Role Of Lexical Frequency Research Articles

Lexical frequency and syntactic variation

Abstract With the rise of exemplar theory, the role of lexical frequency in language variation has been the object of considerable study. Recently, Erker and Guy (2012) extended the analysis of frequency to morphosyntactic variation and examined the role of frequency in variation between null and overt subject personal pronouns (SPPs) in Spanish. Their results suggest that frequency either activates or amplifies the effects of other constraints, such as co-reference. This study extends the study of frequency effects on SPP variation to Mandarin Chinese. Results of multivariate analysis of 6,691 tokens collected from Mandarin speakers in Harbin, China indicate that the effect of frequency on Chinese SPP variation is less than that of other well-established constraints such as co-reference and person and number. The results suggest that the role of frequency in this area of the grammar has been considerably exaggerated. Rather, well-established linguistic constraints provide a better explanation for SPP variation than frequency.

Frequency effects in palatalization: Articulatory evidence from English

Lexical frequency and its influence on speech production have been widely acknowledged across languages and varieties, and frequency effects are so prevalent in various phonological and coarticulatory phenomena. Previous experimental studies have reported that high lexical frequency leads a greater chance of overt coarticulation (for example, more frequent overt palatalization of /d/ in would you (high-frequency) than bad you (low-frequency)). This study tests for articulatory evidence of frequency effects in palatalization by examining palatalized consonants resulted by lexical and post-lexical palatalization in English using ultrasound imaging. Comparisons of tongue contours of palatalized consonants produced by 12 native speakers of American English show that differences in lexical frequency are not directly linked to articulatory gestures. That is, speakers do not necessarily produce a greater degree of palatalization (i.e., tongue contour closer to the palate) in high-frequency words or phrases. Moreover, while most speakers maintain some degree of articulatory contrast in high- vs. low-frequency contexts, the way speakers differentiate palatalized consonants from high- vs. low-frequency items is highly individualized. The findings from this study are in line with individual variation in coarticulation, and merit further exploration in the role of lexical frequency in speech production.Lexical frequency and its influence on speech production have been widely acknowledged across languages and varieties, and frequency effects are so prevalent in various phonological and coarticulatory phenomena. Previous experimental studies have reported that high lexical frequency leads a greater chance of overt coarticulation (for example, more frequent overt palatalization of /d/ in would you (high-frequency) than bad you (low-frequency)). This study tests for articulatory evidence of frequency effects in palatalization by examining palatalized consonants resulted by lexical and post-lexical palatalization in English using ultrasound imaging. Comparisons of tongue contours of palatalized consonants produced by 12 native speakers of American English show that differences in lexical frequency are not directly linked to articulatory gestures. That is, speakers do not necessarily produce a greater degree of palatalization (i.e., tongue contour closer to the palate) in high-frequency words or phrases. More...

The Role of Lexical Frequency in the Acceptability of Syntactic Variants: Evidence From that-Clauses in Polish.

A number of studies report that frequency is a poor predictor of acceptability, in particular at the lower end of the frequency spectrum. Because acceptability judgments provide a substantial part of the empirical foundation of dominant linguistic traditions, understanding how acceptability relates to frequency, one of the most robust predictors of human performance, is crucial. The relation between low frequency and acceptability is investigated using corpus- and behavioral data on the distribution of infinitival and finite that-complements in Polish. Polish verbs exhibit substantial subordination variation and for the majority of verbs taking an infinitival complement, the that-complement occurs with low frequency (<0.66 ipm). These low-frequency that-clauses, in turn, exhibit large differences in how acceptable they are to native speakers. It is argued that acceptability judgments are based on configurations of internally structured exemplars, the acceptability of which cannot reliably be assessed until sufficient evidence about the core component has accumulated.

The Role of Lexical Frequency: A Case of Consonant Insertion in Reduplication

The Role of Lexical Frequency: A Case of Consonant Insertion in Reduplication

The role of lexical frequency in syntactic variability: Variable subject personal pronoun expression in Spanish

Much recent work argues that lexical frequency plays a central explanatory role in linguistic theory, but the status, predicted effects, and methodological treatment of frequency are controversial, especially so in the less-investigated area of syntactic variation. This article addresses these issues in a case study of lexical frequency effects on variable subject personal pronoun (SPP) expression in Spanish. Prior studies of Spanish SPP use revealed significant constraints including formal and semantic properties of the verb, and discourse factors such as a switch reference. These constraints appear to be confirmed in our analysis of 4,916 verbs from a spoken corpus of Spanish, as is a powerful role for lexical frequency. But the frequency effect—best configured as a discrete rather than continuous variable—is complex; statistically, it has no independent direct effect, but operates entirely through interaction with other constraints. All other constraints on SPP use are amplified in high-frequency forms, and some disappear at low frequencies. Frequency thus acts as a 'gatekeeper' and potentiator: above some frequency threshold, significant linguistic constraints on SPP use emerge; below the threshold they do not. We propose that this reflects experience and acquisition: speakers cannot formulate hypotheses about individual lexical items until they have sufficient evidence; the threshold is the level at which speakers have enough experience with a form to do so. These results have important theoretical and methodological implications. They require rich lexical representations incorporating frequency and collocational information. Methodologically they indicate the need for careful quantitative explorations of frequency, because its role as an enabler of other constraints produces unstable statistical results.

Lexical frequency, orthographic information, and first‐language effects on second‐language pronunciation.

In L2 speech learning, lexical frequency may play a facilitative role, whereby perception and production of sounds found in high‐frequency lexical items will develop before the perception and production of the same categories found in low‐frequency lexical items (see Munro and Derwing, 2008). Orthographic information may also facilitate learning by disambiguating L2 sounds (see Erdener and Burnham, 2005), particularly in known words. This study examines the role of lexical frequency, orthographic information, and a learner’s L1 in the development of L2 speech perception and production. Thirty‐eight Mandarin and Slavic participants were asked to repeat a word list comprising ten target English vowels, each embedded in three separate monosyllabic verbs and varying in lexical frequency. Recordings of the L2 productions were obtained under three counter‐balanced conditions: (1) after hearing an auditory prompt accompanied by the written form of the word; (2) after hearing an auditory prompt with no written form provided; and (3) with no auditory prompt but the written form provided. To measure L2 performance, L1 English listeners were asked to identify the vowel they perceived in each recorded item. Results were examined to determine what influence lexical frequency and orthographic information might have had on L2 performance.

The Role of Lexical Frequency in Syntactic Ambiguity Resolution

The role of lexical frequency in syntactic ambiguity resolution was explored in two self-paced reading studies of ambiguous reduced relative clauses. Recent constraint-based models of syntactic ambiguity resolution have proposed that for a reduced relative clause (e.g., “The room searched by the police was .”), both the participle and past tense forms of the ambiguous verb (“searched”) are made available in parallel and that local syntactic and semantic information are used to resolve the ambiguity within a parallel constraint-satisfaction process (MacDonald, Pearlmutter, & Seidenberg, 1994a; Trueswell, Tanenhaus, & Garnsey, 1994). A crucial prediction of these models is that the frequency with which the verb is used as a participle form in the language should affect a reader's ability to consider the relative clause alternative. This prediction was confirmed in two self-paced reading experiments that directly manipulated participle frequency while controlling for the degree of contextual constraint. Implications for constraint-based lexicalist accounts of sentence comprehension are discussed.