Lexical Association Research Articles

Lexical associations of modal verbs in English love songs

Lexical associations of modal verbs in English love songs

The Nature of Word Associations in Sentence Contexts.

. How words are interrelated in the human mind is a scientific topic on which there is still no consensus, with different views on how word co-occurrence and semantic relatedness mediate word association. Recent research has shown that lexical associations are strongly predicted by the similarity of those words in terms of valence, arousal, and concreteness ratings. In the current study, we aimed at extending these results to more complex and realistic linguistic scenarios, since human communication is not done with word pairs, but rather through sentences. Hence, the aim of the current study was to verify whether valence, arousal, and concreteness also articulate sentence-level lexical representations. To this end, 32 native Spanish speakers were given cue words and asked to use them in sentences that would provide a meaningful context. The content words of the written sentences were then analyzed. Our results showed that the emotional dimensions (valence and arousal) and concreteness values of the cue words effectively predicted the same values of said dimensions of their sentences’ words. In sum, the similarity in the emotional dimensions and concreteness are crucial mechanisms behind word association in the human mind.

"Factual and Symbolic Information in Educational Diplomas. A Comparative View on Anglo-Saxon, French, Russian and Romanian Documents"

The term diploma is largely employed to designate a document assessing qualifications of the recipient, in a variety of contexts. In the 21st century educational systems, diplomas are, nevertheless, subjected to various interpretations, a fact that is highlighted by the fact that instructions, regulations and laws are drafted to describe the content, interpretations and uses of diplomas. While preserving the phonetic and lexical similarity when travelling across languages and cultures, the term diploma develops specific lexical and semantic associations in each of the analyzed languages. Definitions are drawn from major dictionaries of the target languages and conclusions serve to further the understanding of the term for translation, educational and managerial purposes.

Comparative analysis of the associative fields of the word-stimulus of EDUCATION

The article is devoted to the comparison of associative fields, which differ in the time of fixation and by obtaining associative material. To compare the content of the associative fields, EDUCATION took an associative field from the Dictionary of Associative Definitions of Nouns of the Ukrainian Language in 1989, which was formed as a result of a chain associative experiment and an associative field obtained by a free associative experiment in 2007 and 2021. The results of the comparison showed that the core of associative value remained unchanged. The connotative fragment is represented to a greater extent by positively colored reactions in the two associative fields.
 In both associative fields EDUCATION is thought of primarily as higher with a repetition rate of 33. In the associative field stimulus EDUCATION, which we find in the dictionary, the most frequent reaction is also higher, but with a frequency of 184 times, which reveals the prestige of higher education among Ukrainians. In the associative field we find reactions with a negative value — insufficient (frequency 8), bad, dangerous, low, funny, poor. Instead, most reactions contain a positive assessment of good (6), high, sufficient, impressive, good, qualified, strong, necessary.
 In the associative field of 2007, evaluative reactions are presented much less often and exclusively of positive content (best, mind 4, grade). In our opinion, a large number of evaluative reactions in the associative field of 1989 is explained by the research method chosen by the researcher to collect associative material, namely to provide a definition of the proposed stimulus. "Types of education" and "Emotional vector" became similar vectors for both associative fields.
 Lexical associations are a certain concentration of mental, cultural, textual and other knowledge. The reactions detected by free and chain experiments testify to the values and opinions of the language community during the experiment. When comparing associative fields, one can observe the dynamics of changes in the conceptual system of society, because during life a person rethinks or receives new information that affects the nature of the association.
 The results of a free associative experiment can help to design and improve curricula for higher education students and take their interests into account. The results of the comparison of associative fields show first of all the coincidence of nuclear tokens in the structure of the word meaning.
 In the future, conducting psycholinguistic experiments with the word-stimulus EDUCATION will help to improve educational programs, to identify relevant knowledge for the implementation of educational initiatives. This is the perspective of our study. The influence of communication technologies on language consciousness in the educational environment. Therefore, we also consider it relevant to conduct research to compare the results of experiments conducted in the form of online and offline.

