Decline and fall:a biological, developmental, and psycholinguistic account of deliberative language processes and ageing

Background: This paper reviews the role of deliberative processes in language: those language processes that require central resources, in contrast to the automatic processes of lexicalisation, word retrieval, and parsing. 10 Aims: We describe types of deliberative processing, and show how these processes underpin high-level processes that feature strongly in language. We focus on metalin- guistic processing, strategic processing, inhibition, and planning. We relate them to frontal-lobe function and the development of the fronto-striate loop. We then focus on the role of deliberative processes in normal and pathological development and ageing, 15 and show how these processes are particularly susceptible to deterioration with age. In particular, many of the commonly observed language impairments encountered in ageing result from a decline in deliberative processing skills rather than in automatic language processes. Main Contribution: We argue that central processing plays a larger and more important 20 role in language processing and acquisition than is often credited. Conclusions: Deliberative language processes permeate language use across the lifespan. They are particularly prone to age-related loss. We conclude by discussing implications for therapy

Evaluation of automatic hypernym extraction from technical corpora in English and Dutch

In this research, we evaluate different approaches for the automatic extraction of hypernym relations from English and Dutch technical text. The detected hypernym relations should enable us to semantically structure automatically obtained term lists from domain- and user-specific data. We investigated three different hypernymy extraction approaches for Dutch and English: a lexico-syntactic pattern-based approach, a distributional model and a morpho-syntactic method. To test the performance of the different approaches on domain-specific data, we collected and manually annotated English and Dutch data from two technical domains, viz. the dredging and financial domain. The experimental results show that especially the morpho-syntactic approach obtains good results for automatic hypernym extraction from technical and domain-specific texts

Linguistic and metalinguistic categories in second language learning

This paper discusses proposed characteristics of implicit linguistic and explicit metalinguistic knowledge representations as well as the properties of implicit and explicit processes believed to operate on these representations. In accordance with assumptions made in the usage-based approach to language and language acquisition, it is assumed that implicit linguistic knowledge is represented in terms of flexible and context-dependent categories which are subject to similarity-based processing. It is suggested that, by contrast, explicit metalinguistic knowledge is characterized by stable and discrete Aristotelian categories which subserve conscious, rule-based processing. The consequences of these differences in category structure and processing mechanisms for the usefulness or otherwise of metalinguistic knowledge in second language learning and performance are explored. Reference is made to existing empirical and theoretical research about the role of metalinguistic knowledge in second language acquisition, and specific empirical predictions arising out of the line of argument adopted in the current paper are put forward. © Walter de Gruyter 2008

Remembering 'zeal' but not 'thing':reverse frequency effects as a consequence of deregulated semantic processing

More efficient processing of high frequency (HF) words is a ubiquitous finding in healthy individuals, yet frequency effects are often small or absent in stroke aphasia. We propose that some patients fail to show the expected frequency effect because processing of HF words places strong demands on semantic control and regulation processes, counteracting the usual effect. This may occur because HF words appear in a wide range of linguistic contexts, each associated with distinct semantic information. This theory predicts that in extreme circumstances, patients with impaired semantic control should show an outright reversal of the normal frequency effect. To test this prediction, we tested two patients with impaired semantic control with a delayed repetition task that emphasised activation of semantic representations. By alternating HF and low frequency (LF) trials, we demonstrated a significant repetition advantage for LF words, principally because of perseverative errors in which patients produced the previous LF response in place of the HF target. These errors indicated that HF words were more weakly activated than LF words. We suggest that when presented with no contextual information, patients generate a weak and unstable pattern of semantic activation for HF words because information relating to many possible contexts and interpretations is activated. In contrast, LF words tend are associated with more stable patterns of activation because similar semantic information is activated whenever they are encountered

Requirements for Information Extraction for Knowledge Management

Knowledge Management (KM) systems inherently suffer from the knowledge acquisition bottleneck - the difficulty of modeling and formalizing knowledge relevant for specific domains. A potential solution to this problem is Information Extraction (IE) technology. However, IE was originally developed for database population and there is a mismatch between what is required to successfully perform KM and what current IE technology provides. In this paper we begin to address this issue by outlining requirements for IE based KM