Zipf's law states that if words of language are ranked in the order of decreasing frequency in texts, the frequency of a word is inversely proportional to its rank. It is very reliably observed in the data, but to date it escaped satisfactory theoretical explanation. This article suggests that Zipf's law may result from a hierarchical organization of word meanings over the semantic space, which...

1. The problem of rdation between the frequency and age of a word is only a small part of the general problem of opposition of the synchronic and diachronic aspects of language. The frequency is obviously a purely synchronic characteristic of a word whereas the age (the time interval t between the appearance of the word and the present moment) is a purely diachronic one. However there is a simp...

In a well-known study, Balota and Chumbley (1985) used a delayed naming task to assess postperceptual word frequency effects. They observed frequency effects after considerable delays, suggesting that frequency sensitivity characterizes not only the perceptual stage, but also postaccess stages. The present investigation examined delayed naming in a dual-task. Using delays after perception and a...

Assessing vocabulary difficulty is useful for finding and creating texts at low reading levels. Prior work has focused on characteristics such as word length and word frequency. In this work, we explore whether other cues might be useful, using features extracted from Wiktionary entries. Comparing words in comparable articles in Standard and Simple English Wikipedia, we find that words that app...

Despite being an important component of problem-solving ability, relatively little is known about the linguistic features of creativity and the related constructs of elaboration, humor, and persuasion. In order to better understand the linguistic features of these constructs, two analyses were performed to examine relationships between linguistic features and human judgments of humor, persuasio...

The dependence of the frequency distributions due to multiple meanings of words in a text is investigated by deleting letters. By coding the words with fewer letters the number of meanings per coded word increases. This increase is measured and used as an input in a predictive theory. For a text written in English, the word-frequency distribution is broad and fat-tailed, whereas if the words ar...

Page 1 of 2 http://www.meetingassistant.com/ohbm2006/planner/abstract_popup.php?abstractno=817 A neural signature of phonological access: Distinguishing the effects of word frequency from familiarity and length in overt picture naming William W. Graves1, Thomas J. Grabowski2,3, Sonya Mehta2 1Neuroscience Graduate Program, University of Iowa 2Department of Neurology, Carver College of Medicine, ...

In this paper, we describe the system we submitted to the SemEval-2012 Lexical Simplification Task. Our system (mmSystem) combines word frequency with decompositional semantics criteria based on syntactic structure in order to rank candidate substitutes of lexical forms of arbitrary syntactic complexity (oneword, multi-word, etc.) in descending order of (cognitive) simplicity. We believe that t...

The category-order effect is observed when stimuli from a small, homogenous category are presented before a large, heterogeneous category (Greene & Lasek, 1994). Schoenherr and Thomson (2008) determined that the category-order effect was a product of the phonotactic properties of the category, facilitating recall in situations that were not consistent with Greene and Lasek’s account. In the pre...

The degree of ambiguity in Chinese is investigated in this paper based on the tagged Sinica Corpus. We propose to use measurement of information content instead of frequency to model generalizations about categorical ambiguity Two important generalizations were found: First, the degree of ambiguity indeed correlates with the number of possible categories that a word has. Second,. Even though fr...