Children with developmental disabilities such as childhood apraxia of speech (CAS) require repeated intervention sessions with a speech therapist, sometimes extending over several years. Technology-based therapy tools offer the potential to reduce the demanding workload of speech therapists as well as time and cost for families. In response to this need, we have developed “Tabby Talks,” a multi...

The paper deals with current lexical databases that are seen as a basis for broad-coverage general-purpose ontologies. Various extensions and refinements of existing multilingual lexical knowledge bases are proposed with the aim of improving the capabilities of these resources. The main goal lies in the effort to gain a better lexical knowledge representation, which is crucial to coping with th...

We examined the effects of acoustic noise on the relative weightings of different segment types during lexical learning and lexical retrieval. We designed an artificial lexicon consisting of 16 CVCV words, learned as names for blackand-white shapes. For each word (dabo), another word shared the same consonants (dubeI) and a third had the same vowels (gapo). In a 4AFC task, 4 pictures were prese...

This paper reports a case study of acquired surface alexia in Spanish and discusses the most suitable tests to detect this syndrome in a writing system that is very regular for reading at the segmental and supra-segmental levels. Patient MM has surface alexia characterized by quantitatively good performance in reading words and pseudowords; accurate but slow and syllabic reading of words, nonwo...

Improving lexical network’s quality is an important issue in the creation process of these language resources. This can be done by automatically inferring new relations from already existing ones with the purpose of (1) densifying the relations to cover the eventual lack of information and (2) detecting errors. In this paper, we devise such an approach applied to the JeuxDeMots lexical network,...

The naming impairments in Alzheimer's disease (AD) have been attributed to a variety of cognitive processing deficits, including impairments in semantic memory, visual perception, and lexical access. To further understand the underlying biological basis of the naming failures in AD, the present investigation examined the relationship of various classes of naming errors to regional brain measure...

This study investigated the effect of lexical content on sentence production in nonfluent aphasia. Five participants with nonfluent aphasia, four with fluent aphasia, and eight controls were asked to describe pictured events in subject-verb-object sentences. Experiment 1 manipulated speed of lexical retrieval by varying the frequency of sentence nouns. Nonfluent participants' accuracy was consi...

Transcript-based topic segmentation of TV programs faces several difficulties arising from transcription errors, from the presence of potentially short segments and from the limited number of word repetitions to enforce lexical cohesion, i.e., lexical relations that exist within a text to provide a certain unity. To overcome these problems, we extend a probabilistic measure of lexical cohesion ...