Many languages have morphological devices to turn a noun into an adjective. Often this morphology is genuinely derivational in that it adds a semantic predicate such as ‘havingN’ (proprietive), ‘lacking-N’ (caritive’), ‘similar-to-N’ (similitudinal) and so on. In other cases the denominal adjective expresses some vaguely defined notion of possession as in Russian Ivan-ovo (detstvo) ‘Ivan’s (chi...

Text examples must be exploited in the acquisition of lexical structures. However, neither syntactic nor semantic features are provided by the text itself, and so acquisition must be aided by additional resources. We investigate the application of an existing resource, a set of lexical categories, as a prediction method. We present an algorithm that applies (a) top-down prediction based on lexi...

the present study aims at investigating the effect of different levels of lexical collocational density on efl learners’ reading comprehension. eighty sophomore students with different levels of proficiency studying at  zand institute of higher education in shiraz, iran were chosen from among eighty five learners based on their score distribution on a reduced toefl test constructed by education...

The size and probability distribution of a word-form’s cohort of lexical competitors influence auditory processing and can be constrained by syntactic category information. This experiment employs noun/verb homonyms (e.g. “ache”) presented in syntactic context to clarify the mechanisms and representations involved in context-based cohort restriction. Implications for theories positing single ve...

This paper proposes a lexical acquisition framework for a closeddomain chatbot. It learns the ontological categories of unknown terms in dialogues through implicit confirmation instead of using explicit questions which are too abrupt. Analysis of human participant responses to implicit confirmation requests confirmed the feasibility of our approach: the response expressions differed in a manner...

Can participants retrieve information about the 2nd of 2 stimuli while they are processing the 1st? Four experiments suggest they can. Reaction times to the 1st stimulus were faster if it came from the same category as the 2nd than if it came from a different category. This category-match effect was observed for letter-digit discrimination (Experiment 1), magnitude and parity judgments about di...

Prototypical items within a semantic category are processed faster than atypical items within the same category. This typicality effect reflects normal representation and processing of semantic categories and when absent may be reflective of lexical-semantic deficits. We examined typicality effects in individuals with semantic and nonsemantic variants of primary progressive aphasia (PPA; semant...

Semantic priming for category coordinates (e.g. CAT–DOG; AEROPLANE–TRAIN) and for pairs of words related through function (e.g. BROOM–FLOOR; SHAMPOO–HAIR) was assessed in children with good and poor reading comprehension, matched for decoding skill. Lexical association strength was also manipulated by comparing pairs of words that were highly associated with pairs that shared low association st...

This work presents a connectionist model of the semantic-lexical system based on grounded cognition. The model assumes that the lexical and semantic aspects of language are memorized in two distinct stores. The semantic properties of objects are represented as a collection of features, whose number may vary among objects. Features are described as activation of neural oscillators in different s...