Lexical Influences Research Articles

Word-Formation in English and German: A Contrastive Analysis

Word building processes are highly common both in English and in German, which in fact share a common history. The two languages make extensive use of various word building processes to enrich their vocabularies. However, despite the certain similarities between the two languages analyzed in this paper, their different paths of evolution, and implicitly the various lexical influences exerted upon them along time, have determined distinctive features when it comes to the process of word building. Therefore, this paper intends to present a contrastive analysis between the various means of word formation in English and German, supported by examples for each of the processes analyzed.

Buszel, Kombajner, and Rels: Fisiak’s 1961 Corpus of English Borrowings in Polish Fifty Five Years Later

Abstract The onset of Professor Jacek Fisiak’s scholarly career is marked by his 1961 Ph.D. dissertation devoted to the lexical influence of English upon Polish. This study, conducted 55 years ago, offers a multilayered analysis and sets the standards of studies on lexical transfer from English to Polish for the years to come. The present article is a tribute to Fisiak’s first scholarly endeavor; it examines the fate of lexical items comprising Fisiak’s corpus in the second decade of the 21st century. More specifically, by conducting searches in the National Corpus of Polish as well as a Google search, the paper checks which borrowings to the Polish language listed and scrutinized by Fisiak gained popularity, which fell out of use, and which underwent semantic changes.

Word Segmentation on English Learning : Phonetic or Lexical?

This study investigates what the key factors are on word segmentation on L2(English) learning: phonetic or lexical? Previous researches on the second language learners' abilities to segment L2 speech in terms of phonetic cues focused on the presence or absence of allophonic cues. For example, presence or absence of aspiration or glottalization determines the location of word boundaries. Not taking into consideration other potential cues such as lexical information or word frequency, it is not clear which cues of linguistic subparts play a main role in word segmentation on English learners. To control potential lexical influences, sequences of non-words are examined with strong phonetic cues across word boundaries. If listeners rely on phonetic cues in segmenting words, non-word sequences should be perceived as real word sequences are perceived. We compare the perception rate of non-words with that of real words. It is hypothesized that different perception rates may be resulted from cues other than phonetic ones. 40 Korean college learners of English participated in an English perception task for the strong phonetic cue of aspiration in both real and non-words. The results show that learners' perception was better on real words than on non-words, suggesting lexical information is contributing to English word segmentation on L2 learning.

Cross-linguistic lexical influence between English and Spanish

This article focuses on the cross-linguistic lexical influence between English and Spanish. We begin by redefining the concept of cross-linguistic lexical influence as the impact that two or more languages have on each other’s vocabulary. We then present a brief chronological survey of Hispanicisms in English and Anglicisms in Spanish, taking theOxford English Dictionary(OED) and theDiccionario de la lengua española(DRAE) as the main sources, and examine some of the factors that affect the patterns of word interchange between these two languages. We argue that the historical and social milieu, mass media, information technology, prevailing attitudes to foreignisms, and the stance taken by dictionaries and official linguistic policy condition which words are borrowed, affect the phonological, orthographic and semantic forms of these borrowings, and impact the degree of their integration in the receiving language. The present study is the first to offer a cross-linguistic (bilateral) perspective on lexical borrowing, a novel approach that is of particular interest given the contrasting philosophical differences governing language policy and lexicographic traditions in English and Spanish. It demonstrates the importance of adopting a comparative approach in the study of lexical influence between languages.

A Thousand Words Are Worth a Picture

In the experiment reported here, approximately 1,000 words were presented to 75 participants in a go/no-go lexical decision task while event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded. Partial correlations were computed for variables selected to reflect orthographic, lexical, and semantic processing, as well as for a novel measure of the visual complexity of written words. Correlations were based on the item-level ERPs at each electrode site and time slice while a false-discovery-rate correction was applied. Early effects of visual complexity were seen around 50 ms after word onset, followed by the earliest sustained orthographic effects around 100 to 150 ms, with the bulk of orthographic and lexical influences arising after 200 ms. Effects of a semantic variable (concreteness) emerged later, at around 300 ms. The overall time course of these ERP effects is in line with hierarchical, cascaded, interactive accounts of word recognition, in which fast feed-forward influences are consolidated by top-down feedback via recurrent processing loops.

