Lexical Association Research Articles

No semantic illusions in the “Semantic P600” phenomenon: ERP evidence from Mandarin Chinese

Recent observations of unexpected ERP responses to grammatically well-formed role-reversed sentences (the “Semantic P600” phenomenon) have been taken to bear directly on questions about the architecture of the language processing system. This paper evaluates two central pieces of evidence for accounts that propose a syntax-independent semantic composition mechanism, namely the presence of P600 effects and the absence of N400 effects in role-reversed sentences. Experiment 1 examined the relative contribution of the presence of an animacy violation and the semantic relations between words (‘combinability’) to the ERP responses to role-reversed sentences. Experiment 2 examined the ERP responses to role-reversed sentences that are fully animacy-congruous. Results from the two experiments showed that animacy-violated sentences with no plausible non-surface interpretation elicited the same P600 effect as both types of role-reversed sentences; additionally, semantically anomalous target words elicited no N400 effects when they were strongly semantically related to the preceding words, regardless of the presence of animacy violations. Taken together, these findings suggest that the presence of P600s to role-reversed sentences can be attributed to the implausibility of the sentence meaning, and the absence of N400 effects is due to a combination of weak contextual constraints and strong lexical association. The presence of a plausible non-surface interpretation and animacy violations made no unique contribution to the ERP response profiles. Hence, existing ERP findings are compatible with the long-held assumption that online semantic composition is dependent on surface syntax and do not constitute evidence for a syntax-independent semantic composition mechanism.

Hemispheric asymmetry in interpreting novel literal language: An event-related potential study

Conceptual mapping, or making connections between conceptual structure in different domains, is a key mechanism of creative language use whose neural underpinnings are not well understood. The present study involved the combination of event-related potentials (ERPs) with the divided visual field presentation technique to explore the relative contributions of the left and right hemispheres (LH and RH) to the construction of novel meanings in fully literal language. Electroencephalogram (EEG) was recorded as healthy adults read sentences that supported either a conventional literal reading of the sentence final word (“His main method of transportation is a boat,”), or a novel literal meaning derived from conceptual mapping (“The clever boys used a cardboard box as a boat,”). The novel and conventional conditions were matched for cloze probability (a measure of predictability based on the sentence context), lexical association between the sentence frame and the final word (using latent semantic analysis), and other factors known to influence ERPs to language stimuli. To compare effects of novelty to previously reported effects of predictability, a high-cloze conventional condition (“The only way to get around Venice is to navigate the canals in a boat.”) was included. ERPs were time-locked to sentence final words (“boat”) presented in either the left visual field, to preferentially stimulate the RH (lvf/RH), or in the right visual field, targeting the LH (rvf/LH). The N400 component of the ERP was affected by predictability in both presentation sides, but by novelty only in rvf/LH. Two distinct late frontal positive effects were observed. Word predictability modulated a frontal positivity with a LH focus, but semantic novelty modulated a frontal positivity focused in RH. This is the first demonstration that the frontal positivity may be composed of multiple overlapping components with distinct functional and anatomical characteristics. Extending contemporary accounts of the frontal positivity, we suggest that both frontal positivities reflect learning mechanisms involving prediction based on statistical regularities in language (LH) and world knowledge (RH).

Top-down influence in young children's linguistic ambiguity resolution.

Language is rife with ambiguity. Do children and adults meet this challenge in similar ways? Recent work suggests that while adults resolve syntactic ambiguities by integrating a variety of cues, children are less sensitive to top-down evidence. We test whether this top-down insensitivity is specific to syntax or a general feature of children's linguistic ambiguity resolution by evaluating whether children rely largely or completely on lexical associations to resolve lexical ambiguities (e.g., the word swing primes the baseball meaning of bat) or additionally integrate top-down global plausibility. Using a picture choice task, we compared 4-year-olds' ability to resolve polysemes and homophones with a Bayesian algorithm reliant purely on lexical associations and found that the algorithm's power to predict children's choices was limited. A 2nd experiment confirmed that children override associations and integrate top-down plausibility. We discuss this with regard to models of psycholinguistic development.

