For native English readers, masked presentations of past-tense verb primes produce faster lexical decision latencies to their present-tense targets than orthographically related or unrelated primes. This facilitation observed with morphologically related prime-target pairs is generally taken as evidence for strong connections based on morphological relationships in the L1 lexicon. It is unclear, however, if similar, morphologically based, connections develop in non-native lexicons. Several earlier studies with L2 English readers have reported mixed results. The present experiments examine whether past-tense (...) verb primes significantly facilitate target lexical decisions for Japanese-English bilinguals beyond any facilitation provided by prime-target orthographic similarity. Overall, past-tense verb primes facilitated lexical decisions to their present-tense targets relative to both orthographically related and unrelated primes. Replicating previous masked priming experiments with L2 readers, orthographically related primes also facilitated target recognition relative to unrelated primes, confirming that orthographic similarity facilitates L2 target recognition. The additional facilitation from past-tense verb primes beyond that provided by orthographic primes suggests that, in the L2 English lexicon, connections based on morphological relationships develop in a way that is similar to how they develop in the L1 English lexicon even though the connections and processing of lower level, lexical/orthographic information may differ. Further analyses involving L2 proficiency revealed that as L2 proficiency increased, orthographic facilitation was reduced, indicating that there is a decrease in the fuzziness in orthographic representations in the L2 lexicon with increased proficiency. (shrink)

The acquisition of English noun and verb morphology is modeled using a single-system connectionist network. The network is trained to produce the plurals and past tense forms of a large corpus of monosyllabic English nouns and verbs. The developmental trajectory of network performance is analyzed in detail and is shown to mimic a number of important features of the acquisition of English noun and verb morphology in young children. These include an initial error-free period of (...) performance on both nouns and verbs followed by a period of intermittent over-regularization of irregular nouns and verbs. Errors in the model show evidence of phonological conditioning and frequency effects. Furthermore, the network demonstrates a strong tendency to regularize denominal verbs and deverbal nouns and masters the principles of voicing assimilation. Despite their incorporation into a single-system network, nouns and verbs exhibit some important differences in their profiles of acquisition. Most importantly, noun inflections are acquired earlier than verb inflections. The simulations generate several empirical predictions that can be used to evaluate further the suitability of this type of cognitive architecture in the domain of inflectional morphology. (shrink)

Three neuropsychological experiments on a group of 16 cerebellar patients and 16 age- and education-matched controls investigated the effects of damage to the cerebellum on English grammatical morphology across production, comprehension, and grammaticality judgment tasks. In Experiment 1, participants described a series of pictures previously used in studies of cortical aphasic patients. The cerebellar patients did not differ significantly from the controls in the total number of words produced or in the proportion of closed-class words. They did differ (...) to a marginally significant extent in the production of required articles. In Experiment 2, participants identified the agent in a series of aurally presented sentences in which three agency cues (subject–verb agreement, word order, and noun animacy) were manipulated. The cerebellar patients were less affected than the controls were by the manipulation of subject–verb agreement to a marginally significant extent. In Experiment 3, participants performed a grammaticality judgment task on a series of aurally presented sentences. The cerebellar patients were significantly less able to discriminate grammatical and ungrammatical sentences than the controls were, particularly when the error was of subject–verb agreement as opposed to word order. The results suggest that damage to the cerebellum can result in subtle impairments in the use of grammatical morphology, and are discussed in light of hypothesized roles for the cerebellum in language. (shrink)

This book is the most comprehensive study to date of the development of the three suffixes -hood, -dom and -ship in the history of English. Based on data from annotated corpora it provides an in depth investigation from Old English to Modern English and shows that structurally the three suffixes developed from syntactic heads via morphological heads in compounds to morphological heads in derivations. Being an instance of morphologisation the rise of suffixes clearly shows that word formation (...) is not part of the syntactic module. This development is triggered by semantic change, more pre. (shrink)

The dependency of a speech recognition system on the accent of a user leads to the variation in its performance, as the people from different backgrounds have different accents. Accent labeling and conversion have been reported as a prospective solution for the challenges faced in language learning and various other voice-based advents. In the English TTS system, the accent labeling of unregistered words is another very important link besides the phonetic conversion. Since the importance of the primary stress is (...) much greater than that of the secondary stress, and the primary stress is easier to call than the secondary stress, the labeling of the primary stress is separated from the secondary stress. In this work, the labeling of primary accents uses a labeling algorithm that combines morphological rules and machine learning; the labeling of secondary accents is done entirely through machine learning algorithms. After 10 rounds of cross-validation, the average tagging accuracy rate of primary stress was 94%, the average tagging accuracy rate of secondary stress was 94%, and the total tagging accuracy rate was 83.6%. This perceptual study separates the labeling of primary and secondary accents providing the promising outcomes. (shrink)