Phonetic and lexical influences on changes across the lifespan

The study considers longitudinal studies over several decades within the same individual in order to determine whether phonetic sound change takes place initially in more frequent words. The focus of the analysis was on the vowels of the Christmas Broadcasts by Queen Elisabeth II over several decades and in Alistair Cooke's Letter from America broadcasts. For the first of these, a re-analysis of the phonetic lowering of the vowel in the lexical set TRAP and of tensing of final lax vowel in HAPPY showed no effect of lexical frequency on sound change. The focus of analysis in the second was during a period in which the speaker was shown to acquire General American characteristics after emigrating to the United States from Britain, but then in later life to revert over a 5–10 year period back toward characteristics of British English Received Pronunciation. This reversion is shown to take place at a faster rate in lexically frequent words. While the evidence overall for lexically gradual changes is equivocal, the changes in both speakers are most appropriately modeled as a leveling due to variation in dialect contact: increasingly with middle class speakers for the Queen; decreasingly with American English speakers for Cooke.

Development of cross-language lexical influence

Bilinguals are often not fully monolingual-like in either language. With respect to the lexicon, recent research demonstrates that their naming patterns for common household objects tend to converge on a common pattern for the two languages. The present study investigates the developmental trajectory of naming of common household objects in Dutch/French bilingual and monolingual children. First, we investigated whether bilingual word diversity for a set of household objects is limited by the demands of learning two languages. We found that children lag behind monolingual controls in terms of vocabulary at young ages, but that they catch up later, ending with as diverse a set of names in each language as the monolinguals. Second, we investigated how the convergence in the adult bilingual lexicon manifests itself over the course of development. We found that naming patterns converge with age following a similarity-driven strategy, a pattern also seen for the monolinguals. However, language-specific exceptions to the similarity principle are acknowledged from age 10 onward by monolinguals, but only from age 14 onward in bilinguals. At all ages, bilinguals show more convergence than monolinguals, and the difference is largest for adults. Together our results indicate that acquisition of naming patterns by bilinguals starts off more or less following the early stages of monolinguals, with separate naming patterns in the two languages, but convergence dominates the later developmental path to a larger extent for bilinguals than for monolinguals.

Lexical effects on children's speech processing: individual differences reflected in the Autism-Spectrum Quotient (AQ).

This study was undertaken to examine whether children exhibit the same relationship that adults show between lexical influence on phoneme identification and individual variation on the Autism-Spectrum Quotient (AQ). Data from 62 4- to 7-year-olds with no diagnosis of autism were analyzed. The main task involved identification of the initial sound in pairs of voice-onset time continua with a real word on one end and a nonword on the other (e.g., gift-kift, giss-kiss). Participants were also given the children's version of the AQ and a 2nd instrument related to autistic-like traits, the Social Responsiveness Scale (SRS). The lexical shift was related to the AQ (particularly to its Attention Switching subscale) but not to the SRS. The size of lexical effects on children's speech perception can be predicted by AQ scores but not necessarily by other measures of autism-like traits. The results indicate that speech perception in children manifests individual differences along some general dimension of cognitive style reflected in the AQ, possibly in relation to local/global information processing.

Lexical mediation of phonotactic frequency effects on spoken word recognition: A Granger causality analysis of MRI-constrained MEG/EEG data.

Phonotactic frequency effects play a crucial role in a number of debates over language processing and representation. It is unclear however, whether these effects reflect prelexical sensitivity to phonotactic frequency, or lexical "gang effects" in speech perception. In this paper, we use Granger causality analysis of MR-constrained MEG/EEG data to understand how phonotactic frequency influences neural processing dynamics during auditory lexical decision. Effective connectivity analysis showed weaker feedforward influence from brain regions involved in acoustic-phonetic processing (superior temporal gyrus) to lexical areas (supramarginal gyrus) for high phonotactic frequency words, but stronger top-down lexical influence for the same items. Low entropy nonwords (nonwords judged to closely resemble real words) showed a similar pattern of interactions between brain regions involved in lexical and acoustic-phonetic processing. These results contradict the predictions of a feedforward model of phonotactic frequency facilitation, but support the predictions of a lexically mediated account.

Effects of lexical semantics on acoustic prominence

abstractThis paper explores the representations underlying lexical semantics. In particular, we test whether a word’s meaning can affect a word’s articulation. In Experiment 1, participants produced high-effort (e.g.,yelling) and low-effort (e.g.,chatting) words that are semantically related to articulation, as well as words that are semantically unrelated to articulation (e.g.,kicking). We found that vocal words were produced with greater intensity than non-vocal words. In Experiment 2, we explored the specificity of this effect by investigating how words semantically related to the mouth, but unrelated to vocalization (e.g.,chewing) were articulated. Analyses revealed that mouth words did not differ from controls, and we replicated the vocal effects from Experiment 1, suggesting fine-grain motor activation from lexical semantics. Experiment 3 revealed that the semantics of a verb influences the prosodic intensity of a sentence prior to the onset of the verb. Together, these data suggest aspects of lexical meaning influence prosody, and that motor representations may underlie lexical semantics.

