The sounds that make up spoken words are heard in a series and must be mapped rapidly onto words in memory because their elements, unlike those of visual words, cannot simultaneously exist or persist in time. Although theories agree that the dynamics of spoken word recognition are important, they differ in how they treat the nature of the competitor set—precisely which words are activated as an auditory word form unfolds in real time. This study used eye tracking to measure the (...) impact over time of word frequency and 2 partially overlapping competitor set definitions: onset density and neighborhood density. Time course measures revealed early and continuous effects of frequency (facilitatory) and on set based similarity (inhibitory). Neighborhood density appears to have early facilitatory effects and late inhibitory effects. The late inhibitory effects are due to differences in the temporal distribution of similarity within neighborhoods. The early facilitatory effects are due to subphonemic cues that inform the listener about word length before the entire word is heard. The results support a new conception of lexical competition neighborhoods in which recognition occurs against a background of activated competitors that changes over time based on fine-grained goodness-of-fit and competition dynamics. (shrink)

In this study, we examined whether the lexical competition process embraced by most models of spoken word recognition is sensitive to talker-specific information. We used a lexical decision task and a long lag priming experiment in which primes and targets sharing all phonemes except the last one were presented in two separate blocks of stimuli. In Experiment 1, the competitor prime block was presented only once to listeners, and no modulation of the competitor priming effect as a (...) function of a talker change between the primes and targets was observed. However, attenuation in the competitor priming effect in the case of a talker change between the primes and targets was observed in Experiment 2 in which the competitor prime block was presented five times to listeners. We discuss our findings in reference to hybrid models of spoken word recognition in which repetition of words with the same talker could be a key factor in the formation and access to talker-dependent representations. (shrink)

How does a child rapidly acquire and develop a structured mental organization for the vast number of words in the first years of life? How does a bilingual individual deal with the even more complicated task of learning and organizing two lexicons? It is only until recently have we started to examine the lexicon as a dynamical system with regard to its acquisition, representation, and organization. In this article, I outline a proposal based on our research that takes the dynamical (...) approach to the lexicon, and I discuss how this proposal can be applied to account for lexical organization, structural representation, and competition within and between languages. In particular, I provide computational evidence based on the DevLex model, a self‐organizing neural network model, and neuroimaging evidence based on functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies, to illustrate how children and adults learn and represent the lexicon in their first and second languages. In the computational research, our goal has been to identify, through linguistically and developmentally realistic models, detailed cognitive mechanisms underlying the dynamic self‐organizing processes in monolingual and bilingual lexical development; in the neuroimaging research, our goal has been to identify the neural substrates that subserve lexical organization and competition in the monolingual and the bilingual brain. In both cases, our findings lead to a better understanding of the interactive dynamics involved in the acquisition and representation of one or multiple languages. (shrink)

There is consensus that the adult lexicon exhibits lexical competition. In particular, substantial evidence demonstrates that words with more phonologically similar neighbors are recognized less efficiently than words with fewer neighbors. How and when these effects emerge in the child's lexicon is less clear. In the current paper, we build on previous research by testing whether phonological onset density slows lexical access in a large sample of 100 English‐acquiring 30‐month‐olds. The children participated in a visual world looking‐while‐listening (...) task, in which their attention was directed to one of two objects on a computer screen while their eye movements were recorded. We found moderate evidence of inhibitory effects of onset neighborhood density on lexical access and clear evidence for an interaction between onset neighborhood density and vocabulary, with larger effects of onset neighborhood density for children with larger vocabularies. Results suggest the lexicons of 30‐month‐olds exhibit lexical‐level competition, with competition increasing with vocabulary size. (shrink)

A critical property of the perception of spoken words is the transient ambiguity of the speech signal. In localist models of speech perception this ambiguity is captured by allowing the parallel activation of multiple lexical representations. This paper examines how a distributed model of speech perception can accommodate this property. Statistical analyses of vector spaces show that coactivation of multiple distributed representations is inherently noisy, and depends on parameters such as sparseness and dimensionality. Furthermore, the characteristics of coactivation vary (...) considerably, depending on the organization of distributed representations within the mental lexicon. This view of lexical access is supported by analyses of phonological and semantic word representations, which provide an explanation of a recent set of experiments on coactivation in speech perception (Gaskell & Marslen–Wilson, 1999). (shrink)

According to standard linguistic theory, the meaning of an utterance is the product of conventional semantic meaning and general pragmatic rules on language use. We investigate how such a division of labor between semantics and pragmatics could evolve under general processes of selection and learning. We present a game‐theoretic model of the competition between types of language users, each endowed with certain lexical representations and a particular pragmatic disposition to act on them. Our model traces two evolutionary forces (...) and their interaction: (i) pressure toward communicative efficiency and (ii) transmission perturbations during the acquisition of linguistic knowledge. We illustrate the model based on a case study on scalar implicatures, which suggests that the relationship between underspecified semantics and pragmatic inference is one of coevolution. (shrink)

