BACKGROUND Phonological priming has been shown to facilitate naming in individuals with aphasia as well as healthy speakers, resulting in faster naming latencies. However, the mechanisms of phonological facilitation (PF) in aphasia remain unclear. AIMS Within discrete vs. interactive models of lexical access, this study examined whether PF occurs via the sub-lexical or lexical route during no...

The C&C CCG parser is a highly efficient linguistically motivated parser. The efficiency is achieved using a tightly-integrated supertagger, which assigns CCG lexical categories to words in a sentence. The integration allows the parser to request more categories if it cannot find a spanning analysis. We present several enhancements to the CKY chart parsing algorithm used by the parser. The firs...

In Vermaat (1999a) and Vermaat (1999b) we have shown that the basic operations Merge and Move can be covered naturally in multimodal Categorial Grammar (MMCG). On the basis of a feature correspondence between lexical feature specifications in Minimalist Grammar (Stabler, 1999, MG) and the categorial types assigned to lexical entries, a mapping can be made between MG and MMCG. As a conclusion of...

The current study investigated the scope of bilingual language control differentiating between whole-language control involving control of an entire lexicon specific to 1 language and lexical-level control involving only a restricted set of recently activated lexical representations. To this end, we tested 60 Dutch-English (Experiment 1) and 64 Chinese-English bilinguals (Experiment 2) on a ver...

BACKGROUND Semantic Category Disambiguation (SCD) is the task of assigning the appropriate semantic category to given spans of text from a fixed set of candidate categories, for example Protein to "Fibrin". SCD is relevant to Natural Language Processing tasks such as Named Entity Recognition, coreference resolution and coordination resolution. In this work, we study machine learning-based SCD m...

Students' writing can provide better insight into their thinking than can multiple-choice questions. However, resource constraints often prevent faculty from using writing assessments in large undergraduate science courses. We investigated the use of computer software to analyze student writing and to uncover student ideas about chemistry in an introductory biology course. Students were asked t...

The role of lexical-semantic neighborhood is relevant to models of lexical access. Recently it has been claimed that the size of the cohort of activated competitors affects ease of lexical selection in word production as well as the effect of semantically related distractors in picture-word interference tasks. Three experiments are reported in which subjects had to name pictures from large and ...

Semantic lexical resources play an important part in both corpus linguistics and NLP. Over the past 14 years, a large semantic lexical resource has been built at Lancaster University. Different from other major semantic lexicons in existence, such as WordNet, EuroWordNet and HowNet, etc., in which lexemes are clustered and linked via the relationship between word/MWE senses or definitions of me...

This study examined how native Japanese speakers, who were naïve to Mandarin, categorized Mandarin tones (in citation form) into their native pitch–accent categories. Results showed that Japanese listeners categorized the nonnative Mandarin tones into their native pitch accent categories, in ways that were consistent with the phonetic features of listeners’ native language. The findings support...

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...