Morphology is the study of word forms and the ways in which words are varied and related to other words in a language. It has been regarded as an essential discipline that is indispensable in language acquisition. It helps learners to figure out the word structure and meaning, particularly the meaning changing of morphemes, which is pivotal for defining words. The present study focuses on developing morphological knowledge with online corpora which are the useful tools for teaching and learning (...) the changes happened in English. Given this light, this research reports an ESL vocabulary classroom in which the instructor designs vocabulary classroom activities with COCA, BNC, TIME MAGAZINE corpus to enrich students' English vocabulary knowledge, help them master word usage, and foster their corpus literacy. This study is oriented by the framework of Classroom Action Research (CAR). Students' classroom performances were recorded and their self-reflections of learning experiences were collected for thematic analysis. The results indicate that, firstly, students' morphological knowledge has been developed as well as their vocabulary knowledge; secondly, their vocabulary self-regulated learning motivation has been incentivised that they are able to answer their own queries about words; thirdly, students' corpus literacy has been fostered, which facilitates their ongoing vocabulary learning; last but not least, a community of inquiry has been established in which students collaborate to construct vocabulary knowledge. The study has wider implications for constructing the student-centered vocabulary classroom and implementing corpus-based instruction in other second language vocabulary classrooms. (shrink)

The debate over how best to characterize inflectional morphology has been couched largely in terms of the “dual-mechanism” approach described in Pinker (Words and rules: the ingredients of language, Basic Books, 1999) versus “single-mechanism” connectionist approaches derived from Rumelhart and McClelland (On learning past tenses of English verbs, MIT, 1986). There are, however, other single-mechanism approaches. The exemplar-based or analogical models of Daelemans et al. (TimBL: Tilburg Memory-Based Learner, version 4.3 reference guide, ILK, 2002) and Skousen (Analogical modeling (...) of language, Kluwer Academic, 1989) also model inflectional usage accurately within a single-mechanism. The most striking theoretical claim peculiar to these purely analogical models is that they do not posit any resident linguistic generalizations for processing language. Instead they process new instances of usage by comparing them systematically to remembered instances of previous usage. Based on a comparison of their Minimal Generalization Model with an adaptation of Nosofsky's (Journal of Mathematical Psychology 34: 393–418, 1990) Generalized Context Model, Albright and Hayes (Cognition 90: 119–161, 2003) argue that such purely analogical models are intrinsically inadequate for modeling the English past tense. This paper shows, however, that Skousen's (Analogical modeling of language, Kluwer Academic, 1989) Analogical Model performs as well as the Minimal Generalization Model. The implications of these results for cognitive linguistics are discussed. (shrink)

This book supplies the need for an authoritative account of the morphology of Dutch in English and at the same time will make an important contribution to current theoretical discussions of word formation; the interactions between morphology, syntax, semantics, and phonology; and morphological change. The author is the leading scholar in the field.

Are morphological patterns learned in the form of rules? Some models deny this, attributing all morphology to analogical mechanisms. The dual mechanism model (Pinker, S., & Prince, A. (1998). On language and connectionism: analysis of a parallel distributed processing model of language acquisition. Cognition, 28, 73-193) posits that speakers do internalize rules, but that these rules are few and cover only regular processes; the remaining patterns are attributed to analogy. This article advocates a third approach, which uses multiple stochastic (...) rules and no analogy. We propose a model that employs inductive learning to discover multiple rules, and assigns them confidence scores based on their performance in the lexicon. Our model is supported over the two alternatives by new "wug test" data on English past tenses, which show that participant ratings of novel pasts depend on the phonological shape of the stem, both for irregulars and, surprisingly, also for regulars. The latter observation cannot be explained under the dual mechanism approach, which derives all regulars with a single rule. To evaluate the alternative hypothesis that all morphology is analogical, we implemented a purely analogical model, which evaluates novel pasts based solely on their similarity to existing verbs. Tested against experimental data, this analogical model also failed in key respects: it could not locate patterns that require abstract structural characterizations, and it favored implausible responses based on single, highly similar exemplars. We conclude that speakers extend morphological patterns based on abstract structural properties, of a kind appropriately described with rules. (shrink)

Compounding is one of the most productive word-formation processes in contemporary Standard English. Hence, new patterns occur regularly. Productivity is one of the characteristic features of human language which implies the ability to create and understand new word forms by the speaker of a language. This was the starting point and motivation of this paper. The main aim of this paper was to investigate the morphological productivity of nominal and verb compounds in English as a foreign language in (...) terms of the most productive and the least productive patterns of compounds in a written English corpus (consisted of 60073 words) by 75 students enrolled in undergraduate studies at the Law Faculty at SEEU. The quantitative measure used for the evaluation of the productivity of compounding patterns was according to hapax legomenon [P = n1 / N]. Findings from the empirical approach show that the most productive compounds in the analyzed corpus (professional /legal English context) are verb compounds, followed by special noun compounds, whereas the least productive were noun compounds. The analysis of the corpus showed that morphological productivity in compounding increased in the writing of students with higher degree of competence and proficiency of English. (shrink)

How do English‐speaking children inflect nouns for plurality and verbs for the past tense? We assess theoretical answers to this question by considering errors of omission, which occur when children produce a stem in place of its inflected counterpart (e.g., saying “dress” to refer to 5 dresses). A total of 307 children (aged 3;11–9;9) participated in 3 inflection studies. In Study 1, we show that errors of omission occur until the age of 7 and are more likely with both (...) sibilant regular nouns (e.g., dress) and irregular nouns (e.g., man) than regular nouns (e.g., dog). Sibilant nouns are more likely to be inflected if they are high frequency. In Studies 2 and 3, we show that similar effects apply to the inflection of verbs and that there is an advantage for “regular‐like” irregulars whose inflected form, but not stem form, ends in d/t. The results imply that (a) stems and inflected forms compete for production and (b) children generalize both product‐oriented and source‐oriented schemas when learning about inflectional morphology. (shrink)