Sociolinguistic research shows that listeners' expectations of speakers influence their interpretation of the speech, yet this is often ignored in cognitive models of language comprehension. Here, we focus on the case of interactions between native and non-native speakers. Previous literature shows that listeners process the language of non-native speakers in less detail, because they expect them to have lower linguistic competence. We show that processing the language of non-native speakers increases lexical competition and access in general, not only (...) of the non-native speaker's speech, and that this leads to poorer memory of one's own speech during the interaction. We further find that the degree to which people adjust their processing to non-native speakers is related to the degree to which they adjust their speech to them. We discuss implications for cognitive models of language processing and sociolinguistic research on attitudes. (shrink)

The examination of how words are learned can offer valuable insights into the nature of lexical representations. For example, a common assessment of novel word learning is based on its ability to interfere with other words; given that words are known to compete with each other, we can use the capacity of a novel word to interfere with the activation of other lexical representations as a measure of the degree to which it is integrated into the mental lexicon. (...) This measure allows us to assess novel word learning in L1 or L2, but also the degree to which representations from the two lexica interact with each other. Despite the somewhat independent lines of research on L1 and L2 word learning, common patterns emerge across the two literatures. In both cases, lexicalization appears to follow a similar trajectory. In L1, newly encoded words often fail at first to engage in competition with known words, but they do so later, after they have been better integrated into the mental lexicon. Similarly, L2 words generally have a facilitatory effect, which can, however, become inhibitory in the case of more robust lexical representations. Despite the similar pattern, L1 lexicalization is described in terms of inter-lexical connections, leading to more automatic processing ; whereas in L2 word learning, lack of lexical inhibition is attributed to less robust L2 lexical representations. Here, I point to these similarities and I use them to argue that a common mechanism may underlie similar patterns across the two literatures. (shrink)

Swedish lexical word accents have been repeatedly said to have a low functional load. Even so, the language has kept these tones ever since they emerged probably over a thousand years ago. This article proposes that the primary function of word accents is for listeners to be able to predict upcoming morphological structures and narrow down the lexical competition rather than being lexically distinctive. Psycho- and neurophysiological evidence for the predictive function of word accents is discussed. A (...) novel analysis displays that word accents have a facilitative role in word processing. Specifically, a correlation is revealed between how much incorrect word accents hinder listeners’ processing and how much they reduce response times when correct. Finally, a dual-route model of the predictive use of word accents with distinct neural substrates is put forth. (shrink)

Earlier studies have shown that musically trained individuals may have a benefit in adverse listening situations when compared to non-musicians, especially in speech-on-speech perception. However, the literature provides mostly conflicting results. In the current study, by employing different measures of spoken language processing, we aimed to test whether we could capture potential differences between musicians and non-musicians in speech-on-speech processing. We used an offline measure of speech perception, which reveals a post-task response, and online measures of real time spoken language (...) processing: gaze-tracking and pupillometry. We used stimuli of comparable complexity across both paradigms and tested the same groups of participants. In the sentence recall task, musicians recalled more words correctly than non-musicians. In the eye-tracking experiment, both groups showed reduced fixations to the target and competitor words’ images as the level of speech maskers increased. The time course of gaze fixations to the competitor did not differ between groups in the speech-in-quiet condition, while the time course dynamics did differ between groups as the two-talker masker was added to the target signal. As the level of two-talker masker increased, musicians showed reduced lexical competition as indicated by the gaze fixations to the competitor. The pupil dilation data showed differences mainly in one target-to-masker ratio. This does not allow to draw conclusions regarding potential differences in the use of cognitive resources between groups. Overall, the eye-tracking measure enabled us to observe that musicians may be using a different strategy than non-musicians to attain spoken word recognition as the noise level increased. However, further investigation with more fine-grained alignment between the processes captured by online and offline measures is necessary to establish whether musicians differ due to better cognitive control or sound processing. (shrink)

