The process of learning a language requires that long-term memory stores the meanings of thousands of words encountered across a variety of situations. These word meanings form a network of associations that, influenced by environmental factors such as word frequency and contextual diversity, cause behavioral effects on measures such as lexical decision and naming times. We investigate the deve...

Sub-categorized arguments introduced by the French preposition pour has been under-studied in previous work, as can be seen from the incompleteness of existing lexical-syntactic resources in that regard. In this paper, we briefly introduce the various types of sub-categorization in pour, which are to be distinguished from occurrences of pour as a discourse connective. We describe how we added a...

Abstract The Language Aptitude Outside the Classroom (LAOC) study investigates factors that contribute to successful English-learning among newly arrived parent-child immigrants. Two types of are considered: cognitive abilities (aptitude measured with LLAMA tests and working memory) contextual-affective (exposure anxiety). Participants pairs Spanish-speaking immigrants in US. Each pair consists...

  This paper investigates the use of ‘lexical bundles’ in two broad corpora of journalistic writing. The aim of this study is to compare the use of lexical bundles in the two domains, one consisted of newspaper articles written in English and published in England and the other one comprised of newspaper articles written in Persian from Iranian publications. For this purpose, the frequency...

Lexical information for South African Bantu languages is not readily available in the form of machine-readable lexicons. At present the availability of lexical information is restricted to a variety of paper dictionaries. These dictionaries display considerable diversity in the organisation and representation of data. In order to proceed towards the development of reusable and suitably standard...

An automatic vigilance hypothesis states that humans preferentially attend to negative stimuli, and this attention to negative valence disrupts the processing of other stimulus properties. Thus, negative words typically elicit slower color naming, word naming, and lexical decisions than neutral or positive words. Larsen, Mercer, and Balota analyzed the stimuli from 32 published studies, and the...

The present study focuses on the relation between a grammatical and a lexical-semantic aspect of verb production. The spontaneous speech of three different populations (normally developing children, agrammatic aphasics, and children with a specific language impairment) has been analyzed with respect to the proportion of finite clauses and the diversity of the produced lexical verbs. The group r...

Introduction For many ESL learners, English prepositions pose a perennial problem, partly because the same lexical item -e.g., the word over -can have a variety of functions (as preposition, noun, adverb, adjective and particle (in verb+particle constructions)) and meanings, and partly because of its diversity in collocational properties. With no generalizations emerging, a common learning stra...

The aim of the article is to present origins regional diversity Brazilian Portuguese. The paper defines diatopic variation and describes influence other languages on Brazilian Portuguese over years, especially at phonetic lexical levels. analyzed are: European Portuguese (the language colonizer), South American indigenous languages, African languages, Arabic language, as wel...