Neuropsychological dissociations between regular and irregular English past-tense morphology have been reported using a lexical decision task in which past-tense primes immediately precede present-tense targets. We present N400 event-related potential data from healthy participants using the same design. Both regular and irregular past-tense forms primed corresponding present-tense forms, but with a longer duration for irregular verbs. Phonological control conditions suggested that differences in formal overlap between prime and target contribute to, but do not account for, this difference, suggesting (...) a link between irregular morphology and semantics. Further analysis dividing the irregular verbs into two categories (weak irregular and strong) revealed that priming for strong verbs was reliably stronger than that for weak irregular and regular verbs, which were statistically indistinguishable from one another. We argue that, although we observe a regular-irregular dissociation, the nature of this dissociation is more consistent with single- than with dual-system models of inflectional morphology. (shrink)

This paper delves into the temporal interpretation of fronting constructions in English, a topic that has received limited attention in the literature on tense semantics. It presents new empirical findings revealing that specific fronting configurations, involving present tense morphology in a complement CP under a matrix past tense, can yield a theoretically unexpected simultaneous interpretation. A novel theoretical framework for understanding English tense is proposed, which accounts for the temporal interpretation of both fronting and non-fronting versions of (...) attitude reports. The framework introduces a null simultaneous tense as a replacement for the conventional indexical present and the Sequence-of-Tense (SOT) _de se_ tense. It is argued that in complement CPs the null simultaneous tense, as well as past tense, can be anchored either to the attitude time or to the utterance time. In either case, each tense receives a _de re_ interpretation. Moreover, the paper contends that evidence from fronting constructions supports Kratzer’s (Proceedings of semantics and linguistic theory 8, pp. 92–110, 1998 ) proposal that the transmission of temporal features (as part of the mechanism of SOT) occurs at PF. Finally, the proposed revision of the English tense system contributes to a more unified cross-linguistic perspective on tense. It is demonstrated how the temporal readings of attitude reports arising in such non-SOT languages as Russian, Japanese, and Hebrew can be captured within the system developed for English, with known contrasts attributed to the absence of Feature Transmission in those languages. Further known and new data from English, Modern Greek, and German are examined, revealing variations in SOT effects across SOT languages. These data are used as additional evidence supporting the claim that cross-linguistic variation in the interpretation of complement tense stems solely from differences in Feature Transmission. Regarding the semantic profile of tenses, it can be considered largely invariant. (shrink)

This paper develops a semantic account of morphological number marking, specifically in the presence of numerals. In addition to accounting for number marking on basic nouns like _book_ in English, the account handles variation in patterns of number marking along two dimensions: cross-linguistically, between languages that either necessitate or prohibit singular morphology in the presence of numerals greater than ‘one’; and within one and the same language on the various nominal elements in English. Building off the presuppositional (...) approach to morphological number from Sauerland (Proc SALT 13:258–275, 2003), the proposed semantics accounts for both sorts of variation by assuming flexibility in the selection of the measure relevant to the one-ness presupposition of the morphological singular form. (shrink)

The distinction between abstract and concrete concepts is fundamental to cognitive linguistics and cognitive science. This distinction is commonly operationalized through concreteness ratings based on the aggregated judgments of many people. What is often overlooked in experimental studies using this operationalization is that ratings are attributed to words, not to concepts directly. In this paper we explore the relationship between the linguistic properties of English words and conceptual abstractness/concreteness. Based on hypotheses stated in the existing linguistic literature we select (...) a set of variables and verify whether they are statistically associated with concreteness ratings. We show that English nouns are rated as more concrete compared to other parts of speech, but mass nouns are rated as less concrete than count nouns. Furthermore, a more complex morphological structure is associated with abstractness, and as for etymology, French- and Latin-derived words are more abstract than words of other origin. This shows that linguistic properties of words are indeed associated with the degree of concreteness that we attribute to the underlying concepts, and we discuss the implications that these findings have for linguistic theory and for empirical investigations in the cognitive sciences. (shrink)

The study analyzes the phenomenal occurrence of Siquijodnon-Englishcode mixing. Using descriptive research design and adapting the linguistic andsociolinguistic theories, the study examined the morphological features code-mixedin Siquijonon–English. The respondents are parents, waiters or waitresses and/or receptionists, teachers, Human Resources Management Officers, and dealers inSiquijor province who were selected based on the five language domains. The resultsreveal that the free morphemes (content words, function words and substitute words)are code mixed through intra-sentential code mixing and/or insertion. The paperalso finds out that (...) code mixing is used as a double-edged tool to effect personal,social and transactional functions which likely occur in school where bilingual and/ormultilingual speakers are evident. These results justify the generation of Code-MixedLanguage Assimilator-Converger Theory. Keywords: Language and communication, code mixing, phenomenal occurrence,Siquijodnon, descriptive design, Siquijor, Philippines. (shrink)

