We explore the application of stylometric methods developed for modern texts to rhymed medieval narratives (Jacob van Maerlant and Lodewijk van Velthem, ca. 1260–1330). Because of the peculiarities of medieval text transmission, we propose to use highly frequent rhyme words for authorship attribution. First, we shall demonstrate that these offer important benefits, being relatively content-inde...

The article is devoted to the study of structure rhyme field CITY. Its microfields are outlined and their lexical composition analyzed. It was revealed that clearly formed via “urban space” (“structure space”, “urbanonyms”), “buildings institutions”, “objects materials”, “transport”. “Structure contains words: avenue, alley, boulevard, street, square, park, suburb, market, garden, square etc. R...

Adults use vision to perceive low-fidelity speech; yet how children acquire this ability is not well understood. The literature indicates that children show reduced sensitivity to visual speech from kindergarten to adolescence. We hypothesized that this pattern reflects the effects of complex tasks and a growth period with harder-to-utilize cognitive resources, not lack of sensitivity. We inves...

Researchers frequently use data from monitoring tasks to argue that constraints on meaning facilitate lower-level processes. An alternate hypothesis is that the processing level that a monitoring task requires interacts with discourse-level processing. Subjects monitored spoken sentences for a synonym (semantic match), a nonsense word (phonological match), or a rhyme (phonologically and semanti...

Under noise or speech reductions, young adult listeners flexibly adjust the parameters of lexical activation and competition to allow for speech signal unreliability. Consequently, mismatches in the input are treated more leniently such that lexical candidates are not immediately deactivated. Using eyetracking, we assessed whether this modulation of recognition dynamics also occurs for older li...

This research examines phonological neighbourhoods in the lexicons of children acquiring English. Analyses of neighbourhood densities were done on children's earliest words and on a corpus of spontaneous speech, used to measure neighbours in the target language. Neighbourhood densities were analyzed for words created by changing segments in word-onset position (rhyme neighbours as in pin/bin), ...

In four experiments, we examined the facilitation that occurs when spoken-word targets rhyme with preceding spoken primes. In Experiment 1, listeners' lexical decisions were faster to words following rhyming words (e.g., ramp-LAMP) than to words following unrelated primes (e.g., pink-LAMP). No facilitation was observed for nonword targets. Targets that almost rhymed with their primes (foils; e....

Recent imaging studies have found that in simple arithmetic processing, addition is lateralized to the right hemisphere, whereas multiplication to the left. Here we aimed to investigate the cognitive mechanism underlying complicated arithmetic processing with a dual task paradigm. Participants were asked to complete a calculation task (addition or multiplication) and a letter judgment task (rhy...