Effects of working memory span on processing of lexical associations and congruence in spoken discourse

The goal of this study was to determine whether variability in working memory (WM) capacity and cognitive control affects the processing of global discourse congruence and local associations among words when participants listened to short discourse passages. The final, critical word of each passage was either associated or unassociated with a preceding prime word (e.g., “He was not prepared for the fame and fortune/praise”). These critical words were also either congruent or incongruent with respect to the preceding discourse context [e.g., a context in which a prestigious prize was won (congruent) or in which the protagonist had been arrested (incongruent)]. We used multiple regression to assess the unique contribution of suppression ability (our measure of cognitive control) and WM capacity on the amplitude of individual N400 effects of congruence and association. Our measure of suppression ability did not predict the size of the N400 effects of association or congruence. However, as expected, the results showed that high WM capacity individuals were less sensitive to the presence of lexical associations (showed smaller N400 association effects). Furthermore, differences in WM capacity were related to differences in the topographic distribution of the N400 effects of discourse congruence. The topographic differences in the global congruence effects indicate differences in the underlying neural generators of the N400 effects, as a function of WM. This suggests additional, or at a minimum, distinct, processing on the part of higher capacity individuals when tasked with integrating incoming words into the developing discourse representation.

Angleški naklonski glagoli in polnopomenski glagoli v glagolskih besednih zvezah z naklonskimi glagoli v »splošnih prodajnih pogojih«

Članek predstavlja izsledke korpusne analize pojavnosti angleških naklonskih glagolov v glagolskih besednih zvezah ter polnopomenskih glagolov, ki se navezujejo na naklonske glagole v ‘splošnih prodajnih pogojih’. ‘Splošni prodajni pogoji’ so pravno zavezujoči dokumenti s področja prodaje, ki določajo obveznosti in pravice prodajalcev in kupcev pri transakciji blaga za plačilo. Z našo raziskavo smo ugotovili, da so najpogostejši naklonski glagoli v teh dokumentih glagoli shall, will, may, must in can ter, da sta glagolski besedni zvezi ‚modal+infinitive’ and ‘modal+be+past participle’ prisotni najpogosteje. Nadalje, analiza je razkrila prisotnost kar 718 različnih polnopomenskih glagolov, ki označujejo dejanja, stanja in pogoje, ki so povezani s prodajo in nakupom blaga. Izsledki naše analize so skladni z namenom in značilnostmi teh dokumentov. Raziskava je primer, kako se pomen in značilnosti pravnega besedilnega žanra s področja komerciale kažejo skozi določeno slovnično kategorijo, t.j. skozi naklonske ter polnopomenske glagole.

Query Representation through Lexical Association for Information Retrieval

A user query for information retrieval (IR) applications may not contain the most appropriate terms (words) as actually intended by the user. This is usually referred to as the term mismatch problem and is a crucial research issue in IR. Using the notion of relevance, we provide a comprehensive theoretical analysis of a parametric query vector, which is assumed to represent the information needs of the user. A lexical association function has been derived analytically using the system relevance criteria. The derivation is further justified using an empirical evidence from the user relevance criteria. Such analytical derivation as presented in this paper provides a proper mathematical framework to the query expansion techniques, which have largely been heuristic in the existing literature. By using the generalized retrieval framework, the proposed query representation model is equally applicable to the vector space model (VSM), Okapi best matching 25 (Okapi BM25), and Language Model (LM). Experiments over various data sets from TREC show that the proposed query representation gives statistically significant improvements over the baseline Okapi BM25 and LM as well as other well-known global query expansion techniques. Empirical results along with the theoretical foundations of the query representation confirm that the proposed model extends the state of the art in global query expansion.