A New Technique to Increase Self-Esteem by Reading and Mental Visualization: The Lexical Association Technique

Introduction: Self-esteem is central to human well-being, quality of life, and mental health. Therefore, it is important to propose preventive and therapeutic techniques to deal with decline in self-esteem. Different interventions have been proposed and their efficacies have been validated. However, they present certain constraints such as a cognitive and/or emotional cost, which limit some clinical applications. Method: Based on contributions from cognitive, social, and clinical psychology, we propose to test the efficacy of a new technique for self-esteem enhancement using brief lexical associations and mental visualization (six sessions of five minutes) for a stimulation of episodic and semantic self-perceptions. Results: Comparing the Lexical Association Technique to a control technique and using a double-blind pre-post design, two studies show the efficacy of this new technique on global self-esteem in two samples of students (nStudy1 = 36; nStudy2 = 89), as well as a sustained effect up to 5 days after the technique is stopped. Discussion: The mechanisms underlying the efficacy of this technique are discussed. Further studies are needed to precise the clinical applicability of the Lexical Association Technique on patients.

Lexical Associations in the L1 Turkish Mental Lexicon: Can L1 Lexical Intuition and a Representative Corpus Guide Teaching of Turkish as a Foreign Language Materials?

Studies to date using corpus linguistic and psycholinguistic approaches have investigated the collocational links in both the L1 and L2 brain from different angles. They have attempted to test the role collocations play in the mental lexicon and question how corpus data can guide us in our investigations. However, there have been almost no attempts to explore the relationship between the L1 Turkish users’ subjective judgements of collocational use (frequency) and the association strength of collocational items in Turkish evidenced in representative corpora. This research, mainly with a corpuslinguistic approach, aims to (a) detect the possible relationship between the collocational links in the L1 Turkish mental lexicon and the collocational frequency profiles on the TNC (Turkish National Corpus) (b) and thus question if L1 speaker intuitions (familiarity) regarding collocational frequency and the frequency profiles of the items, as evidenced through representative corpora, can/should be exploited in an attempt to create target vocabulary lists or vocabulary teaching materials for teaching Turkish as a foreign language. The results indicate that the collocational links in L1 Turkish users’ mental lexicon seem to resemble the lexical associations represented in the TNC. To be more precise, higher Delta-P (1 > word 2) scores are associated with stronger collocational intuitions. Additionally, the Delta-P (1 > word 2) as well as the CEFR1 level are significant predictors of subjective judgements for frequent collocational use. The results have been discussed in light of the psycholinguistic research highlighting collocational processing, and some pedagogical conclusions have been drawn. 

The Role of Predictability During Negation Processing in Truth-Value Judgment Tasks

In experiments investigating the processing of true and false negative sentences, it is often reported that polarity interacts with truth-value, in the sense that true sentences lead to faster reaction times than false sentences in affirmative conditions whereas the same does not hold for negative sentences. Various reasons for this difference between affirmative and negative sentences have been discussed in the literature (e.g., lexical associations, predictability, ease of comparing sentence and world). In the present study, we excluded lexical associations as a potential influencing factor. Participants saw artificial visual worlds (e.g., a white square and a black circle) and corresponding sentences (i.e., “The square/circle is (not) white”). The results showed a clear effect of truth-value for affirmative sentences (true faster than false) but not for negative sentences. This result implies that the well-known truth-value-by-polarity interaction cannot solely be due to long-term lexical associations. Additional predictability manipulations allowed us to also rule out an explanatory account that attributes the missing truth-value effect for negative sentences to low predictability. We also discuss the viability of an informativeness account.

De la contrainte à la forme ?

In the field of aesthetics, the expression formal constraint is most often used in non-problematic ways by critics, who tend to consider it as a convenient and even redundant category, whose constitution need not be questioned. On the contrary, this paper will closely examine the lexical and conceptual association of constraint and form, to try to understand under what conditions and modalities constraints can give rise to aesthetic forms.

Retrieval (N400) and integration (P600) in expectation-based comprehension.

Expectation-based theories of language processing, such as Surprisal theory, are supported by evidence of anticipation effects in both behavioural and neurophysiological measures. Online measures of language processing, however, are known to be influenced by factors such as lexical association that are distinct from—but often confounded with—expectancy. An open question therefore is whether a specific locus of expectancy related effects can be established in neural and behavioral processing correlates. We address this question in an event-related potential experiment and a self-paced reading experiment that independently cross expectancy and lexical association in a context manipulation design. We find that event-related potentials reveal that the N400 is sensitive to both expectancy and lexical association, while the P600 is modulated only by expectancy. Reading times, in turn, reveal effects of both association and expectancy in the first spillover region, followed by effects of expectancy alone in the second spillover region. These findings are consistent with the Retrieval-Integration account of language comprehension, according to which lexical retrieval (N400) is facilitated for words that are both expected and associated, whereas integration difficulty (P600) will be greater for unexpected words alone. Further, an exploratory analysis suggests that the P600 is not merely sensitive to expectancy violations, but rather, that there is a continuous relation. Taken together, these results suggest that the P600, like reading times, may reflect a meaning-centric notion of Surprisal in language comprehension.

