This paper investigates a special type of recurrent expressions, lexical bundles, defined as a sequence of three or more words that co-occur frequently in a particular register (Biber et al., 1999). Considering the importance of this group of multi-word sequences in academic prose, this study explores the forms and syntactic structures of three- and four-word bundles in English abstracts writte...

background: considering a few studies on the genetic basis of the cystinuria in the middle east and the population-specific distribution of mutations in the slc3a1 , we tried to find genetic variants in three exons (1, 3, and 8) of slc3a1 . materials and methods: in this study, exons 1, 3, and 8 of slc3a1 gene of 25 unrelated cystinuria patients searched for genetic variations by polymerase cha...

Although the word-frequency effect is one of the most established findings in spoken-word recognition, the precise processing locus of this effect is still a topic of debate. In this study, we used event-related potentials (ERPs) to track the time course of the word-frequency effect. In addition, the neighborhood density effect, which is known to reflect mechanisms involved in word identificati...

One universal feature of human languages is the division between grammatical functors and content words. From a learnability point of view, functors might provide entry points or anchors into the syntactic structure of utterances due to their high frequency. Despite its potentially universal scope, this hypothesis has not yet been tested on typologically different languages and on populations o...

Cognitive models of word production correlate the word frequency effect (i.e., the fact that words which appear with less frequency take longer to produce) with an increased processing cost to activate the whole-word (lexical) phonological representation. We performed functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while subjects produced overt naming responses to photographs of animals and manipu...

Interactive activation accounts of processing have had a broad and deep influence on cognitive psychology, particularly so in the context of computational accounts of reading aloud at the single word level. Here we address the issue of whether such a framework can simulate the joint effects of stimulus quality and word frequency (which have been shown to produce both additive and interactive ef...

Chinese language has quite different characteristic structures from those of English. There are at least word, character, syllable, Initial-Final levels in Chinese, each carrying different levels of information with complicated correlations among them. In this paper, we investigate the dependency of pronunciation variation in conversational Mandarin speech on these different levels under variou...