A Corpus-Based Analysis of Lexical Salience and Association in ESL Writing

The current study reviews the concordancer as a vocabulary reference tool for the ESL writing instruction and evaluation of ESL writing quality. Corpus evidence, as studies of corpus-based language learning have argued, can be used to identify typical and atypical usages of vocabulary. The evidence also suggests what words are typically used in the target language writing contexts. Few studies analyzed the actual writing sample text data through empirical research methodology to confirm the arguments. Within a quasi-experimental design, then, the current study analyzes and evaluates the ESL writing sample texts through the corpus linguistic text analysis method and discusses the results of the analysis.

Cognitive control influences the use of meaning relations during spoken sentence comprehension

The aim of this study was to investigate individual differences in the influence of lexical association on word recognition during auditory sentence processing. Lexical associations among individual words (e.g. salt and pepper) represent one type of semantic information that is available during the processing of words in context. We predicted that individuals would vary in their sensitivity to this type of local context as a function of suppression ability and working-memory capacity. Lexical association was manipulated in auditory sentence contexts, and multiple regression analyses were employed to examine the relation between individuals’ brain responses to meaning relations in sentences and measures of working-memory capacity, cognitive control and vocabulary. Lexical association influenced the processing of words that were embedded in sentences and also showed a great deal of individual variability. Specifically, suppression ability emerged as a significant predictor of sensitivity to lexical association, such that individuals who performed poorly on our measure of suppression ability (the Stroop task), compared to those who performed well, showed larger N400 effects of lexical association.

Business metaphors: A case study of Peugeot advertisements in different languages

1 IntroductionThe issue of business metaphor lies at the heart of al stakeholders' interest, people studying or working in an international business communication setting, who need to understand the intrinsic relation between language and culture, applied to the business language genre. Moreover, language educators and specialists working in cross-cultural communications planning and management also need to grasp the far-reaching implications of such knowledge for business success. Business English language, as a genre in itself has been widely analysed and debated in specialist literature, as extensive research has been carried out in the field of teaching English for Specific Purposes, specialists having centred on finding the best methods to teach students how to use the business language correctly and appropriately, with clear focus on the notional-functional aspect. However, less research has been made in the intrinsic nature of business English (Nelson 2000).As opposed to General English, Business English features some characteristics (Popescu 2007, 2011) such as:1. a certain fixedness of lexical associations, i.e. less free lexical combinations;2. a certain degree of courtesy and formality which are to be found in the forms and frameworks of conventionalised transactions;3. sociolinguistic and pragmatic orientation, by which we mean that the language used by business people display sensitivity to subject matter, the occasion, shared knowledge and social relations holding between companies and communicators (Pickett 1986:2);4. metaphoric load: the language used in business materials may be characterised by what we could call metaphoric load, i.e. the business language borrows words, phrases, idioms from the general usage and applies them to the specific contexts of the place of work: abort a product, rat race, throw it at the wall and see if it sticks, etc;5. marked idiomaticity: e.g. Instead, rather than undercutting television networks and producers, Joost might them new juice. (= give vitality). It is particularly the two latter traits that the present project will focus on.Based on former research and literature review, it can be uphold that that cognitive metaphors are instantiations of cultural categories manifested in the language spoken by the community that shares a common set of characteristics within a given cultural matrix. Thus, we uphold the idea that metaphors clustered in cognitive categories account for cultural categories, both in terms of conceptual universals and variants, resulting in a complex mapping of interrelated cross- connections.The starting point for this theory is the seminal work Metaphors we live by, published by Lakoff and Johnson in 1980, whose theory of Conceptual Metaphor has opened endless vistas for subsequent research and debate. The basic assumption of this theory is that metaphor is not only a stylistic feature of language, but thought itself is metaphorical in nature. Thus, the conceptual structure of metaphors rests on correspondences or mappings between conceptual domains. These mappings function in a natural way, as some of them are already existent in the human mind emerging from background cultural knowledge, as different kinds of similarities between concepts.Further on, Kovecses (2005) argues that the cognitive view of metaphor can simultaneously account for both universality and diversity in metaphorical thought. He has proved that certain conceptual metaphors (for anger, time, event structure, and the self) are potentially universal or can be near-universal. He identified these as being simple or primary metaphors and/or complex metaphors based on universal human experiences (p.64). He then explores embedded manifestations of generic level metaphors in order to prove that they are not candidates for near universal metaphors. Besides variations in conceptual metaphors at specific level there are others, such as when a culture uses a set of different source domains for a particular target domain, or when a culture uses a particular source domain for the conceptualization of a set of different target domains (p. …