Interface strategies in monolingual and end-state L2 Spanish grammars are not that different.

This study explores syntactic, pragmatic, and lexical influences on adherence to SV and VS orders in native and fluent L2 speakers of Spanish. A judgment task examined 20 native monolingual and 20 longstanding L2 bilingual Spanish speakers' acceptance of SV and VS structures. Seventy-six distinct verbs were tested under a combination of syntactic and pragmatic constraints. Our findings challenge the hypothesis that internal interfaces are acquired more easily than external interfaces (Sorace, 2005, 2011; Sorace and Filiaci, 2006; White, 2006). Additional findings are that (a) bilinguals' judgments are less firm overall than monolinguals' (i.e., monolinguals are more likely to give extreme “yes” or “no” judgments) and (b) individual verbs do not necessarily behave as predicted under standard definitions of unaccusatives and unergatives. Correlations of the patterns found in the data with verb frequencies suggest that usage-based accounts of grammatical knowledge could help provide insight into speakers' knowledge of these constructs.

Border Language

The conceptual framework of this paper is to view Mongolia as a ‘contact zone’ which geographically bridged the gap between two rapidly growing Eurasian empires—Russia and China. It allows a rethinking of the historical and social circumstances that led to the formation of Chinese Pidgin Russian (cpr)1 by highlighting the lexical and grammatical influence of the Mongolian language on contact languages in the China–Russia border area. In particular, it discusses Mongolian language in various encounters in Russian–Chinese interactions, such as the use of Mongolian as mediation language during the initial stage of Qing–Russian diplomatic relations and as lingua franca in caravan trade and border relations between Russia and China, as well as its influence on the formation of Transbaikal dialect (or Zabaikal’skoe narechie), which was widely spoken by Russians in Mongol-speaking colonial frontiers of Russia in Eastern Siberia. Moreover, the paper highlights the Mongolian elements in the first cpr, questioning a common scholarly perception that Kiakhta (or Maimacheng)2 pidgin consisted primarily of Russian and Chinese borrowings. Therefore, unique language hybridisation of these three languages continues to be noticeable in Russia–China trade hubs in Inner Mongolia nowadays, where transborder ethnic and economic contacts between Russia, China and Mongolia are becoming more complicated and diverse.

Phonological and lexical influences on phonological awareness in children with specific language impairment and dyslexia.

Children with dyslexia and/or specific language impairment have marked deficits in phonological processing, putting them at an increased risk for reading deficits. The current study sought to examine the influence of word-level phonological and lexical characteristics on phonological awareness. Children with dyslexia and/or specific language impairment were tested using a phoneme deletion task in which stimuli differed orthogonally by sound similarity and neighborhood density. Phonological and lexical factors influenced performance differently across groups. Children with dyslexia appeared to have a more immature and aberrant pattern of phonological and lexical influence (e.g., favoring sparse and similar features). Children with SLI performed less well than children who were typically developing, but followed a similar pattern of performance (e.g., favoring dense and dissimilar features). Collectively, our results point to both quantitative and qualitative differences in lexical organization and phonological representations in children with SLI and in children with dyslexia.

Lexical Influences on the Sublexical System during Nonword Spelling

Lexical Influences on the Sublexical System during Nonword Spelling

Rules from Words: A Dynamic Neural Basis for a Lawful Linguistic Process

Listeners show a reliable bias towards interpreting speech sounds in a way that conforms to linguistic restrictions (phonotactic constraints) on the permissible patterning of speech sounds in a language. This perceptual bias may enforce and strengthen the systematicity that is the hallmark of phonological representation. Using Granger causality analysis of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)- constrained magnetoencephalography (MEG) and electroencephalography (EEG) data, we tested the differential predictions of rule-based, frequency–based, and top-down lexical influence-driven explanations of processes that produce phonotactic biases in phoneme categorization. Consistent with the top-down lexical influence account, brain regions associated with the representation of words had a stronger influence on acoustic-phonetic regions in trials that led to the identification of phonotactically legal (versus illegal) word-initial consonant clusters. Regions associated with the application of linguistic rules had no such effect. Similarly, high frequency phoneme clusters failed to produce stronger feedforward influences by acoustic-phonetic regions on areas associated with higher linguistic representation. These results suggest that top-down lexical influences contribute to the systematicity of phonological representation.

