The lexical acquisition system presented in this paper incrementally updates linguistic properties of unknown words inferred from their surrounding context by parsing sentences with an HPSG grammar for German. We employ a gradual, informationbased concept of “unknownness” providing a uniform treatment for the range of completely known to maximally unknown lexical entries. “Unknown” information ...

We have examined potential dissociations between lexical and grammatical knowledge in language impairment by investigating noun plurals and plural formation inside compounds in Williams Syndrome (WS) subjects. For comparison, we also report results from studies investigating the same linguistic phenomena in children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI). We found that nouns taking regular plu...

We discuss here the way the integration of sound files in lexical-lexicographical entries, which is made possible by the electronic nature of e-dictionaries, opens a new frontier in lexicographical work, by making possible the integration of prosodic features in the description of words. We start by showing the relevance of prosody at a lexical level, and hence by defining “lexical prosody”, us...

Reading utilises at least two neural pathways. The temporal lexical route visually maps whole words to their lexical entries, whilst the nonlexical route decodes words phonologically via parietal cortex. Readers typically employ the lexical route for familiar words, but poor comprehension plus precocity at mechanically 'sounding out' words suggests that differences might exist in autism. Combin...

The Minimalist Grammars (MGs) proposed by Stabler(1997) have tree-shaped derivations (Harkema, 2001b; Michaelis, 2001a). As in categorial grammars, each lexical item is an association between a vocabulary element and complex of features, and so the “yields” or “fringes” of the derivation trees are sequences of these lexical items, and the string parts of these lexical items are reordered in the...

The semantic annotation of corpora has an important role to play in ensuring that sentences occurring in natural language texts are correctly understood based on their intended context. Two examples of lexical semantic units that contribute to this knowledge are word senses – which allow words with multiple meanings to be understood based on the context in which they are used – and named entiti...

The structure of lexical entries and the status of lexical decomposition remain controversial. In the psycholinguistic literature, one aspect of this debate concerns the psychological reality of the morphological complexity difference between compound words (teacup) and single words (crescent). The present study investigates morphological decomposition in compound words using visual lexical dec...

Understanding which verb argument structure (VAS) features (if any) are part of verbs' lexical entries and under which conditions they are accessed provides information on the nature of lexical representations and sentence construction. We investigated neural and behavioral effects of three understudied VAS characteristics (number of subcategorization options, number of thematic options and ove...

In this paper, we report on methods to detect and repair lexical errors for deep grammars. The lack of coverage has for long been the major problem for deep processing. The existence of various errors in the hand-crafted large grammars prevents their usage in real applications. The manual detection and repair of errors requires a significant amount of human effort. An experiment with the Britis...

Although text-based ontology engineering gained much popularity in the last 10 years, very few ontology engineering platforms exploit the full potential of the connection between texts and ontologies. We propose DAFOE, a new platform for building ontologies with a terminological component using different types of linguistic entries (text corpora, results of natural language processing tools, te...