Top-down feedback does not benefit speech recognition; on the contrary, it can hinder it. No experimental data imply that feedback loops are required for speech recognition. Feedback is accordingly unnecessary and spoken word recognition is modular. To defend this thesis, we analyse lexical involvement in phonemic decision making. TRACE (McClelland & Elman 1986), a model with feedback from the lexicon to prelexical processes, is unable to account for all the available data on phonemic decision making. The modular Race model (...) (Cutler & Norris 1979) is likewise challenged by some recent results, however. We therefore present a new modular model of phonemic decision making, the Merge model. In Merge, information flows from prelexical processes to the lexicon without feedback. Because phonemic decisions are based on the merging of prelexical and lexical information, Merge correctly predicts lexical involvement in phonemic decisions in both words and nonwords. Computer simulations show how Merge is able to account for the data through a process of competition between lexical hypotheses. We discuss the issue of feedback in other areas of language processing and conclude that modular models are particularly well suited to the problems and constraints of speech recognition. Key Words: computational modeling; feedback; lexical processing; modularity; phonemic decisions; reading; speech recognition; word recognition. (shrink)

Computational modeling and eye-tracking were used to investigate how phonological and semantic information interact to influence the time course of spoken word recognition. We extended our recent models to account for new evidence that competition among phonological neighbors influences activation of semantically related concepts during spoken word recognition . The model made a novel prediction: Semantic input modulates the effect of phonological neighbors on target word processing, producing an approximately inverted-U-shaped pattern with a high phonological density advantage at an (...) intermediate level of semantic input—in contrast to the typical disadvantage for high phonological density words in spoken word recognition. This prediction was confirmed with a new analysis of the Apfelbaum et al. data and in a visual world paradigm experiment with preview duration serving as a manipulation of strength of semantic input. These results are consistent with our previous claim that strongly active neighbors produce net inhibitory effects and weakly active neighbors produce net facilitative effects. (shrink)

Most words in English are ambiguous between different interpretations; words can mean different things in different contexts. We investigate the implications of different types of semantic ambiguity for connectionist models of word recognition. We present a model in which there is competition to activate distributed semantic representations. The model performs well on the task of retrieving the different meanings of ambiguous words, and is able to simulate data reported by Rodd, Gaskell, and Marslen‐Wilson [J. Mem. Lang. 46 (2002) 245] (...) on how semantic ambiguity affects lexical decision performance. In particular, the network shows a disadvantage forwords with multiple unrelated meanings (e.g., bark) that coexists with a benefit for words with multiple related word senses (e.g., twist). The ambiguity disadvantage arises because of interference between the different meanings, while the sense benefit arises because of differences in the structure of the attractor basins formed during learning. Words with few senses develop deep, narrow attractor basins, while words with many senses develop shallow, broad basins. We conclude that the mental representations of word meanings can be modelled as stable states within a high‐dimensional semantic space, and that variations in the meanings of words shape the landscape of this space. (shrink)

There is now considerable evidence that human sentence processing is expectation based: As people read a sentence, they use their statistical experience with their language to generate predictions about upcoming syntactic structure. This study examines how sentence processing is affected by readers' uncertainty about those expectations. In a self-paced reading study, we use lexical subcategorization distributions to factorially manipulate both the strength of expectations and the uncertainty about them. We compare two types of uncertainty: uncertainty about the verb's complement, (...) reflecting the next prediction step; and uncertainty about the full sentence, reflecting an unbounded number of prediction steps. We find that uncertainty about the full structure, but not about the next step, was a significant predictor of processing difficulty: Greater reduction in uncertainty was correlated with increased reading times. We additionally replicated previously observed effects of expectation violation, orthogonal to the effect of uncertainty. This suggests that both surprisal and uncertainty affect human RTs. We discuss the consequences for theories of sentence comprehension. (shrink)

Enhancements of the human germ-line introduce further inequalities in the competition for scarce goods, such as income and desirable social positions. Social inequalities, in turn, amplify the range of genetic inequalities that access to germ-line enhancements may produce. From an egalitarian point of view, inequalities can be arranged to the benefit of the worst-off group (for instance, through general taxation), but the possibility of an indefinite growth of social and genetic inequality raises legitimate concerns. It is argued that inequalities (...) produced by markets of germ-line enhancements are just if it they are embedded in a framework of social institutions that satisfies two conditions: (i) Rawls’ Difference Principle, which states that inequalities of income and wealth should benefit the worst-off group; (ii) the lexically prior 'principle of rough equality', which states that citizens’ initial life-chances should be similar enough, so that extreme inequalities in income, wealth and power are not produced or accumulated through institutions justified by the Difference Principle. The principle of rough equality replaces the Rawlsian principles of the Fair Value of the Political Liberties and Fair Equality of Opportunity in a post-genomic society and expresses a concern with background political equality, which is argued to be a condition of the freedom and equality of citizens that should not be traded off with material benefits. Extreme inequalities are defined in terms of political equality. (shrink)

