Despite substantial scholarship relating to word structure (Anderson, 2018), for English affixes the relationship between productivity, genre, and second language (L2) learning remains unclear. Analysis of existing literature reveals that deadjectival noun suffixes (i.e., nouns derived from adjectives such as appropriacy or goodness) have been underexamined. To address this gap, we examine two ...

Abstract In this study, neural representation of adult second language (L2) speakers’ implicit grammatical knowledge was investigated. Advanced L2 speakers Japanese living in Japan, as well L1 speakers, performed a word-monitoring task (proposed an test) the MRI scanner. Behavioral measures were obtained from aptitude tests for explicit (language analytic ability) and (statistical learning lear...

Second language (L2) learners must not only acquire L2 knowledge (i.e. vocabulary and grammar), but they also rapidly access this knowledge. In monolinguals, efficient spoken word recognition is accomplished via lexical competition, by which listeners activate a range of candidates that compete for as the signal unfolds. We examined in adult learners, investigating competition both amongst word...

This paper elaborates on a factor that plays a role in receptive multilingualism, namely the influence of a second language (L2). We investigated whether knowledge of German can help Dutch people to decode written Danish words when they do not know any Danish. We instructed 32 participants with Dutch as a native language (L1) and different levels of proficiency in German as an L2 to translate 4...

This event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study investigated brain activity elicited by emotional adjectives during silent reading without specific processing instructions. Fifteen healthy volunteers were asked to read a set of randomly presented high-arousing emotional (pleasant and unpleasant) and low-arousing neutral adjectives. Silent reading of emotional in contrast t...

A key element of any sentiment analysis system is the ability to assign a polarity strength value to words appearing within the documents. In this paper we present a novel approach to polarity strength assignment. The approach is knowledge based in that it uses WordNet to build an adjective graph which is used to measure semantic distance between words of known polarity (reference or seed words...

This paper is devoted to a particular aspect of the interpretation of evaluative adjectives (marvelous, horrible), that is, adjectives that are compatible with subjective attitude verbs like find in the construction find x adj (e.g. find marvelous) and give rise to the so-called ‘faultless disagreement’ pattern. 1 Evaluative adjectives have often been claimed to manifest a strong, and even excl...

This article studies how a robot can learn nouns and adjectives in language. Towards this end, we extended a framework that enabled robots to learn affordances from its sensorimotor interactions, to learn nouns and adjectives using labeling from humans. Specifically, an iCub humanoid robot interacted with a set of objects (each labeled with a set of adjectives and a noun) and learned to predict...

The authors examined whether people can use their knowledge of the wider discourse rapidly enough to anticipate specific upcoming words as a sentence is unfolding. In an event-related brain potential (ERP) experiment, subjects heard Dutch stories that supported the prediction of a specific noun. To probe whether this noun was anticipated at a preceding indefinite article, stories were continued...