Previous research, for example in English, French, German, and Spanish, has investigated the interplay between grammatical gender information and stereotype gender information (e.g., that secretaries are usually female, in many cultures), in the interpretation of both singular noun phrases (the secretary) and plural nouns phrases, particularly so-called generic masculines—nouns that have masculine grammatical gender but that should be able to refer to both groups of men and mixed groups of men and women. Since the studies have been conducted in (...) cultures with broadly similar stereotypes, the effects generally reflect differences in the grammatical systems of the languages. Russian has a more complex grammatical gender system than the languages previously studied, and, unlike those languages frequently presents examples in which grammatical gender is marked on the predicate (in an inflection on the verb). In this study we collected stereotype norms for 160 role names in Russian, providing a useful resource for further work in this language. We also conducted a reading time study examining the interaction of grammatical and stereotype gender information in the interpretation of both Russian singular noun phrases, and plurals that were (potentially) generic masculines. Our results show that, although both types of gender information are used, when available, the effects of grammatical marking on the predicate are not as strong as those of such marking on subject noun phrases. (shrink)

In this paper we reconsider the issue of free choice and the role of the wh-morphology employed in it. We show that the property of being an interrogative wh-word alone is not sufficient for free choice, and that semantic and sometimes even morphological definiteness is a pre-requisite for some free choice items (FCIs) in certain languages, e.g. in Greek and Mandarin Chinese. We propose a theory that explains the polarity behaviour of FCIs cross-linguistically, and allows indefinite (Giannakidou 2001) as (...) well as definite-like FCIs. The difference is manifested as a lexical distinction in English between any (indefinite) and wh-ever (definite); in Greek it appears as a choice between a FCI nominal modifier (taking an NP argument), which illustrates the indefinite option, and a FC free relative illustrating the definite one. We provide a compositional analysis of Greek FCIs in both incarnations, and derive in a parallel manner the Chinese FCIs. Here the definite versus indefinite alternation is manifested in the presence or absence of dōu, which we take to express the maximality operator. It is thus shown that what we see in the morphology of FCIs in Greek is reflected in syntax in Chinese. Our analysis has important consequences for the class of so-called wh-indeterminates. In the context of current proposals, free choiceness is taken to come routinely from interrogative semantics, and wh-indeterminates are treated as question words which can freely become FCIs (Kratzer and Shimoyama 2002). Our results from Mandarin and Greek emphasize that wh-indeterminates do not form a uniform class in this respect, and that interrogative semantics alone cannot predict either sensitivity of free choice to definiteness, or the polarity behaviour of FCIs. (shrink)

The productive use of English past tense morphology in school-aged children (N= 74; 3 years, 8 months to 13 years, 5 months) is explored using on elicited production task. Errors represented 20% of the responses overall. Virtually all of the children demonstrated productivity with regular (e.g., good) and irregular patterns (zero-marking, e.g., sit + sit; vowel-change, e.g., ride -+ rid). Overall frequency of errors decreased with age, yet the tendency for certain types of irregularizations increased in the older (...) groups. Analyses across items indicated that all error types were predicted by combinations of item frequency, phonological chamcteristics of stems and past tense forms, and aspects of phonological past tense “neighborhoods.” Contrary to “hybrid” or dual-mechanism models incorporating a phonologically-insensitive default mechanism (e.g., Prasada & Pinker, 1993), these results suggest that children’s productivity with regular and irregular patterns is consistent with a phonologically-based constraint satisfaction system similar to that implemented in connectionist models (Daugherty & Seidenberg, 1992; Plunkett 81 Marchman, 1991,1993). (shrink)

The current paper investigates two productive morphological processes, namely compounds and portmanteau words (or blends). While compounds, a productive, regular and predicable morphological process, have received much attention in the literature, little attention was paid to portmanteau words, a creative, irregular and unpredictable word formation process. The present paper aims to find the commonalities and differences between these morphological devices, using Rosch et al.’s (1975; 1976) theory of prototypes and basic-level categories to achieve this goal. This theory will also be (...) employed to discuss the literature on the word formation mechanisms under investigation and propose a new categorization approach to these neologisms. The analysis suggests that compounds and blends compare and contrast and that the distinctions between them are blurry. The analysis confirms that a prototypical approach is well suited to compounds and blends in English. This has implications for future research into English word-formation processes in general and compounds and blends precisely. (shrink)

This paper presents a phenomenon of colloquial English that we call Contrastive Reduplication (CR), involving the copying of words and sometimes phrases as in It’s tuna salad, not SALAD-salad, or Do you LIKE-HIM-like him? Drawing on a corpus of examples gathered from natural speech, written texts, and television scripts, we show that CR restricts the interpretation of the copied element to a ‘real’ or prototypical reading. Turning to the structural properties of the construction, we show that CR is unusual (...) among reduplication phenomena in that whole idioms can be copied, object pronouns are often copied (as in the second example above), and inflectional morphology need not be copied. Thus the ‘scope’ of CR cannot be defined in purely phonological terms; rather, a combination of phonological, morphosyntactic, syntactic, and lexical factors is involved. We develop an analysis within the parallel architecture framework of Jackendoff (1997, 2002), whereby CR is treated as a lexical item with syntactic and semantic content and reduplicative phonology. We then sketch an alternative analysis, based on current assumptions within the Minimalist Program, which involves movement into a focus-like position with both the head and the tail of the resulting chain spelled out. (shrink)

