BACKGROUND The words people use convey important information about internal states, feelings, and views of the world around them. Lexical analysis is a fast, reliable method of assessing word use that has shown promise for linking speech content, particularly in emotion and social categories, with psychopathological symptoms. However, few studies have utilized lexical analysis instruments to as...

The productivity of lexical categories was studied longitudinally in a sample of 17 young hearing-impaired French-speaking children with cochlear implants. Age of implantation ranged from 22 months to 76 months. Spontaneous speech samples were collected at six-month intervals over a period of 36 months, starting at the one-word stage. Four general measures of their linguistic production (number...

Text processing in Serbian is based on the Intex format system of electronic dictionaries. Although lexical recognition is successful for 75% to 90% of word forms (depending on the type of text), some categories of words remain unrecognized. In this paper we present two aspects of e-dictionary enhancement that provide for additional recognition of two important categories of words: named entiti...

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...

Abstract Sebastián-Gallés et al. [The influence of initial exposure on lexical representation: Comparing early and simultaneous bilinguals. Journal of Memory and Language, 52, 240-255, 2005] contrasted highly proficient early Spanish-Catalan and Catalan-Spanish bilinguals, using Catalan materials in a lexical decision task (LDT). They constructed two types of experimental pseudowords, substitut...

Lexical context strongly influences listeners' identification of ambiguous sounds. For example, a sound midway between /f/ and /s/ is reported as /f/ in "sheri_," but as /s/ in "Pari_." Norris, McQueen, and Cutler (2003) have demonstrated that after hearing such lexically determined phonemes, listeners expand their phonemic categories to include more ambiguous tokens than before. We tested whet...