We report the pattern of performance on language tasks by a neurologically impaired patient, RCM, who makes semantic errors in writing to dictation and in written naming, but makes very few errors at all (and no semantic errors) in spoken naming, oral reading, or spontaneous speech. RCM also shows a significant effect of concreteness on spelling accuracy and other features of so-called "deep dy...

The thesis tries to adopt the method used by Leech and Short in their book Style in Fiction to make a relatively overall and objective analysis of the novel’s language from lexical and grammatical Category. As far as the lexical features are concerned, the author employs special lexical items and lexical clusters. The lexical deviation and word connotations are mainly used for characterization ...

Two experiments explored learning, generalization, and the influence of semantics on orthographic processing in an artificial language. In Experiment 1, 16 adults learned to read 36 novel words written in novel characters. Posttraining, participants discriminated trained from untrained items and generalized to novel items, demonstrating extraction of individual character sounds. Frequency and c...

Since nobody knows how to draw the line between lexical expressions and grammatical devices, it is natural to suppose that, in some sense, the transition from lexicon to grammar is a gradual one. There is a continuum, it seems, bounded by purely lexical items on one end and purely grammatical items on the other, with many expressions lying somewhere between these opposites. This, at any rate, i...

Over the years, sophisticated techniques for utilizing the prior knowledge in the form of text-derived language model and in pronunciation lexicon evolved. However, their use has an undesirable effect: unexpected lexical items (words) in the phrase are replaced by acoustically acceptable in-vocabulary items [1]. This is the major source of error since the replacement often introduces additional...

Collocation and colligation are two closely related concepts associated with the distributional properties of linguistic items in actual language use. Specifically, collocation and colligation refer to the likelihood of co-occurrence of (two or more) lexical items and grammatical categories, respectively. Both terms have been attributed to J. R. Firth (1957: 194–195; 1968: 181–183; see Östman a...

In a production study of tonal contrasts in lexically stressed but grammatically stressless syllables vs. lexically stressless syllables in Nanchang, a Gan dialect spoken in the city of Nanchang, Jiangxi province, we found that tonal neutralization only occurred in lexically stressless syllables. We argue that the main phonetic ground for such a tonal contrast distribution lies in the rime dura...

Phylogenetic models, originally developed to demonstrate evolutionary biology, have been applied to a wide range of cultural data including natural language lexicons, manuscripts, folktales, material cultures, and religions. A fundamental question regarding the application of phylogenetic inference is whether trees are an appropriate approximation of cultural evolutionary history. Their validit...

The study investigates the impact of visual cues and lexical knowledge on the identification of a nonnative phonemic contrast. Twenty native Colombians were tested on an identification task involving 16 minimal pairs of English words, produced by four English speakers, contrasting in the presence of /b/ or /v/ in initial or medial position. The test was run in three conditions: audiovisual (AV)...

In the systemic framework, lexis has received little attention in comparison to grammar. The paper compares existing systemic approaches to lexis and outlines a model for describing lexical items from the viewpoint of realization of communicative intentions by lexical items using the systemic network of lexical choices. As an example of the approach, the paper attempts to describe contrastive l...