Computational Demand and Resources in Aphasia

It is sometimes claimed that interactive-activation models are too powerful, and that it is difficult to constrain them adequately. I illustrate this problem by showing that the basic interactive-activation architecture has several different possible sources for effects of spelling-to-sound regularity on word naming. I then show how data can constrain the architecture. New data lead to a rather different and more constrained version of the interactive-activation model to account for spelling-to-sound conversion. Analysis of the errors made by patients suffering from acquired surface dyslexia confirms the predictions of the constrained model. It is concluded that the traditional interactive activation framework must be considerably constrained to account for normal and disturbed word naming

Front-end Serial Processing of Complex and Compound Words: The APPLE Model

Native speaker competence in English includes the ability to produce and recognize morphologically complex words such as blackboard and indestructibility &s well as novel constructions such as quoteworthiness. This paper addresses the question: H o w do subjects 'see into these complex strings? It presents, as an answer, the Automatic Progressive Parsing and Lexical Excitation (APPLE) model of complex word recognition and demonstrates how the model can provide a natural account of the complex and compound word recognition data in the literature. The APPLE model has as its core a recursive procedure which isolates progressively larger substrings of a complex word and allows for the lexical excitation of constituent morphemes. The model differs from previous accounts of morphological decomposition in that it supports a view of the mental lexicon in which the excitation of lexical entries and the construction of morphological representations IS automatic and obligatory

Variation in Unconscious Lexical Processing: Education an d Experience Make a Difference

Over the past twenty years numerous studies have investigated the extent to which morphological constituents of words are activated during the process of word recognition. In the vast majority of these studies it has been assumed that a correspondence exists between the formal linguistic analysis of a word and its representation in the minds of native speakers. This paper investigates the the extent to which this correspondence can be affected by individual variation that is associated with education, exposure and training. We investigated student who had recently completed a course in medical terminology. These students, and matched control subjects, responded to medical and nonmedical multimorphemic stimuli in a lexical decision task. The results indicate that the medical terminology students' training affected their performance on novel medical words as well as their performance on very common medical words (e.g., psychiatry) that would have been part of their vocabulary prior to taking the course. The results therefore support the view that automatic unconscious lexical processing can indeed be modified by explicit training and specialized exposure. This finding has consequences for the generalizability of studies conducted on university students to the general population of native speakers

Second Culture Acquisition and Second Language Acquisition: Faux amis?

One of the well-known characteristics of modern approaches to second language learning is the view that successful second language acquisition (SLA) is accompanied by second culture acquisition (SCA) (e.g., Hamers & Blanc,1989; Schumann 1978). It seems clear that a learner's acquisition of communicative competence must involve more than the command of the grammatical structures of the target language and a mastery of its phonology. The learner must also acquire new cultural knowledge and a set of culture-specific constraints on linguistic behaviour. The claims above make sense. There is little doubt that, in the best case, expansions of linguistic competence should be accompanied by expansions of cultural competence. But there is also a way in which the claims above make too much sense. They suggest a straightforward parallelism between SLA and SCA as well as a parallelism between the successful end-states of bilingualism and biculturalism. In this paper, we suggest that although the parallels between SLA and SCA are intuitively appealing, they often mask important underlying differences in the ways in which linguistic knowledge and cultural knowledge are organized as well as important differences in the acquisition process

The role of constituents in multiword expressions: An interdisciplinary, cross-lingual perspective

Multiword expressions (MWEs), such as noun compounds (e.g. nickname in English, and Ohrwurm in German), complex verbs (e.g. give up in English, and aufgeben in German) and idioms (e.g. break the ice in English, and das Eis brechen in German), may be interpreted literally but often undergo meaning shifts with respect to their constituents. Theoretical, psycholinguistic as well as computational linguistic research remain puzzled by when and how MWEs receive literal vs. meaning-shifted interpretations, what the contributions of the MWE constituents are to the degree of semantic transparency (i.e., meaning compositionality) of the MWE, and how literal vs. meaning-shifted MWEs are processed and computed. This edited volume presents an interdisciplinary selection of seven papers on recent findings across linguistic, psycholinguistic, corpus-based and computational research fields and perspectives, discussing the interaction of constituent properties and MWE meanings, and how MWE constituents contribute to the processing and representation of MWEs. The collection is based on a workshop at the 2017 annual conference of the German Linguistic Society (DGfS) that took place at Saarland University in Saarbrücken, German

The role of constituents in multiword expressions: An interdisciplinary, cross-lingual perspective

Multiword expressions (MWEs), such as noun compounds (e.g. nickname in English, and Ohrwurm in German), complex verbs (e.g. give up in English, and aufgeben in German) and idioms (e.g. break the ice in English, and das Eis brechen in German), may be interpreted literally but often undergo meaning shifts with respect to their constituents. Theoretical, psycholinguistic as well as computational linguistic research remain puzzled by when and how MWEs receive literal vs. meaning-shifted interpretations, what the contributions of the MWE constituents are to the degree of semantic transparency (i.e., meaning compositionality) of the MWE, and how literal vs. meaning-shifted MWEs are processed and computed. This edited volume presents an interdisciplinary selection of seven papers on recent findings across linguistic, psycholinguistic, corpus-based and computational research fields and perspectives, discussing the interaction of constituent properties and MWE meanings, and how MWE constituents contribute to the processing and representation of MWEs. The collection is based on a workshop at the 2017 annual conference of the German Linguistic Society (DGfS) that took place at Saarland University in Saarbrücken, German

The role of constituents in multiword expressions: An interdisciplinary, cross-lingual perspective

Multiword expressions (MWEs), such as noun compounds (e.g. nickname in English, and Ohrwurm in German), complex verbs (e.g. give up in English, and aufgeben in German) and idioms (e.g. break the ice in English, and das Eis brechen in German), may be interpreted literally but often undergo meaning shifts with respect to their constituents. Theoretical, psycholinguistic as well as computational linguistic research remain puzzled by when and how MWEs receive literal vs. meaning-shifted interpretations, what the contributions of the MWE constituents are to the degree of semantic transparency (i.e., meaning compositionality) of the MWE, and how literal vs. meaning-shifted MWEs are processed and computed. This edited volume presents an interdisciplinary selection of seven papers on recent findings across linguistic, psycholinguistic, corpus-based and computational research fields and perspectives, discussing the interaction of constituent properties and MWE meanings, and how MWE constituents contribute to the processing and representation of MWEs. The collection is based on a workshop at the 2017 annual conference of the German Linguistic Society (DGfS) that took place at Saarland University in Saarbrücken, German

The role of constituents in multiword expressions: An interdisciplinary, cross-lingual perspective

Multiword expressions (MWEs), such as noun compounds (e.g. nickname in English, and Ohrwurm in German), complex verbs (e.g. give up in English, and aufgeben in German) and idioms (e.g. break the ice in English, and das Eis brechen in German), may be interpreted literally but often undergo meaning shifts with respect to their constituents. Theoretical, psycholinguistic as well as computational linguistic research remain puzzled by when and how MWEs receive literal vs. meaning-shifted interpretations, what the contributions of the MWE constituents are to the degree of semantic transparency (i.e., meaning compositionality) of the MWE, and how literal vs. meaning-shifted MWEs are processed and computed. This edited volume presents an interdisciplinary selection of seven papers on recent findings across linguistic, psycholinguistic, corpus-based and computational research fields and perspectives, discussing the interaction of constituent properties and MWE meanings, and how MWE constituents contribute to the processing and representation of MWEs. The collection is based on a workshop at the 2017 annual conference of the German Linguistic Society (DGfS) that took place at Saarland University in Saarbrücken, German