A novel neighborhood based document smoothing model for information retrieval

In this paper, a novel neighborhood based document smoothing model for information retrieval has been proposed. Lexical association between terms is used to provide a context sensitive indexing weight to the document terms, i.e. the term weights are redistributed based on the lexical association with the context words. A generalized retrieval framework has been presented and it has been shown that the vector space model (VSM), divergence from randomness (DFR), Okapi Best Matching 25 (BM25) and the language model (LM) based retrieval frameworks are special cases of this generalized framework. Being proposed in the generalized retrieval framework, the neighborhood based document smoothing model is applicable to all the indexing models that use the term-document frequency scheme. The proposed smoothing model is as efficient as the baseline retrieval frameworks at runtime. Experiments over the TREC datasets show that the neighborhood based document smoothing model consistently improves the retrieval performance of VSM, DFR, BM25 and LM and the improvements are statistically significant.

‘Brown Sugar’

Advertisements are a key site for gender and language study, many ads constructing relationships between femininity and consumption, and gender relations of a (hetero) sexual nature. In this paper I look in a qualitative way at how two ads in the form of ‘tiny texts’ indirectly index gender inflected with both ethnicity and sexuality. Printed on sugar tubes found in a café in modern urban Botswana, one of these ads shows a black woman, the other a white woman. I adopt a feminist discourse analytic approach to argue that the many lexical and other intertextual associations of ‘sugar’ and ‘sweetness’ in relation to women and sex function to sexualise the black woman (in particular), and that these in turn intertextually sexualise the white woman in ways which index women’s ‘availability’ within an overall discourse of multiculturalism and social liberalisation.

Tracking the changes: vocabulary acquisition in the study abroad context

Empirical evidence suggests that the study abroad experience accelerates growth in global vocabulary knowledge. The exact nature of this growth is rarely reported, however, and there is little documented evidence to indicate whether it is linear or uneven, whether the speed of growth is constant or changing, or whether the study abroad context favours the acquisition of certain aspects of vocabulary knowledge over others. This paper introduces and evaluates a method of tracking incremental changes in vocabulary knowledge during a year of overseas study. Lexical knowledge is elicited through a word association task completed by the learner at six-weekly intervals. Responses to the task, although not formally constrained, are dependent on the conceptual and lexical associations of the test-taker. Data sets are analysed using a word-knowledge framework, and findings reveal a gradual increase in some aspects of vocabulary knowledge (the number of collocations and native speaker-like associations), but striking inconsistencies over time in others (e.g. word form, form-meaning connections, orthography). The study uses an innovative application of an investigative tool to capture stages in the micro-development of the lexicon, thus exposing the complex and multi-dimensional nature of lexical acquisition.

Does discourse congruence influence spoken language comprehension before lexical association? Evidence from event-related potentials

Does discourse congruence influence spoken language comprehension before lexical association? Evidence from event-related potentials

Les collocations en russe : combinabilité et restrictions

The aim of this article, dedicated to questions of compositionality, is to describe, through the study of metaphoric collocations and those involving support verbs, the semantic mechanisms which regulate and generate semi-fixed lexical associations and to bring to light the fact that the semantic characteristics of their constituents have a direct impact on the combinatorial aptitude of the words.