This study investigated the relative role of sub-syllabic components in spoken word recognition of Mandarin Chinese using an eye-tracking experiment with a visual world paradigm. Native Mandarin speakers were presented with four pictures and an auditory stimulus. They were required to click the picture according to the sound stimulus they heard, and their eye movements were tracked during this process. For a target word, nine conditions of competitors were constructed in terms of the amount of their phonological overlap with the (...) target: consonant competitor, rime competitor, tone competitor, consonant plus rime competitor, consonant plus tone competitor, rime plus tone competitor, cohort competitor, cohort plus tone competitor, and baseline competitor. A growth curve analysis was conducted with the fixation to competitors, targets, and distractors, and the results showed that competitors with consonant or rime overlap can be adequately activated, while tone overlap plays a weaker role since additional tonal information can strengthen the competitive effect only when it was added to a candidate that already bears much phonological similarity with the target. Mandarin words are processed in an incremental way in the time course of word recognition since different partially overlapping competitors could be activated immediately; like the pattern found in English, both cohort and rime competitors were activated to compete for lexical activation, but these two competitors were not temporally distinctive and mainly differed in the size of their competitive effects. Generally, the gradation of activation based on the phonological similarity between target and candidates found in this study was in line with the continuous mapping models and may reflect a strategy of native speakers shaped by the informative characteristics of the interaction among different sub-syllabic components. (shrink)

The controversies over genetically modified crops in India involve what Gieryn refers to as ‘boundary work’ in the ongoing competition for credibility and trustworthiness among claimsmakers with opposing points of view. Discourse about GM crops involves extensive drawing of boundaries by actors including policymakers, technocrats, NGOs, scientists, industrialists, and farmers. The issues raised range from governmental processes to moral and ethical implications, from environmental consequences to integration into the global economy. Those involved in these discussions frequently invoke the idealized (...) notions of farmers and farming in order to situate themselves within the boundary of a particular social category which may lend credibility to their claims. While Gieryn has focused primarily on scientists’ attempts to construct a boundary between science and non-science in order to establish themselves as experts, strengthen the credibility of their claims and avoid political interference in their intellectual activities, this article focuses on a different way in which knowledgeable and influential actors lay claim to trustworthiness by drawing a different kind of social boundary around themselves. This article will especially focus on the ways in which the category of farmers is used in the GM crop controversies by actors who are in a position to influence public policies regarding GM crops, especially in their efforts to justify their policy prescriptions. The thesis here is that GM crop controversies in India reflect elite actors’ attempts to compete for a shared social identity with farmers, thus constructing a context for the particular public policy prescriptions they support. The thesis is supported by a lexical item frequency analysis of discussion related to genetically modified cotton in India which demonstrates that boundary work using social identity of farmers plays a significant role in shaping the discourse surrounding the adoption and governance of GM crops. (shrink)

Parallel language activation in bilinguals leads to competition between languages. Experience managing this interference may aid novel language learning by improving the ability to suppress competition from known languages. To investigate the effect of bilingualism on the ability to control native-language interference, monolinguals and bilinguals were taught an artificial language designed to elicit between-language competition. Partial activation of interlingual competitors was assessed with eye-tracking and mouse-tracking during a word recognition task in the novel language. Eye-tracking results showed (...) that monolinguals looked at competitors more than bilinguals, and for a longer duration of time. Mouse-tracking results showed that monolinguals’ mouse movements were attracted to native-language competitors, whereas bilinguals overcame competitor interference by increasing the activation of target items. Results suggest that bilinguals manage cross-linguistic interference more effectively than monolinguals. We conclude that language interference can affect lexical retrieval, but bilingualism may reduce this interference by facilitating access to a newly learned language. (shrink)

In this paper, I link philosophical discussion of policies for trans inclusion or exclusion, to a method of policy making. I address the relationship between concerns about safety, fairness, and inclusion in policy making about the inclusion of transwomen athletes into women’s sport. I argue for an approach based on lexical priority rather than simple ‘balancing’, considering the different values in a specific order. I present justifying reasons for this approach and this lexical order, based on the special (...) obligations of International Federations such as World Rugby. As a result, I provide a justificatory framework for the WR Guidelines that exclude transwomen from the women’s game in WR competitions. Finally, I give an account of a maximally safe, maximally fair and maximally inclusive form of sex categorisation in sport. (shrink)

“Scalar implicatures” is a phrase used to refer to some inferences arising from the competition between alternatives: typically, “Mary read some of the books” ends up conveying that Mary did not read all books, because one could have said “Mary read all books”. The so-called grammatical theory argues that these inferences obtain from the application of a covert operator \, which not only has the capability to negate alternative sentences, but also the capability to be embedded within sentences under (...) other linguistic operators, i.e. \ has the potential to add to the meaning of expressions, the negation of their alternatives. This view typically seeks support from the existence of readings that could not be explained without the extra-capability of \ to occur in embedded positions. However, if some embedded positions seem to be accessible to \, not all conceivable positions that \ could occupy yield sensible results. In short: the \ approach is powerful, maybe too powerful. Various approaches based on logical strength and monotonicity have been proposed to justify on principled grounds the limited distribution of \; these approaches are mostly based on a comparison between possible parses, and considerations of monotonicity. We propose a new constraint based instead on “connectedness”, ruling out parses because of inherent problems their outcome may raise. Connectedness is a sister notion of monotonicity, which has been recruited to explain certain lexical restrictions on nouns, adjectives and more recently quantifiers; we propose here that connectedness could play a similar role at the level of propositional meanings. (shrink)