Lexical Influences on the Sublexical System during Nonword Spelling

We investigated the combined contributions of multiple mechanisms that have been previously indicated to underlie the lexical system’s influence on the spelling of unfamiliar words. In two lexical priming studies we presented lists of words and nonwords aurally for participants to spell only the nonwords. Word primes that rhymed with the target nonwords immediately preceded the nonwords (Experiment 1) or there were two intervening items between the prime word and target nonword (Experiment 2). We found that prime words influenced nonword spellings even across intervening items, suggesting that the presentation of a real word may temporarily re-weight sublexical sound-to-spelling correspondences. Importantly, word neighbors were also found to influence nonword spelling, even in the absence of a prime word. Our data provide evidence of the operation of multiple mechanisms that underlie the lexical system’s influence on the sublexical system during the spelling of unfamiliar words (or nonwords).

Neology, Competing Authenticities, and the Lexicography of Regional Languages: The Case of Breton

Lexicographic practices when dealing with minoritized regional languages demonstrably differ in certain key respects from such practices with “big” languages like English or French. Prominent among such differences is the treatment of onomasiological gaps, common in small languages of limited currency, including the handling of neologisms and deliberate coinages. Here we propose a case study of Breton, the regional Celtic language of northwestern France, whose sociolinguistic history has divided intellectuals into two camps with competing visions of authenticity: a traditionalist camp focused on the dialectal speech of older, rural native speakers who have long filled lexical gaps by resorting to borrowing from French; and a modernist camp of younger, urban, well educated “Neo-Breton” speakers, whose standardized Breton eschews French lexical influence, looking rather to the Celtic roots of Breton, and even the closely related language Welsh, to fill lexical gaps. In this case study we examine a selection of quasi-technical terms in a corpus of twentieth- and twenty-first-century bilingual Breton lexicography. The study examines the issue of terminological variation attested for such words, their lexicological profile, and the extent to which their lexicographic handling reflects a position with respect to competing notions of authenticity.

Lexical category influences in Persian children who stutter

This article explores the effect that words from different lexical categories have on disfluency in 12 Persian children, ten boys and two girls, who stutter. They were aged 7 years 5 months to 10 years 6 months. Words from the participants’ narrative and reading samples (sub-tests of the Reading and Dyslexia Test validated for Persian school-aged children) were categorized as content, function, or content–function, and stuttering-like disfluencies were coded in each speech sample. Content and content–function words were significantly more likely to show stuttering-like disfluencies than function words. The distribution of symptom types over content and content–function words was similar, and differed from the distribution seen in function words. The symptom type analysis also supported the view that whole-word repetitions should not be grouped with other stuttering-like disfluencies.

Lexical Influences on Auditory Streaming

SummaryBiologically salient sounds, including speech, are rarely heard in isolation. Our brains must therefore organize the input arising from multiple sources into separate “streams” and, in the case of speech, map the acoustic components of the target signal onto meaning. These auditory and linguistic processes have traditionally been considered to occur sequentially and are typically studied independently [1, 2]. However, evidence that streaming is modified or reset by attention [3], and that lexical knowledge can affect reports of speech sound identity [4, 5], suggests that higher-level factors may influence perceptual organization. In two experiments, listeners heard sequences of repeated words or acoustically matched nonwords. After several presentations, they reported that the initial /s/ sound in each syllable formed a separate stream; the percept then fluctuated between the streamed and fused states in a bistable manner. In addition to measuring these verbal transformations, we assessed streaming objectively by requiring listeners to detect occasional targets—syllables containing a gap after the initial /s/. Performance was better when streaming caused the syllables preceding the target to transform from words into nonwords, rather than from nonwords into words. Our results show that auditory stream formation is influenced not only by the acoustic properties of speech sounds, but also by higher-level processes involved in recognizing familiar words.

How robust are lexical effects on phonetic categorization?

Previous work has shown that lexical knowledge (whether a stimulus token makes a word or nonword) influences phonetic categorization [e.g., Fox (1984)]. Recent work in our lab examined the effect of lexical influences on speech perception using two tasks (phoneme identification and AXB discrimination) and uncovered some unexpected findings. Listeners who performed identification first showed a robust effect of lexical status on phonetic categorization. However, listeners who performed the discrimination task first showed no effect of lexical status. Since prior research has shown that the lexical effect is fairly robust [see Pitt and Samuel (1993)], the finding that the influence of lexical status can be eliminated by first placing listeners in an AXB discrimination task is the focus of the current research. The AXB task may focus attention on the prelexical, phonetic representation and differences within each phonetic category. This, in turn, eliminates the influence of higher level processes on phonetic perception in the identification task. The present study seeks to replicate this finding and investigate whether other lexical influences on perception (the influence of lexical neighborhood) are also altered by experience with AXB discrimination. Results are discussed in terms of the flow of information during phonetic perception and word recognition.