Physical Activities as a Manner of Lifelong Developing Creativity

Problem Statement: “Creativity, specific to human beings, is of a vital importance in the evolution of culture and society, was considered for a long period of time, a quality or a characteristic which, mysteriously, was given to a person” (Horst H. S., 2000, p. 99). Today, as a result of research undertaken, this capacity is recognized as a “personality factor existing in any one of us” (Horst H. S., 2000, p. 99) in a smaller or bigger proportion, according of one's stimulation or practice upon it. Evaluation of creativity can be done through several tests. These tests can determine: the wealth of the lexical fund, the fluidity of lexical association, divergent thinking, visual creativity, etc.). In the present study, in order to demonstrate the hypothesis, we have chosen to evaluate the richness of the lexical fund and fluidity of lexical association, each addressing other dimension of the creative power of individuals and how this creative dimension is influenced by the participation or lack of it at physical activities within physical education lessons. Purpose of Study: This research has started from the hypothesis according to which people who constantly participate at physical activities have a much developed creative capacity, as compared to those who refuse to make effort and have medical exempts. This research has been realised on a group of students involved in the educational process from the Petroleum-Gas University in Ploiesti. Research Methods: Bibliographic study method; observation method; investigation method (conversation, questionnaire, scale Fl, scale Al, etc.); pedagogical experiment method; statistical-mathematic method; graphical method. Findings and Results: Creativity is the recombination of concepts that existed or still exist in the human mind, hidden in the subconscious and which could be activated as needed. Creativity seems to be more developed in people who regularly participate in physical activities. Conclusions and Recommendations: It is widely known that innovation can not exist outside creativity. On a market that can not be satisfied, creativity and intelligence are very rare qualities, sought in all areas of activity, being very well paid. For this reason we believe that the proposed theme is very new in the research field, that it opens new research perspectives and the statement that physical activities stimulate creativity, values it and represent a manner of lifelong training-learning, thus confirming the hypothesis. As a consequence, we recommend the existence of physical education lessons even since kindergarten.

Real-time sentence processing in children with specific language impairment: The contribution of lexicosemantic, syntactic, and world-knowledge information

ABSTRACTThe present study investigated how lexicosemantic information, syntactic information, and world knowledge are integrated in the course of oral sentence processing in children with specific language impairment (SLI) as compared to children with typical language development. A primed lexical-decision task was used where participants had to make a lexical decision on the last word of a sentence. Thirty-nine children were tested: 13 children with SLI, 13 younger children matched on receptive vocabulary, and 13 age-matched children. We manipulated (a) the semantic fit between the target and the prime sentence, (b) the syntactic structure of the prime (syntactic vs. asyntactic), and (c) the lexical association between the target word and the prime. Despite being slower overall, children with SLI showed a significant priming effect. Syntactic information had a similar impact on thematic integration in control children and children with SLI, although the latter were more sensitive to lexicosemantic association and world knowledge than control groups. In addition, children with SLI appeared to use semantic information even when the sentence was asyntactic. The results suggest thematic integration problems in SLI: syntactic and semantic information contribute independently to the thematic structure but are not integrated to generate the emerging higher order representation.

One of Them: Homosexuality and Anarchism in Wilde and Zola

This article considers the figures of the anarchist and the homosexual in Oscar Wilde's play Vera, or the Nihilists (1880) and Émile Zola's novel Paris (1898) and argues that the two are ideologically associated and structurally analogous. In Zola's novel and French and English responses to the Wilde trials, the article identifies a peculiarly fin-de-siècle form of homophobia that denigrates an abstract notion of male homosexuality while denying the authenticity of homosexual tastes as they are professed by real individuals. Both this understanding of homosexuality and the politics of Paris are complicated by the structural and lexical associations the novel sets up between the homosexual and the anarchist, the latter of whom Zola treats sympathetically, if critically. The article goes on to consider how both Vera and Paris situate anarchism and, implicitly or explicitly, homosexuality in opposition to the idea of the family, which represents for Zola the only conceivable foundation of human happiness and social progress, and for Wilde's Nihilists an oppressive structure to be resisted or destroyed. Wilde's play is shown to offer an exploration of the tension between family and politics, sexual or otherwise, and of the possibilities and risks involved in “coming out” as anything other than normal; it thus provides a critique of the heteronormativity and familialism of Zola's ideological project.