This study adjudicates between two opposing accounts of morphological productivity, using English past-tense as its test case. The single-route model posits that both regular and irregular past-tense forms are generated by analogy across stored exemplars in associative memory. In contrast, the dual-route model posits that regular inflection requires use of a formal “add -ed” rule that does not require analogy across regular past-tense forms. Children saw animations of an animal performing a novel action described with a novel verb. Past-tense (...) forms of novel verbs were elicited by prompting the child to describe what the animal “did yesterday.” Collapsing across age group, the likelihood of a verb being produced in regular past-tense form was positively associated with the verb's similarity to existing regular verbs, consistent with the single-route model only. Results indicate that children's acquisition of the English past-tense is best explained by a single-route analogical mechanism that does not incorporate a role for formal rules. (shrink)

Exocentric compounding is a creative morphological process that contributes to the English lexicon. However, because it lacks a syntactic or semantic head, it was deemed an exceptional case in most word-formation literature and hence neglected. Previous work has only been limited to syntax-based grammar and the notion of headedness and thus failed to address the other linguistic rules that constrain exocentric compounds. The current paper aims to identify the frequency of exocentric compounds and thus to determine their viability. The (...) research will also look into how conceptual metaphor and/or conceptual metonymy motivate exocentric compound formation. The results demonstrate that exocentric compounds are viable lexical units, generating content words (e.g., adjectives and adverbs) through productive word-formation processes, and extending word senses. The results also suggest that conceptual metonymy is more active than conceptual metaphor in the formation of exocentric compounds. The present findings have several implications for research on exocentric compounds, conceptual metonymy and conceptual metaphor. (shrink)

During the early twentieth century, the Swiss Zoologist Adolf Naef (1883–1949) established himself as a leader in German comparative anatomy and higher level systematics. He is generally labeled an ‘idealistic morphologist’, although he himself called his research program ‘systematic morphology’. The idealistic morphology that flourished in German biology during the first half of the twentieth century was a rather heterogeneous movement, within which Adolf Naef worked out a special theoretical system of his own. Following a biographical sketch, we (...) present an English translation of a previously unpublished typescript from Naef’s estate, which Naef intended as the introduction to a textbook on Comparative Anatomy for which he was unable to find a publisher before his sudden death in 1949. The typescript contains Naef’s mature thoughts with unprecedented conciseness, focus, and clarity. The density of Naef’s text warrants a historical and contextual explication of its content. (shrink)

Everybody who has learned English as a second or foreign language knows that for reaching intermediate levels, English is an easy language regarding grammar and vocabulary; however, when reaching advanced levels, the learners are faced with complex forms of morphology, syntax, and most obviously, they are faced with the difficulties that pronunciation presents. These are mainly the problems that occur with the English students whose native language is other than English. An experienced teacher of non-native (...) speakers of English can easily recognize the causes of mispronunciation, which in most cases are lack of vocabulary, lack of practice, bad teaching experiences, lack of direct contact with the language, and lack of self-confidence. There are quite a lot of words in English, which are often mispronounced. Those who have just started to learn English as a foreign language, students at primary schools, adults using English as a means of communication and as a working tool, such as businessmen, politicians, administrators, doctors, accountants, and those studying English for teaching purposes, even the teachers of English are faced with the problems of proper pronunciation of words in English.The aim of this research is to identify the problems that the students in the Department of English Language and Literature in the Faculty of Languages, Cultures and Communication face with when they deal with pronunciation of lexical words. (shrink)

This paper discusses the role of cognitive factors in language change; specifically, it investigates the potential impact of argument ambiguity avoidance on the emergence of one of the most well-studied syntactic alternations in English, viz. the dative alternation. Linking this development to other major changes in the history of English like the loss of case marking, I propose that morphological as well as semantic-pragmatic ambiguity between prototypical agents and prototypical recipients in ditransitive clauses plausibly gave a processing advantage (...) to patterns with higher cue reliability such as prepositional marking, but also fixed clause-level order. The main hypotheses are tested through a quantitative analysis of ditransitives in a corpus of Middle English, which confirms that the spread of the PP-construction is impacted by argument ambiguity and demonstrates that this change reflects a complex restructuring of disambiguation strategies. (shrink)

The complex characteristics of lexical blending have long troubled mainstream word formation research to the extent that it has typically been considered a peripheral issue in linguistics. In recent years this has begun to change, and there is currently a growing body of evidence uncovering the intriguing nature of this word formation process. In the present study, underlying principles and usage-based aspects of lexical blends were examined. Analyses of derivatives of three matrix words,republican, liberal, andvegetarian, revealed the impact of three (...) cognitive constraints on the use of lexical blends: schema transfer effects, neighborhood effects, and effects of the influence from morphological lexicalization. The first constraint fueled blend formation, while the other two displayed a hampering effect on the use of lexical blending. Furthermore, a study of the word class distribution in the datasets showed that there were significant differences in the grammar of lexical blending and compounding, respectively. (shrink)

