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

Revisiting lexical ambiguity effects in visual word recognition

2012 - 2013The aim of this work is to focus on how lexically ambiguous words are represented in the mental lexicon of speakers. The existence of words with multiple meanings/senses (e.g., credenza, mora, etc. in Italian) is a pervasive feature of natural language. Routinely speakers of almost all languages encounter ambiguous words, whose correct interpretation is made by recurring to the linguistic context in which these forms are inserted... [edited by author]XII n.s

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

Lessico mentale bilingue: rappresentazioni lessicali cross-linguistiche tra italiano e inglese

A crucial issue in research on bilingualism concerns the nature of mental representations for multiple languages. Recent psycholinguistic research suggests that both languages are activated in parallel and are mutually influenced, even when speakers have to deal with only one language; in other words, bilinguals can never «turn off» the non-target language. This has relevant implications for applied researches about bilingualism, second language acquisition and teaching methodologies. In psycholinguistics, an empirical demonstration of this phenomenon is provided by cross-language similarities. For instance, words from different languages may have the same orthography and same meaning; others may have the same orthography but a different meaning. The former are called interlingual cognates (e.g., the word «idea», which has the same spelling and meaning both in Italian and English), while the latter are defined as interlingual homographs (or false friends, e.g., the English word «come», which in Italian means «how»). Interlingual homographs and cognates have been the most important sources of stimulus materials in studies investigating the bilingual mental lexicon. Through such words, many studies in the last decades have revealed that bilinguals often co-activate word candidates from both languages (see Dijkstra, 2005, for an overview). However, many issues about lexical representation and processing of these words are still debated and also empirical results are often conflicting. In this work, after a brief review of the literature, we present the results of an experimental research conducted on a group of late Italian/English bilinguals, where evidence for co-activation of both languages in bilingual lexical processing are found. The main purpose of the study is to provide a new perspective to disentangle competing accounts of cross-language relations, by taking into accounts some variables, such as word frequency, second language proficiency, etc., which previous studies did not always consider

Objective frequency values of canonical and syntactically modified idioms: preliminary normative data

In this study we collected several objective frequency values for 124 Italian idiomatic expressions, in order to verify the relation among these measures of frequency and a set of subjective variables (e.g., familiarity, meaning knowledge, age of acquisition, etc.) which are relevant from a psycholinguistic perspective, since they are supposed to play a role in idiom processing. Specifically, we calculated the following frequency types: occurrences of content words, (lemma and word-form values), occurrences of canonical idioms (e.g., Paolo broke the ice), occurrences of syntactically manipulated idioms (e.g., The ice was suddenly broken by Paolo). We discuss the results of correlational analyses