A broad-coverage distributed connectionist model of visual word recognition

In this study we describe a distributed connectionist model of morphological processing, covering a realistically sized sample of the English language. The purpose of this model is to explore how effects of discrete, hierarchically structured morphological paradigms, can arise as a result of the statistical sub-regularities in the mapping between word forms and word meanings. We present a model that learns to produce at its output a realistic semantic representation of a word, on presentation of a distributed representation of its orthography. After training, in three experiments, we compare the outputs of the model with the lexical decision latencies for large sets of English nouns and verbs. We show that the model has developed detailed representations of morphological structure, giving rise to effects analogous to those observed in visual lexical decision experiments. In addition, we show how the association between word form and word meaning also give rise to recently reported differences between regular and irregular verbs, even in their completely regular present-tense forms. We interpret these results as underlining the key importance for lexical processing of the statistical regularities in the mappings between form and meaning

Word frequency distributions and lexical semantics

This paper addresses the relation between meaning, lexical productivity, and frequency of use. Using density estimation as a visualization tool, we show that differences in semantic structure can be reflected in probability density functions estimated for word frequency distributions. We call attention to an example of a bimodal density, and suggest that bimodality arises when distributions of well-entrenched lexical tems, which appear to be lognormal, are mixed with distributions of productively reated nonce formation

The comprehension of acoustically reduced morphologically complex words: The roles of deletion, duration, and frequency of occurence

This study addresses the roles of segment deletion, durational reduction, and frequency of use in the comprehension of morphologically complex words. We report two auditory lexical decision experiments with reduced and unreduced prefixed Dutch words. We found that segment deletions as such delayed comprehension. Simultaneously, however, longer durations of the different parts of the words appeared to increase lexical competition, either from the word’s stem (Experiment 1) or from the word’s morphological continuation forms (Experiment 2). Increased lexical competition slowed down especially the comprehension of low frequency words, which shows that speakers do not try to meet listeners’ needs when they reduce especially high frequency words

Semantic relations and compound transparency: A regression study in CARIN theory

According to the CARIN theory of Gagné and Shoben (1997), conceptual relations play an important role in compound interpretation. This study develops three measures gauging the role of conceptual relations, and pits these measures against measures based on latent semantic analysis (Landauer & Dumais, 1997). The CARIN measures successfully predict response latencies in a familiarity categorization task, in a semantic transparency task, and in visual lexical decision. Of the measures based on latent semantic analysis, only a measure orthogonal to the conceptual relations, which instead gauges the extent to which the concepts for the compound’s head and the compound itself are discriminated, also reached significance. Results further indicate that in tasks requiring careful assessment of the meaning of the compound, general knowledge of conceptual relations plays a central role, whereas in the lexical decision task, attention shifts to co-activated meanings and the specifics of the conceptual relations realized in the compound’s modifier family

Prosodic cues for morphological complexity: The case of Dutch plural nouns

It has recently been shown that listeners use systematic differences in vowel length and intonation to resolve ambiguities between onset-matched simple words (Davis, Marslen-Wilson, & Gaskell, 2002; Salverda, Dahan, & McQueen, 2003). The present study shows that listeners also use prosodic information in the speech signal to optimize morphological processing. The precise acoustic realization of the stem provides crucial information to the listener about the morphological context in which the stem appears and attenuates the competition between stored inflectional variants. We argue that listeners are able to make use of prosodic information, even though the speech signal is highly variable within and between speakers, by virtue of the relative invariance of the duration of the onset. This provides listeners with a baseline against which the durational cues in a vowel and a coda can be evaluated. Furthermore, our experiments provide evidence for item-specific prosodic effects

Early occipital sensitivity to syntactic category is based on form typicality

Syntactic factors can rapidly affect behavioral and neural responses during language processing; however, the mechanisms that allow this rapid extraction of syntactically relevant information remain poorly understood. We addressed this issue using magnetoencephalography and found that an unexpected word category (e.g., “The recently princess . . . ”) elicits enhanced activity in visual cortex as early as 120 ms after exposure, and that this activity occurs as a function of the compatibility of a word’s form with the form properties associated with a predicted word category. Because no sensitivity to linguistic factors has been previously reported for words in isolation at this stage of visual analysis, we propose that predictions about upcoming syntactic categories are translated into form-based estimates, which are made available to sensory cortices. This finding may be a key component to elucidating the mechanisms that allow the extreme rapidity and efficiency of language comprehension

Regular morphologically complex neologisms leave detectable traces in the mental lexicon

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On speech variation and word type differentiation by articulatory feature representations

This paper describes ongoing research aiming at the description of variation in speech as represented by asynchronous articulatory features. We will first illustrate how distances in the articulatory feature space can be used for event detection along speech trajectories in this space. The temporal structure imposed by the cosine distance in articulatory feature space coincides to a large extent with the manual segmentation on phone level. The analysis also indicates that the articulatory feature representation provides better such alignments than the MFCC representation does. Secondly, we will present first results that indicate that articulatory features can be used to probe for acoustic differences in the onsets of Dutch singulars and plurals