The study aimed to investigate the functional-pragmatic and communicative-pragmatic use of morphological and syntactic diminutive resources of Kazakh and English in the example of artistic contexts. The following methods were used: comparative-comparative, morphological-syntactic, communicative-pragmatic, analytical-synthetic, and contextual. This paper analysed the main morphological and syntactic resources used for word formation of diminutive adjectives in Kazakh and English languages. In particular, the results of the study showed that synthetic means (use of suffixal morphemes with diminutive semantics) and analytical means (...) (use of special lexemes with diminutive semantics) are frequent in Kazakh. It was determined that suffixal morphemes to express the diminutiveness of adjectives were most often used to warn addressees about the properties of objects and phenomena, to soften categorical evaluation in Kazakh, to diminish the attributes of the object, to demonstrate the incompleteness of the attribute in English. This work can be used in the spheres of communicative linguistics, linguistic pragmatics, word formation, and morphology. (shrink)

Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) have significant deficits in language ability that cannot be attributed to neurological damage, hearing impairment, or intellectual disability. The symptoms displayed by children with DLD differ across languages. In English, DLD is often marked by severe difficulties acquiring verb inflection. Such difficulties are less apparent in languages with rich verb morphology like Spanish and Italian. Here we show how these differential profiles can be understood in terms of an interaction between properties of (...) the input language, and the child's ability to learn predictive relations between linguistic elements that are separated within a sentence. We apply a simple associative learning model to sequential English and Spanish stimuli and show how the model's ability to associate cues occurring earlier in time with later outcomes affects the acquisition of verb inflection in English more than in Spanish. We relate this to the high frequency of the English bare form (which acts as a default) and the English process of question formation, which means that (unlike in Spanish) bare forms frequently occur in third‐person singular contexts. Finally, we hypothesize that the pro‐drop nature of Spanish makes it easier to associate person and number cues with the verb inflection than in English. Since the factors that conspire to make English verb inflection particularly challenging for learners with weak sequential learning abilities are much reduced or absent in Spanish, this provides an explanation for why learning Spanish verb inflection is relatively unaffected in children with DLD. (shrink)

Introduction of deep neural networks to the machine translation research ameliorated conventional machine translation systems in multiple ways, specifically in terms of translation quality. The ability of deep neural networks to learn a sensible representation of words is one of the major reasons for this improvement. Despite machine translation using deep neural architecture is showing state-of-the-art results in translating European languages, we cannot directly apply these algorithms in Indian languages mainly because of two reasons: unavailability of the good corpus and (...) Indian languages are morphologically rich. In this paper, we propose a neural machine translation (NMT) system for four language pairs: English–Malayalam, English–Hindi, English–Tamil, and English–Punjabi. We also collected sentences from different sources and cleaned them to make four parallel corpora for each of the language pairs, and then used them to model the translation system. The encoder network in the NMT architecture was designed with long short-term memory (LSTM) networks and bi-directional recurrent neural networks (Bi-RNN). Evaluation of the obtained models was performed both automatically and manually. For automatic evaluation, the bilingual evaluation understudy (BLEU) score was used, and for manual evaluation, three metrics such as adequacy, fluency, and overall ranking were used. Analysis of the results showed the presence of lengthy sentences in English–Malayalam, and the English–Hindi corpus affected the translation. Attention mechanism was employed with a view to addressing the problem of translating lengthy sentences (sentences contain more than 50 words), and the system was able to perceive long-term contexts in the sentences. (shrink)

In this paper we present the problem of a noisy lexical taxonomy and suggest two tasks as potential remedies. The first task is to identify and eliminate incorrect hypernymy links, and the second is to repopulate the taxonomy with new relations. The first task consists of revising the entire taxonomy and returning a Boolean for each assertion of hypernymy between two nouns (e.g. brie is a kind of cheese). The second task consists of recursively producing a chain of hypernyms for (...) a given noun, until the most general node in the taxonomy is reached (e.g. brie → cheese → food → etc.). In order to achieve these goals, we implemented a hybrid hypernym-detection algorithm that incorporates various intuitions, such as syntagmatic, paradigmatic and morphological association measures as well as lexical patterns. We evaluate these algorithms individually and collectively and report findings in Spanish, English and French. (shrink)

There are three main types of number used in modern, industrialized societies. Cardinals count sets (e.g., people, objects) and quantify elements of conventional scales (e.g., money, distance), ordinals index positions in ordered sequences (e.g., years, pages), and nominals serve as unique identifiers (e.g., telephone numbers, player numbers). Many studies that have cited number frequencies in support of claims about numerical cognition and mathematical cognition hinge on the assumption that most numbers analyzed are cardinal. This paper is the first to investigate (...) the relative frequencies of different number types, presenting a corpus analysis of morphologically unmarked numbers (not, e.g., “eighth” or “21st”) in which we manually annotated 3,600 concordances in the Corpus of Contemporary American English. Overall, cardinals are dominant—both pure cardinals (sets) and measurements (scales)—except in the range 1,000–10,000, which is dominated by ordinal years, like 1996 and 2004. Ordinals occur less often overall, and nominals even less so. Only for cardinals do round numbers, associated with approximation, dominate overall and increase with magnitude. In comparison with other registers, academic writing contains a lower proportion of measurements as well as a higher proportion of ordinals and, to some extent, nominals. In writing, pure cardinals and measurements are usually represented as number words, but measurements—especially larger, unround ones—are more likely to be numerals. Ordinals and nominals are mostly represented as numerals. Altogether, this paper reveals how numbers are used in American English, establishing an initial baseline for any analyses of number frequencies and shedding new light on the cognitive and psychological study of number. (shrink)

