It has been suggested that damage to anterior regions of the left hemisphere results in a dissociation in the perception and lexical activation of past-tense forms. Specifically, in a lexical-decision task in which past-tense primes immediately precede present-tense targets, such patients demonstrate significant priming for irregular verbs (spoke-speak), but, unlike control participants, fail t...

This paper specifically addresses the question of polysemy with respect to verbs, and whether or not the sense distinctions that are made in on-line lexical resources such as WordNet are appropriate for computational lexicons. The use of sets of related syntactic frames and verb classes are examined as a means of simplifying the task of defining different senses, and the importance of concrete ...

On some accounts, word-meanings are organized in the human-brain according to their sensory-motor attributes. We tested an alternative hypothesis: word-meanings are neuroanatomically dissociable along abstract conceptual dimensions (entities vs. events). We measured brain activity in the left middle temporal gyrus (lMTG), a brain region that has previously been shown to respond more to verbs th...

Levin’s (1993) study of verb classes is a widely used resource for lexical semantics. In her framework, some verbs, such as give, exhibit no class ambiguity. But other verbs, such as write, have several alternative classes. We extend Levin’s inventory to a simple statistical model of verb class ambiguity. Using this model we are able to generate preferences for ambiguous verbs without the use o...

This study was an analytical account of EFL postgraduate learners’ use of verbs in citing other scholars in their own writing. Particular interest was differing extents of these verbs as categorised by Myer (1997), namely verbs representing statement of scholarly writing, verbs communicating knowledge of scholarly writing, and verbs denoting cognition of scholarly writing, each of which has sub...