Recent scholarship on Plato'sCratylus has yielded interpretations that assign various functions of philosophical importance to the dialogue's lengthy etymological section. Barney considers the section an ‘agonistic display’ in which Socrates beats contemporary practitioners of etymology at their own game while, at the same time, offering a cosmological theory intended for serious intellectual competition. In this context, Barney emphasizes the importance of Parmenides, a charioteer who journeys towards Truth, as a literary point of reference for Socrates’ own etymological quest after (...) the true meaning of names which, from Cratylus’ naturalist perspective on language, are considered indicative of their referents’ essential nature. The contents of the etymologies may be a ‘rational reconstruction’ of Cratylus’ linguistic naturalism. Sedley stresses the encyclopedic character of Socrates’ lexical interpretations and argues that these are ‘exegetically correct’ in representing the opinions of the name-givers of old who subscribed to a Heraclitean view of a world in flux, as is reflected in the original form of the names they devised. Ademollo stresses that Socrates’ etymologies display the evolution of Greek intellectual thought, shown to be heavily reliant on the assumption of a universe in flux, and serve to exhibit the weaknesses in Cratylus’ naturalist view of language. (shrink)

Previous research on associative learning has uncovered detailed aspects of the process, including what types of things are learned, how they are learned, and where in the brain such learning occurs. However, perceptual processes, such as stimulus recognition and identification, take time to unfold. Previous studies of learning have not addressed when, during the course of these dynamic recognition processes, learned representations are formed and updated. If learned representations are formed and updated while recognition is ongoing, the result of learning (...) may incorporate spurious, partial information. For example, during word recognition, words take time to be identified, and competing words are often active in parallel. If learning proceeds before this competition resolves, representations may be influenced by the preliminary activations present at the time of learning. In three experiments using word learning as a model domain, we provide evidence that learning reflects the ongoing dynamics of auditory and visual processing during a learning event. These results show that learning can occur before stimulus recognition processes are complete; learning does not wait for ongoing perceptual processing to complete. (shrink)

We develop a formal semantic analysis of the alarm calls used by Campbell’s monkeys in the Tai forest and on Tiwai island —two sites that differ in the main predators that the monkeys are exposed to. Building on data discussed in Ouattara et al. :e7808, 2009a; PNAS 106: 22026–22031, 2009b and Arnold et al., we argue that on both sites alarm calls include the roots krak and hok, which can optionally be affixed with -oo, a kind of attenuating suffix; in (...) addition, sentences can start with boom boom, which indicates that the context is not one of predation. In line with Arnold et al., we show that the meaning of the roots is not quite the same in Tai and on Tiwai: krak often functions as a leopard alarm call in Tai, but as a general alarm call on Tiwai. We develop models based on a compositional semantics in which concatenation is interpreted as conjunction, roots have lexical meanings, -oo is an attenuating suffix, and an all-purpose alarm parameter is raised with each individual call. The first model accounts for the difference between Tai and Tiwai by way of different lexical entries for krak. The second model gives the same underspecified entry to krak in both locations, but it makes use of a competition mechanism akin to scalar implicatures. In Tai, strengthening yields a meaning equivalent to non-aerial dangerous predator and turns out to single out leopards. On Tiwai, strengthening yields a nearly contradictory meaning due to the absence of ground predators, and only the unstrengthened meaning is used. (shrink)

Previous studies have shown that multiple reference frames are available and compete for selection during the use of spatial terms such as “above.” However, the mechanisms that underlie the selection process are poorly understood. In the current paper we present two experiments and a comparison of three computational models of selection to shed further light on the nature of reference frame selection. The three models are drawn from different areas of human cognition, and we assess whether they may be applied (...) to a reference frame selection by examining their ability to account for both existing and new empirical data comprising acceptance rates, response times, and response time distributions. These three models are the competitive shunting model, the leaky competing accumulator model, and a lexical selection model. Model simulations show that only the LCA model satisfactorily accounts for the empirical observations. The key properties of this model that seem to drive its success are its bounded linear activation function, its number and type of processing stages, and its use of decay. Uncovering these critical properties has important implications for our understanding not only of spatial term use, in particular, but also of conflict and selection in human cognition more generally. (shrink)