Comments on G. Marcus' criticisms (see record 1996-24670-001) of K. Plunkett's and V. Marcham's (see record 1994-35650-001) connectionist account of the acquisition of the English past tense (verb morphology). The original model is reviewed. Graphing, overregularization, and other criticisms are addressed (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2000 APA, all rights reserved).

Several studies have highlighted that reading comprehension is determined by different linguistic skills: semantics, syntax, and morphology, in addition to one’s own competence in reading fluency. On the other hand, according to the Linguistic Interdependence Hypothesis, linguistic skills developed in one’s own native language facilitate the development of these skills in a second one. In this study, we wanted to explore the linguistic abilities that determine reading comprehension in Spanish and in English in Secondary Education students. To do (...) this, 73 Secondary Education Students participated in this study. The students carried out a battery of tasks in English and Spanish, all of them related to reading comprehension and different linguistic skills, which included syntactic awareness tasks, synonymy judgment tasks, and morphological awareness tasks. The results indicated a positive correlation between linguistic competencies in both languages, which were determined by school year, with a lower performance in the 1st year than in the 3rd year. Moreover, we found more skills with correlations in English reading comprehension than in Spanish. Finally, reading comprehension in L1 was mainly explained English reading comprehension, while English reading comprehension was predicted by grade, and syntactic awareness, as well as Spanish reading comprehension. This could be explained by the different levels of exposure to L1 and L2 of sample subjects, as the linguistic variables have different influences on the reading comprehension of both languages. (shrink)

Due to new innovations and changes, every language needs new words simply because there is a need for new words to name new things. It is a common occurrence for a speaker to use some words in a way that has never been used before in order to communicate directly about certain facts or ideas. When new inventions and changes come into people’s lives, there is a need to name them and talk about them. If a new word is used (...) by many speakers of the language, it will probably survive, and the same word will one day become an everyday word and enter the vocabulary of a language. This paper looks at compounding as one of the most productive word formation process in English. The term compounding refers to a process in which two or more lexemes are combined into one new word. When a word is formed by merging two or more words, each of which can be used separately, it is called a compound word. The term “word formation” has no universally accepted use. Word formation is sometimes defined as a process associated with changing the form of a word, for example, affixation, which is, in fact, the subject of morphology. In a broader sense, word formation covers the processes of creating new lexical items. In English, word formation is of great importance because this phenomenon affects the English dictionary, which in addition to borrowing from various other languages is enriched in this way. The aim of this paper was to investigate the context based vs. non-context interpretation of English compounds by EFL students in legal discourse. The findings from the test run-questionnaire showed that students of English as a foreign language found it more difficult to apply compound words in context rather than choosing an appropriate definition for them, with or without a given context. Furthermore, students scored lower when 50% of the compounds were given in context. (shrink)

The aim of this study was to test the claim that languages universally employ morphosyntactic marking to differentiate events of more‐ versus less‐direct causation, preferring to mark them with less‐ and more‐ overt marking, respectively (e.g., Somebody broke the window vs. Somebody MADE the window break; *Somebody cried the boy vs. Somebody MADE the boy cry). To this end, we investigated whether a recent computational model which learns to predict speakers’ by‐verb relative preference for the two causatives in English, (...) Hebrew, Hindi, Japanese, and K'iche’ Mayan is able to generalize to a sixth language on which it has never been trained: Balinese. Judgments of the relative acceptability of the less‐ and more‐transparent causative forms of 60 verbs were collected from 48 native‐speaking Balinese adults. The composite crosslinguistic computational model was able to predict these judgments, not only for verbs that it had seen, but also––in a split‐half validation test––to verbs that it had never seen in any language. A “random‐semantics” model showed only a relatively small decrement in performance with seen verbs, whose behavior can be learned on a verb‐by‐verb basis, but achieved zero correlation with human judgments when generalizing to unseen verbs. Together, these findings suggest that Balinese conceptualizes directness of causation in a similar way to these unrelated languages, and therefore constitute support for the view that the distinction between more‐ versus less‐distinct causation constitutes a morphosyntactic universal. (shrink)

As children gradually master grammatical rules, they often go through a period of producing form‐meaning associations that were not observed in the input. For example, 2‐ to 3‐year‐old English‐learning children use the bare form of verbs in settings that require obligatory past tense meaning while already starting to produce the grammatical –ed inflection. While many studies have focused on overgeneralization errors, fewer studies have attempted to explain the root of this earlier stage of rule acquisition. In this work, we (...) use computational modeling to replicate children's production behavior prior to the generalization of past tense production in English. We illustrate how seemingly erroneous productions emerge in a model, without being licensed in the grammar and despite the model aiming at conforming to grammatical forms. Our results show that bare form productions stem from a tension between two factors: (1) trying to produce a less frequent meaning (the past tense) and (2) being unable to restrict the production of frequent forms (the bare form) as learning progresses. Like children, our model goes through a stage of bare form production and then converges on adult‐like production of the regular past tense, showing that these different stages can be accounted for through a single learning mechanism. (shrink)

