The conventionalization of figurative comparisons is one source of lexical evolution. For example, anchor once only meant a device for mooring a ship, but may now be used to describe any source of stability or confidence. Our goal is to understand this process. Following the Career of Metaphor framework, figurative mappings are interpreted through a structure-mapping process, rendering common s...

Evidence from recent psycholinguistic experiments suggests that humans resolve reference incrementally in the presence of constraining visual context. In this paper, we present and evaluate a computational model of human reference resolution that directly builds a semantic interpretation of an utterance without the need for a separate syntactic analysis phase, which typically involves the const...

This work investigates lexical organizat ion of verbs looking at the influence of some linguistic factors on the process of lexical acquisition and use. Among the factors that may play a role in acquisition, in this paper we investigate the influence of polysemy. We examine data obtained from psycholinguistic action naming tasks performed by children and adults (speakers of Brazilian Portuguese...

Psycholinguistic studies suggest a model of human language processing that 1) performs incremental interpretation of spoken utterances or written text, 2) preserves ambiguity by maintaining competing analyses in parallel, and 3) operates within a severely constrained short-term memory store — possibly constrained to as few as four distinct elements. This paper describes a relatively simple mode...

Despite an impressive psycholinguistic effort to explore the way in which two or more languages are represented and controlled, controversy surrounds both issues. During my talk, I will show that problems of language representation and language control are intimately connected and I will propose that data from functional neuroimaging may advance a resolution. Neuroimaging data support the notio...

This work extends the study of Germann et al. (2010) in investigating the lexical organization of verbs. Particularly, we look at the influence of frequency on the process of lexical acquis ition and use. We examine data obtained from psycholinguistic action naming tasks performed by children and adults (speakers of Brazilian Portuguese), and analyze some characteristics of the verbs used by ea...

In speaking and comprehending language, word information is retrieved from memory and combined into larger units (unification). Unification operations take place in parallel at the semantic, syntactic and phonological levels of processing. This article proposes a new framework that connects psycholinguistic models to a neurobiological account of language. According to this proposal the left inf...

This article presents an introduction to psycholinguistic models of speech development. Two specific types of models are addressed: box-and-arrow models and connectionist or neural network models. We review some historical and some current models and discuss recent applications of such models to the management of speech impairment in children. We suggest that there are two ways in which a psych...