Phonological Typicality (PT) is a measure of the extent to which a word’s phonology is typical of other words in the lexical category to which it belongs. There is a general coherence among words from the same category in terms of speech sounds, and we have found that words that are phonologically typical of their category tend to be processed more quickly and accurately than words that are les...

Language acquisition may be one of the most difficult tasks that children face during development. They have to segment words from fluent speech, figure out the meanings of these words, and discover the syntactic constraints for joining them together into meaningful sentences. Over the past couple of decades, computational modeling has emerged as a new paradigm for gaining insights into the mec...

This thesis proposes a category suggestion model for an e-commerce search engine to get an insight on the intent of the visitors. The dataset is provided by the Dutch e-commerce website Bol.com and consists of visitors queries and their subsequent clicks on items. The first part of the model is clustering the dataset to decrease the complexity and find previously unseen similarities between que...

Five experiments monitored eye movements in phoneme and lexical identification tasks to examine the effect of within-category subphonetic variation on the perception of stop consonants. Experiment 1 demonstrated gradient effects along voice-onset time (VOT) continua made from natural speech, replicating results with synthetic speech (B. McMurray, M. K. Tanenhaus, & R. N. Aslin, 2002). Experimen...

Semantic and affective priming are classic effects observed in cognitive and social psychology, respectively. The authors discovered that affect regulates such priming effects. In Experiment 1, positive and negative moods were induced before one of three priming tasks; evaluation, categorization, or lexical decision. As predicted, positive affect led to both affective priming (evaluation task) ...

Previous electrophysiological evidence supports categorical perception of Chinese lexical tones at the preattentive stage (Xi and colleagues). In this study, we examined participants' attentive responses to tonal continua in an event-related potential experiment that recorded their N2b and P3b oddball responses. We found that for both the N2b and the P3b component, the responses elicited by the...

In this study, results of computational simulations on English child-directed speech are presented to uncover what distributional properties of words make it easier to group them into lexical categories. This analysis provides evidence that words are easier to categorize when (i) they are hard to predict given the contexts they occur in; (ii) they occur in few different contexts; and (iii) thei...

Identification and discrimination of lexical tones in Cantonese were compared in the context of a traditional categorical perception paradigm. Three lexical tone continua were used: one ranging from low level to high level, one from high rising to high level, and one from low falling to high rising. Identification data showed steep slopes at category boundaries, suggesting that lexical tones ar...

Are the processes responsible for reading aloud single well-formed letter strings under contextual control? Despite the widespread contention that the answer to this question is "yes," it has been remarkably difficult to provide a compelling demonstration to that effect. In a speeded naming experiment, skilled readers read aloud exception words (such as PINT) that are atypical in terms of their...

A crucial component of language acquisition involves organizing words into grammatical categories and discovering relations between them. Many studies have argued that phonological or semantic cues or multiple correlated cues are required for learning. Here we examine how distributional variables will shift learners from forming a category of lexical items to maintaining lexical specificity. In...