consulting service about training methods. Many thanks to my advisor Dr. Zhang for his hard work and mentorship, and to my undergraduate assistants, Jiawei Li and Chloe Laabs, for their help with data collection. Additional thanks to my long-suffering and ever-supportive friends and family, who provided much-needed encouragement. ii Dedication This thesis is dedicated to all those hard-working ...

Native listeners adapt to noncanonically produced speech by retuning phoneme boundaries by means of lexical knowledge. We asked whether a second language lexicon can also guide category retuning and whether perceptual learning transfers from a second language (L2) to the native language (L1). During a Dutch lexical-decision task, German and Dutch listeners were exposed to unusual pronunciation ...

A major issue in speech production research is the question of how speakers retrieve words from the so-called mental lexicon. Current models of lexical retrieval converge on the assumption that category associates of a target word are semantically activated during speech planning. However, the question of whether these competitors are also phonologically activated is less agreed on. Past resear...

BACKGROUND While previous studies have shown that children affected by dyslexia exhibit a deficit in categorical perception of segmental features in alphabetic languages, it remains unclear whether the categorical perception deficit generalizes to nonalphabetic languages at the suprasegmental level. In this study, we investigated the occurrence of categorical perception deficit in Mandarin lexi...

This paper presents an implemented, computationally inexpensive technique for disambiguating categories (parts of speech) by exploiting constraints on possible category combinations. Early resolutions of category ambiguities provide a great deal of leverage, simplifying later resolutions of other types of lexical ambiguity. Prioritized pattern action rules (CONDS) are specified for each known c...

Research on child language acquisition would benefit from the availability of a large body of syntactically parsed utterances between parents and children. We consider the problem of generating such a “treebank” from the CHILDES corpus, which currently contains primarily orthographically transcribed speech tagged for lexical category.

We describe 2 neurologically impaired patients with lesions involving primarily the left temporal lobe, whose production and comprehension of words in the semantic category of animals were disproportionately spared in 1 case and disproportionately impaired in the other, in comparison to performance with other common categories. This double dissociation provides neurally based evidence for the v...

Vectorial representations of words derived from large current events datasets have been shown to perform well on word similarity tasks. This paper shows vectorial representations derived from substantially smaller explanatory text datasets such as English Wikipedia and Simple English Wikipedia preserve enough lexical semantic information to make these kinds of category judgments with equal or b...

The article describes a prototype system aimed at monitoring attitudes toward any social group. The approach involves web mining and content analysis based on Rectitude Gain category from the Laswell dictionary of political values, extended into shallow predicate rules. The system requires no lexical sentiment resources and no training corpora. It has been designed, implemented and tested in Po...

Production data suggest that meanings of common nouns continue to change well past the early years of language acquisition (Andersen, 1975; Ameel, Malt, & Storms, 2008). Here we used two comprehension tasks to further evaluate the nature of later lexical learning. In a name applicability task, sevento 13-year old Dutch-speaking children judged whether each of three names applied to common house...