The goal of the present study was to investigate the interaction between different senses of polysemous nouns (metonymies and metaphors) and different meanings of homonyms using the method of event-related potentials (ERPs) and a priming paradigm. Participants read two-word phrases containing ambiguous words and made a sensicality judgment. Phrases with polysemes highlighted their literal sense and were preceded by primes with either the same or different – metonymic or metaphorical – sense. Similarly, phrases with homonyms were primed by phrases with (...) a consistent or inconsistent meaning of the noun. The results demonstrated that polysemous phrases with literal senses preceded by metonymic primes did not differ in ERP responses from the control condition with the same literal primes. In contrast, processing phrases with the literal sense preceded by metaphorical primes resulted in N400 and P600 effects that might reflect a very limited priming effect. The priming effect observed between metonymic and literal senses supports the idea that these senses share a single representation in the mental lexicon. In contrast, the effects observed for polysemes with metaphorical primes characterize lexical access to the word’s target sense and competition between the two word senses. The processing of homonyms preceded by the prime with an inconsistent meaning, although it did not elicit an N400 effect, was accompanied by a P600 effect as compared to the control condition with a consistent meaning of the prime. We suppose that the absence of the N400 effect may result from inhibition of the target meaning by the inconsistent prime, whereas the P600 response might reflect processes of reanalysis, activation, and integration of the target meaning. Our results provide additional evidence for the difference in processing mechanisms between metonymies and metaphors that might have separate representations in the mental lexicon, although they are more related as compared to homonyms. (shrink)

Both notional and grammatical number affect agreement during language production. To explore their workings, we investigated how semantic integration, a type of conceptual relatedness, produces variations in agreement (Solomon & Pearlmutter, 2004). These agreement variations are open to competing notional and lexical-grammatical number accounts. The notional hypothesis is that changes in number agreement reflect differences in referential coherence: More coherence yields more singularity. The lexical-grammatical hypothesis is that changes in agreement arise from competition between nouns differing in (...) grammatical number: More competition yields more plurality. These hypotheses make opposing predictions about semantic integration. On the notional hypothesis, semantic integration promotes singular agreement. On the lexical-grammatical hypothesis, semantic integration promotes plural agreement. We tested these hypotheses with agreement elicitation tasks in two experiments. Both experiments supported the notional hypothesis, with semantic integration creating faster and more frequent singular agreement. This implies that referential coherence mediates the effect of semantic integration on number agreement. (shrink)

This paper addresses the problem of Twitter sentiment analysis through a hybrid approach in which SentiWordNet (SWN)-based feature vector acts as input to the classification model Support Vector Machine. Our main focus is to handle lexical modifier negation during SWN score calculation for the improvement of classification performance. Thus, we present naive and novel shift approach in which negation acts as both sentiment-bearing word and modifier, and then we shift the score of words from SWN based on their contextual (...) semantic, inferred from neighbouring words. Additionally, we augment negation accounting procedure with a few heuristics for handling the cases in which negation presence does not necessarily mean negation. Experimental results show that the contextual-based SWN feature vector obtained through shift polarity approach alone led to an improved Twitter sentiment analysis system that outperforms the traditional reverse polarity approach by 2–6%. We validate the effectiveness of our hybrid approach considering negation on benchmark Twitter corpus from SemEval-2013 Task 2 competition. (shrink)

Over the past years, Massive Open Online Courses have emerged as new competitive advantages in the digital economy of higher education globally. Accordingly, an increasing number of individuals are attracted to these new learning environments for developing their knowledge and skills in a variety of subject areas. Despite these developments, research on linguistic features of MOOCs lectures as the main mediums for delivering the course contents remained limited. To address this gap, the present study analyzed a corpus of MOOCs lectures (...) with around 4.45 million words to determine the size of vocabulary knowledge needed for 95 and 98% coverages. The findings revealed that sufficient coverage of the course contents requires knowledge of the 5,000 most frequent words in English. Nonetheless, achieving adequate coverage level requires a much larger vocabulary size of around 9,000 most frequent words in English. The study also found that widely used word lists for general and academic vocabulary fail to support MOOCs learners with sufficient vocabulary knowledge for adequate lexical coverage. Based on these findings, the study draws a number of implications for preparing non-native English speakers to use MOOCs effectively and setting research-informed vocabulary learning goals in instructional programs and materials. (shrink)