An ERP Study on Attraction Effects in Advanced L2 Learners.

In English, the rule of agreement is quite simple: verbs must agree with their subject head nouns in terms of number features. Despite this simplicity, agreement processing is always interrupted when the subject phrase of the sentence “The key to the cabinets is on the table,” contains two nouns with a mismatch in number features commonly known as attraction effects. This study used event-related potentials (ERPs) to examine whether late advanced second language (L2) learners can acquire native-like sensitivity of attraction effects. The results revealed that L2 learners showed ERP patterns qualitatively similar to native English speakers: ungrammatical verbs following singular attractors elicited a P600 effect relative to their grammatical counterparts, whereas this positivity was replaced by an N400 effect when plural attractors intervened between the subject head nouns and the verbs. Of particular interest, given that, compared to native speakers, the amplitude of the P600 effect elicited by L2 learners was smaller, there was a quantitative difference between native speakers and L2 learners. We proposed that these two ERP components represented the two processing routes of agreement: the P600 effect indexed a full, combinatorial process, which parsed morphosyntactic features between agreement controllers and targets, whereas the N400 effect indexed a shallow, heuristic process, which evaluated lexical associations between agreeing elements. Moreover, similar to native speakers, advanced L2 learners showed an asymmetrical pattern of attraction effects, in that plural attractors were interfered with ungrammaticality at disagreeing verbs, but they did not cause any difficulties in processing grammatical sentences at agreeing verbs. The overall results suggested that compared to native processing, L2 processing of complex agreement with attractor interference was shallower and therefore late advanced L2 learners could not achieve native-like attraction effects.

Modeling Textual Cohesion for Event Extraction

Event extraction systems typically locate the role fillers for an event by analyzing sentences in isolation and identifying each role filler independently of the others. We argue that more accurate event extraction requires a view of the larger context to decide whether an entity is related to a relevant event. We propose a bottom-up approach to event extraction that initially identifies candidate role fillers independently and then uses that information as well as discourse properties to model textual cohesion. The novel component of the architecture is a sequentially structured sentence classifier that identifies event-related story contexts. The sentence classifier uses lexical associations and discourse relations across sentences, as well as domain-specific distributions of candidate role fillers within and across sentences. This approach yields state-of-the-art performance on the MUC-4 data set, achieving substantially higher precision than previous systems.

A statistical and lexical study ofClavis Prophetarum[Key of the Prophets] by António Vieira, S.J. (1608–97)

AbstractWe applied the resources created in NooJ software, developed by Max Silberstein, to the third book of the Clavis Prophetarum [Key of the Prophets], by the 17th century Father António Vieira S.J. (1608–97), in the Latin version and its Portuguese translation by Espírito Santo, 2000, Critical Edition of the Clavis Prophetarum / Chave dos Profetas: Livro III by António Vieira. Lisboa: Biblioteca Nacional. We have carried out a statistical and lexical study that attempts to overcome the mere counting of forms, highlighting the lexical richness of texts, forms with higher frequency, new forms, and lexical associations. We created Nooj dictionaries for specific purposes and local grammars that allowed an analysis of the Latin text and its translation into Portuguese, going beyond mere counts of forms and highlighting the vocabulary richness of both texts, the most frequent forms, the new forms, and the lexical associations. This contrastive analysis has shown, for example, that, contrary to what one might expect, the Latin lexicon of the Latin original text is richer than the Portuguese translation.

Smart City Data Sensing during COVID-19: Public Reaction to Accelerating Digital Transformation.