Statistical learning is often taken to lie at the heart of many cognitive tasks, including the acquisition of language. One particular task in which probabilistic models have achieved considerable success is the segmentation of speech into words. However, these models have mostly been tested against English data, and as a result little is known about how a statistical learning mechanism copes with input regularities that arise from the structural properties of different languages. This study focuses on statistical word segmentation (...) in Arabic, a Semitic language in which words are built around consonantal roots. We hypothesize that segmentation in such languages is facilitated by tracking consonant distributions independently from intervening vowels. Previous studies have shown that human learners can track consonant probabilities across intervening vowels in artificial languages, but it is unknown to what extent this ability would be beneficial in the segmentation of natural language. We assessed the performance of a Bayesian segmentation model on English and Arabic, comparing consonant-only representations with full representations. In addition, we examined to what extent structurally different proto-lexicons reflect adult language. The results suggest that for a child learning a Semitic language, separating consonants from vowels is beneficial for segmentation. These findings indicate that probabilistic models require appropriate linguistic representations in order to effectively meet the challenges of language acquisition. (shrink)

Children traditionally learn to read Chinese characters by rote, and thus stretching children’s memory span could possibly improve their reading in Chinese. Nevertheless, 85% of Chinese characters are semantic-phonetic compounds that contain probabilistic information about meaning and pronunciation. Hence, enhancing children’s metalinguistic skills might also facilitate reading in Chinese. In the present study we tested whether training children’s metalinguistic skills or training their working-memory capacity in eight weeks would produce reading gains, and whether these gains would be similar in Chinese (...) and English. We recruited 35 second graders in Hong Kong and randomly assigned them to a metalinguistic training group (N = 13), a working-memory training group (10), or a waitlist control group (12). In the metalinguistic training, children were taught to analyze novel Chinese characters into phonetic and semantic radicals and novel English words into onsets and rimes. In the working-memory training, children were trained to recall increasingly long strings of Cantonese or English syllables in correct or reverse order. All children were tested on phonological skills, verbal working memory, and word reading fluency in Chinese and in English before and after training. Analyses of the pre- and post-test data revealed that only the metalinguistic training group, but not the other two groups, showed significant improvement on phonological skills in Chinese and English. Working-memory span in Chinese and English increased from the pre- to post-test in the working-memory training group relative to other two groups. Despite these domain-specific training effects, the two training groups improved similarly in word reading fluency in Chinese and English compared to the control group. Our findings suggest that increased metalinguistic skills and a larger working-memory span appear equally beneficial to reading fluency, and that these effects are similar in Chinese and English. (shrink)

Lexical models diverge on the question of how to represent complex words. Under the morpheme-based approach, each morpheme is treated as a separate unit, while under the word-based approach, morphological structure is derived from complex words. In this paper, we propose a new computational model of morphology that is based on graph theory and is intended to elaborate the word-based network approach. Specifically, we use a key concept of network science, the notion of shortest path, to investigate how complex (...) words are learned, stored, and processed. The notion of shortest path refers to the task of finding the shortest or most optimal path connecting two non-adjacent nodes in a network. Building on this notion, the current study shows (i) that new complex words can be segmented into morphemes through the shortest path analysis; (ii) that attested English words tend to represent the shortest paths in the morphological network; and (iii) that novel (unattested) words receive higher acceptability ratings in experiments when they are formed along established optimal paths. The model's performance is tested in two experiments with human participants as well as against the behavioral data from the English Lexicon Project. We interpret our empirical results from the perspective of a usage-based model of grammar and argue that network science provides a powerful tool for analyzing language structure. (shrink)

Inflectional morphology has been taken as a paradigmatic example of rule-governed grammatical knowledge (Pinker, 1999). The plausibility of this claim may be related to the fact that it is mainly based on studies of English, which has a very simple inflectional system. We examined the representation of inflectional morphology in Serbian, which encodes number, gender, and case for nouns. Linguists standardly characterize this system as a complex set of rules, with disagreements about their exact form. We present (...) analyses of a large corpus of nouns which showed that, as in English, Serbian inflectional morphology is quasiregular: It exhibits numerous partial regularities creating neighborhoods that vary in size and consistency. We then asked whether a simple connectionist network could encode this statistical information in a manner that also supported generalization. A network trained on 3,244 Serbian nouns learned to produce correctly inflected phonological forms from a specification of a word's lemma, gender, number, and case, and generalized to untrained cases. The model's performance was sensitive to variables that also influence human performance, including surface and lemma frequency. It was also influenced by inflectional neighborhood size, a novel measure of the consistency of meaning to form mapping. A word-naming experiment with native Serbian speakers showed that this measure also affects human performance. The results suggest that, as in English, generating correctly inflected forms involves satisfying a small number of simultaneous probabilistic constraints relating form and meaning. Thus, common computational mechanisms may govern the representation and use of inflectional information across typologically diverse languages. (shrink)