This paper considers literary responses to the role of competition in the polis of the late Geometric and Archaic periods through the semantics of the word eris , with particular reference to Hesiod's account of the two Erides at Works and Days 11–26. As Homeric and Epic Cycle usage makes clear, the innovation in this passage is not the assertion that there is a positive as well as a destructive form of eris but the qualitative polarization between them. This (...) polar opposition is a reflex of, and an attempt to gain cognitive mastery over, a fundamental cultural problem: the need of the polis to project direct forms of violence externally as intercommunal warfare, to eliminate internal discord or at least limit its effect, and to use the competitive energies associated with eris positively, in the interest of social and political cohesion. Uses of eris in Herodotus, Xenophon, and Thucydides confirm the lexical argument and show the continuity of these issues in Greek culture. (shrink)

Approaching language change within a Darwinian framework constitutes a long-standing tradition within the literature of diachronic linguistics. However, many publications remain vague, omitting conceptual details or missing necessary terminology. For example, phylogenetic trees of language families are regularly compared to biological speciation, but definitions on mechanisms of inheritance, i.e. how linguistic information is transferred between individuals and cohorts, or on the linguistic correlates to genotype and phenotype are often missing or lacking. In light of this, Haider’s attempts to develop this (...) approach into a theoretically more precise position, closely mirroring principles of Darwinian natural selection in the dimension of diachronic grammatical change, but contrasting this with non-Darwinian lexical change. He draws a comparison to viral replication, essentially positing that grammar variants act as mental viruses, competing for replication in new hosts, i.e. children during critical periods of language acquisition. Haider proposes that in light of this competition for replication, the unconscious fixation of an individual’s grammar leads to diachronic grammatical change largely mirroring Darwinian natural selection. Despite the intuitive appeal this mode of reasoning may feature, the following response paper identifies and discusses a suit of shortcomings to this conceptualization. Some problems arise from underspecified theoretical notions, others due to the incomplete or inaccurate adoption of biological principles, and yet more through a partial incompatibility with empirical data. These criticisms do not amount to a dismissal of the Darwinian framework Haider is following, but to a rejection of Haider’s current position. Albeit it remains unclear if a truly Darwinian approach to language change can be reached, suggestions on how Haider’s theoretical notions could be further developed are made and pertinent efforts may ultimately lead to a productive theory. (shrink)

Despite the lack of invariance problem (the many‐to‐many mapping between acoustics and percepts), human listeners experience phonetic constancy and typically perceive what a speaker intends. Most models of human speech recognition (HSR) have side‐stepped this problem, working with abstract, idealized inputs and deferring the challenge of working with real speech. In contrast, carefully engineered deep learning networks allow robust, real‐world automatic speech recognition (ASR). However, the complexities of deep learning architectures and training regimens make it difficult to use them to (...) provide direct insights into mechanisms that may support HSR. In this brief article, we report preliminary results from a two‐layer network that borrows one element from ASR, long short‐term memory nodes, which provide dynamic memory for a range of temporal spans. This allows the model to learn to map real speech from multiple talkers to semantic targets with high accuracy, with human‐like timecourse of lexical access and phonological competition. Internal representations emerge that resemble phonetically organized responses in human superior temporal gyrus, suggesting that the model develops a distributed phonological code despite no explicit training on phonetic or phonemic targets. The ability to work with real speech is a major advance for cognitive models of HSR. (shrink)

The aim of this study is to assess the role of readers’ proficiency and of the base-word distributional properties on eye-movement behavior. Sixty-two typically developing children, attending 3rd, 4th, and 5th grade, were asked to read derived words in a sentence context. Target words were nouns derived from noun bases (e.g., umorista, ‘humorist’), which in Italian are shared by few derived words, and nouns derived from verb bases (e.g., punizione, ‘punishment’), which are shared by about 50 different inflected forms and (...) several derived words. Data showed that base and word frequency affected first-fixation duration for nouns derived from noun bases, but in an opposite way: Base frequency had a facilitative effect on first fixation, whereas word frequency exerted an inhibitory effect. These results were interpreted as a competition between early accessed base words (e.g., camino, chimney) and target words (e.g., caminetto, fireplace). For nouns derived from verb bases, an inhibitory base frequency effect but no word frequency effect were observed. These results suggest that syntactic context, calling for a noun in the target position, lead to an inhibitory effect when a verb base was detected, and made it difficult for readers to access the corresponding base+suffix combination (whole word) in the very early processing phases. Gaze duration was mainly affected by word frequency and length: for nouns derived from noun bases, this interaction was modulated by proficiency, as length effect was stronger for less proficient readers, while they were processing low-frequency words. For nouns derived from verb bases, though, all children, irrespective of their reading ability, showed sensitivity to the interaction within frequency of base+suffix combination (word frequency) and target length. Results of this study are consistent with those of other Italian studies that contrasted noun and verb processing, and confirm that distributional properties of morphemic constituents have a significant impact on the strategies used for processing morphologically complex words. (shrink)

