Two experiments show that prosodic information plays a crucial role in the processing of sentences of Standard Mandarin Chinese, where local lexical ambiguities may occur due to the operation of a tone sandhi rule. In Chinese, each word is associated with a tone; in this paper, the term "Mandarin tone sandhi" refers to a phonological rule that changes the first of two consecutive low tones (Ton...

One of the domains where corpus linguistics has been particularly successful is the analysis of variation in the choice of lexical items that is governed by the context around the slot into which one out of several functionally similar lexical items is to be inserted. In this study, we investigate the variation found in two near synonymous hedging expressions kind of and sort of on the basis of...

This paper presents a Bayesian decision framework that performs automatic story segmentation based on statistical modeling of one or more lexical chain features. Automatic story segmentation aims to locate the instances in time where a story ends and another begins. A lexical chain is formed by linking coherent lexical items chronologically. A story boundary is often associated with a significa...

This study explores the grammatical representations employed by preschoolers during online sentence processing. Tomasello and colleagues have argued that young children, unlike adults, are limited to structural representations organized around individual lexical items (Trends in Cognitive Sciences 4 (2000) 156). Evidence for broader syntactic representations in adults comes from, among other th...

This paper presents a quantitative description of the lexical items used for linguistic feedback in the Corpus of Interactional Data (CID). The paper includes the raw figures for feedback lexical item as well as more detailed figures concerning interindividual variability. This effort is a first step before a broader analysis including more discourse situations and featuring communicative funct...

The annotation of large corpora is usually restricted to syntactic structure and word class. Pure lexical information and information on the structure of words are stored in specialized dictionaries (Baayen et al., 1995). Both data structures – dictionary and text corpus – can be matched to get e.g. a distribution of certain (restricted) lexical information from a text. This procedure works fin...

In this paper we propose the codification of argument and event structures in wordnets, providing information on selection properties, semantic incorporation phenomena and internal properties of events, in what we claim to be an affordable procedure. We propose an explicit expression of argument structure, including default and shadow arguments, through three new relations and a new order featu...

We investigated the electrophysiological correlates of the processing of subject's own name (SON) in comparison to familiar and unfamiliar names in the Chinese language. The three types of names were the deviants in an oddball paradigm among lexical and non-lexical phrases. All items consisted of three characters, and the non-lexical items were the targets. All names caused a clear N170 compone...

We investigated whether phonological relationships at the lexical level affect syntactic encoding during sentence production. Cleland and Pickering (2003) showed that syntactic priming effects are enhanced by semantic, but not phonological relations between lexical items, suggesting that there are no effects of phonology on syntactic encoding. Here we report four experiments investigating the i...

the purpose of the study was to activate the passive lexical knowledge through noticing and to investigate the effect of sentence writing as the post task of noticing activity on strengthening the effect of noticing. forty-two iranian female adult upper-intermediate english students of a state university in 2 homogenous groups participated in noticing the lexical items whose production were not...