The article presents the results of the analysis of the adaptation of metropolis IT technologies to solve operational problems in extreme conditions during the COVID-19 pandemic. The material for the study was Russian-language data from social networks, microblogging, blogs, instant messengers, forums, reviews, video hosting services, thematic portals, online media, print media and TV related to the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in Russia. The data were collected between 1 March 2020 and 1 June 2020. The database size includes 85,493,717 characters. To analyze the content of social media, a multimodal approach was used involving neural network technologies, text analysis, sentiment-analysis and analysis of lexical associations. The transformation of old digital services and applications, as well as the emergence of new ones were analyzed in terms of the perception of digital communications by actors.

The Intertextual Rhetoric of the Apostrophe to Zion (11QPsa XXII, 1–15)

Abstract Considerable agreement has existed concerning the intertextual relations between the Apostrophe to Zion (Ap Zion) and Third Isaiah. But I propose to reread Ap Zion as a literary and theological response to the most famous lament over Zion, exemplified in the book of Lamentations. The common acrostic feature and leitmotif of Zion shared by Lamentations and Ap Zion clearly reflect the latter’s deliberate attention to the former. In this reconsideration, I argue that the much-acclaimed intertextuality between Ap Zion and Third Isaiah is the consequence of the pre-established Isaianic inner-biblical allusion (Second Isaiah) to Lamentations. To expand on this proposal, the paper will explore the multilayered intertextuality between Lam 2, Isa 49, and Ap Zion through classifying their lexical, thematic, structural, and theological associations.

РЕПРЕЗЕНТАЦІЯ КОНЦЕПТУ WAR В АНГЛОМОВНІЙ ЛІНГВОКУЛЬТУРІ

The features of verbalization and structuring of the concept war on the material of the artistic discourse in English language culture are revealed in the article. It is found out how the conceptualization has led to its development. At the beginning of the 20th century, international relations have dramatically changed in the world. There is a risk that people of different worldviews may interpret certain military notions (in particular the linguocultural concept WAR) otherwise. The solution of this complex problem of ambiguity must be sought in the etymology of the linguocultural concept WAR and its lexical field. The concept of WAR is vividly expressed in the English-language picture of the world, and its expression has a deep national and cultural specificity. Subject-image, conceptual and value components can be distinguished in the structure of this concept. The semantic field of the WAR concept consists of the kernel (the "State of Armed Conflict" microfield) and the semantic periphery objectified by the "Situation of Antagonism" and "Art of War" microfields. The main lexical verbalizers of the WAR concept were also identified. These include the war token itself, as well as the corresponding synonymous tokens and lexical associations. A new understanding of the concept of WAR is observed within the English-language artistic and journalistic discourses, which is realized in the system of conceptual metaphors. The concept war in the artistic discourse of participants is a multidimensional mental formation, very complex, encompassing radically opposite meanings. It is clear that the sense of the concept includes components that are associated with death, agitation, pain, horror, depression and more. At the same time the structure of the concept includes extremely positive meanings that can be verbalized in such words as life, love, honesty, help, heroism. For each war, it carries something personal, but always war is when the heart aches.

Constructional associations trump lexical associations in processing valency coercion

Abstract The paper investigates the interaction of lexical and constructional meaning in valency coercion processing, and the effect of (in)compatibility between verb and construction for its successful resolution (Perek, Florent & Martin Hilpert. 2014. Constructional tolerance: Cross-linguistic differences in the acceptability of non-conventional uses of constructions. Constructions and Frames 6(2). 266–304; Yoon, Soyeon. 2019. Coercion and language change: A usage-based approach. Linguistic Research 36(1). 111–139). We present an online experiment on valency coercion (the first one on Italian), by means of a semantic priming protocol inspired by Johnson, Matt A. & Adele E. Goldberg. 2013. Evidence for automatic accessing of constructional meaning: Jabberwocky sentences prime associated verbs. Language & Cognitive Processes 28(10). 1439–1452. We test priming effects with a lexical decision task which presents different target verbs preceded by coercion instances of four Italian argument structure constructions, which serve as primes. Three types of verbs serve as target: lexical associate (LA), construction associate (CA), and unrelated (U) verbs. LAs are semantically similar to the main verb of the prime sentence, whereas CAs are prototypical verbs associated to the prime construction. U verbs serve as a mean of comparison for the two categories of interest. Results confirm that processing of valency coercion requires an integration of both lexical and constructional semantics. Moreover, compatibility is also found to influence coercion resolution. Specifically, constructional priming is primary and independent from compatibility. A secondary priming effect for LA verbs is also found, which suggests a contribution of lexical semantics in coercion resolution – especially for low-compatibility coercion coinages.