Homonyms, i.e. ambiguous words like ‘score’, have different meanings in different contexts. Previous research indicates that all potential meanings of a homonym are first accessed in parallel before one of the meanings is selected in a competitive race. If these processes are automatic, these processes of selection should even be observed when homonyms are shown subliminally. This study measured the time course of subliminal and supraliminal priming by homonyms with a frequent and a rare meaning in a neutral context, using (...) a lexical decision task. In the subliminal condition, priming across prime-target asynchronies ranging from 100 ms to 1.5 s indicated that the dominant meaning of homonyms was facilitated and the subordinate meaning was inhibited. This indicates that selection of meaning was much faster with subliminal presentation than with supraliminal presentation. Awareness of a prime might decelerate an otherwise rapid selection process. (shrink)

Human languages vary in terms of which meanings they lexicalize, but this variation is constrained. It has been argued that languages are under two competing pressures: the pressure to be simple (e.g., to have a small lexicon) and to allow for informative (i.e., precise) communication, and that which meanings get lexicalized may be explained by languages finding a good way to trade off between these two pressures. However, in certain semantic domains, languages can reach very high levels of informativeness even (...) if they lexicalize very few meanings in that domain. This is due to productive morphosyntax and compositional semantics, which may allow for construction of meanings which are not lexicalized. Consider the semantic domain of natural numbers: many languages lexicalize few natural number meanings as monomorphemic expressions, but can precisely convey very many natural number meanings using morphosyntactically complex numerals. In such semantic domains, lexicon size is not in direct competition with informativeness. What explains which meanings are lexicalized in such semantic domains? We will propose that in such cases, languages need to solve a different kind of trade‐off problem: the trade‐off between the pressure to lexicalize as few meanings as possible (i.e, to minimize lexicon size) and the pressure to produce as morphosyntactically simple utterances as possible (i.e, to minimize average morphosyntactic complexity of utterances). To support this claim, we will present a case study of 128 natural languages' numeral systems, and show computationally that they achieve a near‐optimal trade‐off between lexicon size and average morphosyntactic complexity of numerals. This study in conjunction with previous work on communicative efficiency suggests that languages' lexicons are shaped by a trade‐off between not two but three pressures: be simple, be informative, and minimize average morphosyntactic complexity of utterances. (shrink)

This article explores the consequences of falling costs of solar and wind power for the ethics of climate change mitigation. We suggest that price competitiveness of renewables reveals a divergence of interest between fossil fuel consumers and producers: cheap renewables strengthen precautionary arguments for aggressive mitigation for consumers but threaten the economic base of producers. As existing applications of the precautionary principle to climate change do not address this issue, we develop a novel approach based on lexical utilities. Given (...) the premise that climate catastrophe entails economic catastrophe but not vice versa, we argue that both producers and consumers should favor mitigation. (shrink)

A half-century of Rawls interpreters have overemphasized economic equality in A Theory of Justice, slighting liberty—the central value of liberalism—in the process. From luck-egalitarian readings of Rawls to more recent claims that Rawls was a “reticent socialist,” these interpretations have obscured Rawls’s identity as a philosopher of freedom. They have also obscured the perhaps surprising fact that Rawlsian liberties (basic and non-basic) restrain and even undermine that same economic equality. As I will show in this article, such undermining occurs in (...) three areas: first, in the lexical priority of the basic liberties; second, in the (underappreciated) role played by free and competitive markets in Rawls’s theory; and third, in the structure and functioning of Rawls’s preferred economic institutions, viz., liberal socialism and property-owning democracy. (shrink)

This investigation sought to find the relationships among multiple dimensions of personality and multiple features of language style. Unlike previous investigations, after controlling for such other moderators as culture and socio-demographics, the current investigation explored those dimensions of naturalistic spoken language that most closely align with communication. In groups of five to eight players, participants from eight international locales completed hour-long competitive games consisting of a series of ostensible missions. Composite measures of quantity, lexical diversity, sentiment, immediacy and negations (...) were measured with an automated tool called SPLICE and with Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count. We also investigated style dynamics over the course of an interaction. We found predictors of extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism, but overall fewer significant associations than prior studies, suggesting greater heterogeneity in language style in contexts entailing interactivity, conversation rather than solitary message production, oral rather than written discourse, and groups rather than dyads. Extraverts were found to maintain greater linguistic style consistency over the course of an interaction. The discussion addresses the potential for Type I error when studying the relationship between language and personality. (shrink)

The functional approach to language holds that the forms of natural languages are created, governed, constrained, acquired, and used in the service of communicative functions. To evaluate this claim, we need to examine both the strengths and the weaknesses of the functional approach.