Does discourse congruence influence spoken language comprehension before lexical association? Evidence from event-related potentials

The goal of this study was to examine how lexical association and discourse congruence affect the time course of processing incoming words in spoken discourse. In an event-related potential (ERP) norming study, we presented prime-target pairs in the absence of a sentence context to obtain a baseline measure of lexical priming. We observed a typical N400 effect when participants heard critical associated and unassociated target words in word pairs. In a subsequent experiment, we presented the same word pairs in spoken discourse contexts. Target words were always consistent with the local sentence context, but were congruent or not with the global discourse (e.g., “Luckily Ben had picked up some salt and pepper/basil,” preceded by a context in which Ben was preparing marinara sauce (congruent) or dealing with an icy walkway (incongruent). Event-related potential effects of global discourse congruence preceded those of local lexical association, suggesting an early influence of the global discourse representation on lexical processing, even in locally congruent contexts. Furthermore, effects of lexical association occurred earlier in the congruent than incongruent condition. These results differ from those that have been obtained in studies of reading, suggesting that the effects may be unique to spoken word recognition.

On Chinese EFL Learners’ Homonym Processing in Relation to Their Organization of L2 Mental Lexicon

Based on the models of lexical ambiguity resolution and the organization of L2 mental lexicon proposed by previous researchers in recent years, this paper aimed at investigating the correlation between the Chinese EFL learners’ homonym processing in relation to their organization of L2 mental lexicon through cross-modal sentence-priming lexical decision tasks and word association tasks completed by both English major and non-English major students. The results showed that there is a positive correlation between the learners’ organization of L2 mental lexicon and their performance on English homonym processing. Inferential statistic analysis indicates that learners whose L2 mental lexicon is more syntagmatically related can process the English homonym more effectively. They can use contextual cues (semantic and syntactic information) to deactivate inappropriate meanings while low proficiency learners may be slower and less effective in using the sentence context cues needed for disambiguation. Therefore, it has been tentatively indicated that effective spreading activation of a word during reading and listening is important and helpful for learners’ comprehension, and pedagogically suggested that consciously categorizing syntagmatically related words in L2 mental lexicon during teaching and learning new English words can help reconstruct lexical networks so as to correctly and quickly retrieve the words from the mental lexicon in a certain context and better understand the meaning of the whole context in reading and listening.

Predictability and novelty in literal language comprehension: An ERP study

Linguists have suggested that one mechanism for the creative extension of meaning in language involves mapping, or constructing correspondences between conceptual domains. For example, the sentence, “The clever boys used a cardboard box as a boat,” sets up a novel mapping between the concepts cardboard box and boat, while “His main method of transportation is a boat,” relies on a more conventional mapping between method of transportation and boat. To examine the electrophysiological signature of this mapping process, electroencephalogram (EEG) was recorded from the scalp as healthy adults read three sorts of sentences: low-cloze (unpredictable) conventional (“His main method of transportation is a boat,”), low-cloze novel mapp'ing (“The clever boys used a cardboard box as a boat,”), and high-cloze (predictable) conventional (“The only way to get around Venice is to navigate the canals in a boat,”). Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were time-locked to sentence final words. The novel and conventional conditions were matched for cloze probability (a measure of predictability based on the sentence context), lexical association between the sentence frame and the final word (using latent semantic analysis), and other factors known to influence ERPs to language stimuli. The high-cloze conventional control condition was included to compare the effects of mapping conventionality to those of predictability. The N400 component of the ERPs was affected by predictability but not by conventionality. By contrast, a late positivity was affected both by the predictability of sentence final words, being larger for words in low-cloze contexts that made target words difficult to predict, and by novelty, as words in the novel condition elicited a larger positivity 700–900 ms than the same words in the (cloze-matched) conventional condition.