Electrophysiology reflects the influence of discourse context on auditory semantic processing in bilinguals.

Most language experiences take place at the level of multiple sentences. However, previous studies of second language (L2) comprehension have typically focused on lexical- and sentence-level processing. Our study addresses this gap by examining auditory discourse comprehension in 32 English/French bilinguals. We tested the prediction of the noisy channel model (Futrell & Gibson, 2017) that bilinguals will rely more on top-down, discourse-level cues in L2 because these are common across languages, as opposed to the language-specific associations of an often weaker L2. We further hypothesized that these effects could be influenced by individual differences, such that participants with lower L2 proficiency or working memory would have more difficulty building and maintaining discourse context. Specifically, we measured the N400 response, an index of automatic semantic processing. Participants heard three-sentence stories with prime and target words in the final sentence whose lexical association was manipulated, as was the congruence of the target with the preceding discourse. Overall, our results support the noisy channel model of language comprehension in a sample of highly proficient bilinguals. We observed larger N400 effects of discourse congruence than lexical association, and the difference between these 2 conditions was greater in the L2 than in the L1. Additionally, the effects of lexical association were limited to the L1 and predicted by individual differences in language dominance but not working memory. These findings suggest that bilinguals do indeed make greater use of top-down, supralinguistic information in their L2 compared with their L1. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Semantic association effect and its neural mechanism from the perspective of lexical co-occurrence frequency

<p id="C2">Word recognition and memory are influenced by the semantic associative relationship between words. The free association method has some limitations in establishing lexical semantic associations. Researchers have proposed a new method called co-occurrence association. This study analyzed the semantic association effect and its neural mechanism from the perspective of lexical co-occurrence frequency. The results showed that the number and intensity of semantic association influenced the processing of words. Words with a large number of semantic associations led to an increase in the amplitude of P200 and a decrease in the amplitude of N400. The brain regions involved in semantic association processing are mainly the superior frontal gyrus and the left medial temporal lobe. Future research should discuss the differences between free and co-occurrence association in establishing a semantic association. Based on co-occurrence association, the behavioral characteristics and neural mechanisms of semantic association are further explored. Research on the semantic association effect and neural mechanism from the perspective of co-occurrence association is recommended.

Discovery Engine for Finding Hidden Connections in Prose Comprehension from References

Reading is one of the essential practices of modern human learning. Comprehending prose text simply from the available text is particularly challenging as in general the comprehension of prose requires the use of external knowledge or references. Although the processes of reading comprehension have been widely studied in the field of psychology, no algorithm level models for comprehension have yet to be developed. This paper has proposed a comprehension engine consisting of knowledge induction which connects the knowledge space by augmenting associations within it. The connections are achieved through the automatic incremental reading of external references and the capturing of high familiarity knowledge associations between prose concepts. The Ontology Engine is used to find lexical knowledge associations amongst concept pairs, with the objective being to obtain a knowledge space graph with a single giant component to establish a base model for prose comprehension. The comprehension engine is evaluated through experiments with various selected prose texts. Akin to human readers, it could mine reference texts from modern knowledge corpuses such as Wikipedia and WordNet. The results demonstrate the potential efficiency of using the comprehension engine that enhances the quality of reading comprehension in addition to reducing reading time. This comprehension engine is considered the first algorithm level model for comprehension compared with existing works.

On lexical uniqueness and lexicon organization in native Spanish and Greek SFL learners

The present paper examines lexicon organization and lexical uniqueness through a lexical availability task. Previous research has concentrated on exploring via word association tests how learners organize their L1 and L2 lexicons. Additionally, the closeness between the native and the L2 lexicons are also object of analysis in research. Lexical uniqueness has also been used as a measure to determine “nativeness”. In the present study, we had two groups of Greek B1 and C1 level learners of Spanish FL answer a lexical availability task and compared their results with those of a group of native speakers. We found that proficiency level is crucial in the determination of lexical uniqueness and lexicon organization via lexical associations obtained with a lexical availability task. Furthermore, our results revealed that thematic field is a relevant factor in speakers’ associative behaviour and lexicon organization. Results are discussed in light of previous research findings and pedagogical implications are proposed