Different hypotheses were proposed concerning the role of talker variability in lexical learning. It remains unclear whether new phonetic categories are acquired as episodic memory traces with talkers’ voice information preserved or as abstract categories. The current study investigated the role of voice similarity in perceptual learning of Cantonese tones. Six high-variability training session...

Three studies explored relationships between prototypicahty and the structure of sentences in recall, preference ratings, and natural dictionary definitions. The first experiment showed that sentences were systematically changed in retail to allow prototypical instances of categories to be mentioned before nonprototypical instances. In the second experiment, sentences in which the prototype pre...

In a lexical decision task (LDT) using 88 words and 88 matched nonwords, 46 undergraduate participants responded significantly faster (90 ms faster on average) to lower-frequency words such as ”voice” and ”challenge” than to higher-frequency words with equal or greater homophony and polysemy such as ”end” and ”see”. Responsetime differences between semantic categories were significant, F(4,217)...

This work tries to align the knowledge representation of Anatomy with Galen modelling of the French new coding system of surgical procedures named CCAM and the UMLS semantic network. We use a mixed method lexical and semantic to align the semantic categories of Galen CCAM with the UMLS semantic types. The matching rate is high and the 22 % of non matched Galen CCAM descriptors are depending upo...

Experiments with semantic annotation based on the Corpus pattern Analysis and the lexical resource PDEV (Hanks and Pustejovsky, 2005), revealed a need of an evaluation measure that would identify the optimum relation between the semantic granularity of the semantic categories in the description of a verb and the reliability of the annotation expressed by the interannotator agreement (IAA). We h...

We propose a method for learning semantic categories of words with minimal supervision from web search query logs. Our method is based on the Espresso algorithm (Pantel and Pennacchiotti, 2006) for extracting binary lexical relations, but makes important modifications to handle query log data for the task of acquiring semantic categories. We present experimental results comparing our method wit...

Current supervised parsers are limited by the size of their labelled training data, making improving them with unlabelled data an important goal. We show how a state-of-theart CCG parser can be enhanced, by predicting lexical categories using unsupervised vector-space embeddings of words. The use of word embeddings enables our model to better generalize from the labelled data, and allows us to ...

Much attention has been paid to English verbal gerunds in generative grammar, but most of the studies dealt with the abstract 'functional' category empty categories, derivational deep structure analyses, and things like that, which all ignored the Lexical Integrity Prniciple in the sense of Pollard and Sag (1994), Sag and Wasow (1999), Bresnan and Mchombo (1995), and Sells (1995). Only recently...

Research in speech perception has been dominated by a search for invariant properties of the signal that correlate with lexical and sublexical categories. We argue that this search for invariance has led researchers to ignore the perceptual consequences of systematic variation within such categories and that sensitivity to this variation may provide an important source of information for integr...

Diachronic change has often been linked with synchronic instability and the realignment of phonological categories according to fine phonetic detail. For example, the development of tones in some languages is widely believed to have been the result of coarticulatory influences of onset obstruent voicing contrasts on the fundamental frequency (f0) of the following vowel. This is just one example...