Lexical Ambiguity in Nouns: Frequency Dominance and Declensional Classes

The existence of differences in lexical processing between ambiguous and unambiguous words is still controversial. Many factors seem to play a role in determining different ambiguity effects in word recognition, such as ambiguity type, experimental paradigm, frequency dominance, etc. The aim of this study is to investigate the role played by frequency dominance and declensional class in recognizing Italian homonymous nouns, namely, forms with multiple unrelated meanings. We report the results of two visual lexical decision experiments, in which these factors are manipulated. An ambiguity disadvantage effect is found for words belonging to two different declensional classes (Exp. 2, e.g., conte), while an absence of processing differences is reported for ambiguous words within the same declensional class (Exp. 1, e.g., credenza). Moreover, an interaction between condition and frequency is found: the inhibitory effects are stronger for ambiguous nouns with two frequency-balanced meanings than for ambiguous nouns with a strongly dominant meaning. The results are compatible with the idea that several factors should be taken into account in order to disentangle competing accounts of lexical ambiguity processing. We discuss these results in terms of how variables such as frequency dominance and declensional class affect the activation of lexical representations and play a role in determining different ambiguity effects in lexical acces

Categorical Properties of Italian Verbs in Written Word Recognition

The study addresses the issue of lexical representation of inflected Italian verbal forms. Linguistic and experimental data suggest the existence of differences in lexical processing of verbs depending on morphological factors. We aimed at verifying whether lexical organization of verbs in the mental lexicon is affected by information about the grammatical category of mood. Two unmasked priming lexical decision experiments were carried out with different SOAs. Primetarget pairs composed of inflected verbs sharing or not mood information were compared. A number of control conditions were also included. The results show that information about mood becomes available in the early stages of lexical processing of verbs, but it is likely to induce priming effects a few hundred milliseconds after its pre-activation. This pattern provides evidence that mood is represented in the input component(s) and is an organizational criterion for verbal forms in the lexicon

Grammatical class effects in production of Italian inflected verbs

We report a picture-word interference (PWI) experiment conducted in Italian where target verbs were used to name pictures in presence of semantically related and unrelated distracters. The congruency of grammatical class between targets and distracters was manipulated and nouns and verbs were used as distracters. Consistently with previous studies, an expected semantic interference effect was observed but, interestingly, such an effect does not equally apply to target-distracter pairs sharing or not grammatical class information. This outcome seems to corroborate the hypothesis of the intervention of grammatical constraints in word production as explored in the PWI task.Questo lavoro descrive un esperimento di interferenza figura-parola sull’ italiano in cui le figure dovevano essere denominate usando verbi in presenza di distrattori semanticamente collegati o non collegati alla figura. È stata manipolata anche la congruenza di classe grammaticale tra target e distrattori; questi ultimi nella metà dei casi erano nomi e nell’altra verbi. In linea con studi precedenti, abbiamo ottenuto un effetto di interferenza semantica; il dato interessante è che quest’ultimo effetto interessa in modo differente le coppie target-distrattore congruenti o non congruenti per classe grammaticale. Questo risultato sembra corroborare l’ipotesi che nella di produzione di parole esplorata attraverso il compito di interferenza figura-parola giochino un ruolo le proprietà grammaticali delle parole

Proceedings of the Fifth Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics CLiC-it 2018

On behalf of the Program Committee, a very warm welcome to the Fifth Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics (CLiC-­‐it 2018). This edition of the conference is held in Torino. The conference is locally organised by the University of Torino and hosted into its prestigious main lecture hall “Cavallerizza Reale”. The CLiC-­‐it conference series is an initiative of the Italian Association for Computational Linguistics (AILC) which, after five years of activity, has clearly established itself as the premier national forum for research and development in the fields of Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing, where leading researchers and practitioners from academia and industry meet to share their research results, experiences, and challenges