156 research outputs found
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
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