The present study explores the effects of age on the priming of alternate homophone spellings and recognition memory. Sixteen young and sixteen elderly adults were given a general information test, a spelling test, and a test of recognition memory. By embedding the less frequently spelled member of different homophone units (e.g., write vs. right) in the general information questions, certain o...

We introduce the problem of generation in distributional semantics: Given a distributional vector representing some meaning, how can we generate the phrase that best expresses that meaning? We motivate this novel challenge on theoretical and practical grounds and propose a simple data-driven approach to the estimation of generation functions. We test this in a monolingual scenario (paraphrase g...

In a lexical-decision task (LDT), Hino and Lupker (1996) reported a polysemy effect (faster response times for polysemous words [e.g., BANK]), and attributed this effect to enhanced feedback from the semantic system to orthographic units, for polysemous words. Using the same task, Pexman, Lupker, and Jared (in review) reported a homophone effect (slower response times for homophonic words [e.g....

We describe multi-lingual text generation as an alternative to automatic translation in specified technical sublanguages, illustrating the notion with the implemented RAREAS-2 system for synthesizing marine weather forecasts in English and French. We then review the Meaning-Text Theory (MTT) of Mel'cuk et al. as we have applied it to text generation in the GOSSIP system for producing English re...

A gating experiment was conducted to examine the effects of context and neighborhood density information in the processing of Chinese homophones during spoken language comprehension. In this experiment, listeners were presented with successively gated portions of a spoken homophone, embedded in a sentence context, and they identified the homophone on the basis of its increasing amount of acoust...

P. M. Pexman, S. J. Lupker, and D. Jared (2001) reported longer response latencies in lexical decision tasks (LDTs) for homophones (e.g., maid) than for nonhomophones, and attributed this homophone effect to orthographic competition created by feedback activation from phonology. In the current study, two predictions of this feedback account were tested: (a) In LDT, observe homophone effects sho...

This study examined whether phrasal prosody can impact toddlers' syntactic analysis. French noun-verb homophones were used to create locally ambiguous test sentences (e.g., using the homophone as a noun: [le bébésouris] [a bien mangé] - [the baby mouse] [ate well] or using it as a verb: [le bébé] [sourità sa maman] - [the baby] [smiles to his mother], where brackets indicate prosodic phrase bou...