Type–token ratio (TTR), or vocabulary size divided by text length (V/N), is a timehonoured but unsatisfactory measure of lexical diversity. The problem is that the TTR of a text sample is affected by its length. We present an algorithm for rapidly computing TTR through a moving window that is independent of text length, and we demonstrate that this measurement can detect changes within a text a...

We present a language complexity analysis of World of Warcraft (WoW) community texts, which we compare to texts from a general corpus of web English. Results from several complexity types are presented, including lexical diversity, density, readability and syntactic complexity. The language of WoW texts is found to be comparable to the general corpus on some complexity measures, yet more specia...

A diversity of structural alternations enriches tongue twisters, in form of a language game speakers consider intriguing while reciting. However, none of efforts are put into the interval between twister constituents. This study is an attempt to give a complimentary view to Chinese tongue twisters. The twister effects are actually affected both by unstable lexical structures and limited space b...

An automatic vigilance hypothesis states that humans preferentially attend to negative stimuli, and that this attention to negative valence disrupts the processing of other stimulus properties. Thus negative words typically elicit slower color naming, word naming, and lexical decisions than neutral or positive words. Larsen, Mercer, and Balota (2006) analyzed the stimuli from 32 published studi...

the most important and practical phase of analyzing the linguistic errors of second language learners is to find the solutions to decrease these errors. to that end, the present study examined translation strategy to decrease the number of grammatical and lexical errors of chinese language learners learning persian. twelve chinese language learners were asked to write a text in two stages. firs...

Abstract In the globalised world connected via communication technologies and social media, this paper endeavours to understand how politicians succeed in influencing peopleʼs linguistic worlds through their public communication. The patterns politiciansʼ precise verbal usage convey intended connotations redefine people naturally experience expressions concerning conceptual knowledge associated...

The corpus-based identification of those lexical units which serve to describe a given specialized domain usually becomes a complex task, where an analysis oriented to the frequency of words and the likelihood of lexical associations is often ineffective. The goal of this article is to demonstrate that a user-adjustable composite metric such as SRC can accommodate to the diversity of domain-spe...

This chapter presents a survey of contemporary NLP research on Multiword Expressions (MWEs). MWEs pose a huge problem to precise language processing due to their idiosyncratic nature and diversity of their semantic, lexical, and syntactical properties. The chapter begins by considering MWEs definitions, describes some MWEs classes, indicates problems MWEs generate in language applications and t...

Findings from a longitudinal study of language acquisition in a group of autistic children are presented. Six autistic subjects and six children with Down syndrome, matched on age and MLU at the start of the study, were followed over a period of between 12 and 26 months. Language samples were collected in the children's homes while they interacted with their mothers. Samples of 100 spontaneous ...

PanLex, a project of The Long Now Foundation, aims to enable the translation of lexemes among all human languages in the world. By focusing on lexemic translations, rather than grammatical or corpus data, it achieves broader lexical and language coverage than related projects. The PanLex database currently documents 20 million lexemes in about 9,000 language varieties, with 1.1 billion pairwise...