Two theoretical frameworks relevant to proper name learning in ageing make competing predictions about the effects of name frequency. Under an inhibition model, common (high-frequency; HF) proper names will be harder to learn and remember than rare (low-frequency; LF) names, whereas under a transmission deficit model, HF names will have the advantage. Young adults (ages 18-31) and two groups of...

inadequacy of descriptive theories to account for the mechanism of reference led to the emergence of the direct reference theory. this theory, however, has its own problems. if the only component of the meaning of a proper name is its referent, then how is it that the substitution of two co-referent proper names in propositional attitude sentences changes the truth value of the sentence? the pr...

Motivated by the fact that the pronunciation of a name may be influenced by its language of origin, we present methods to improve pronunciation prediction of proper names using word origin information. We train grapheme-to-phoneme (G2P) models on language-specific data sets and interpolate the outputs. We perform experiments on US surnames, a data set where word origin variation occurs naturall...

This chapter is focused on a concept-based query language that permits querying by means of application domain concepts only. The query language has features making it simple and transparent for end-users: a query signature represents an unordered set of application domain concepts; each query operation is completely defined by its result signature and nested operation’s signatures; join predic...

The paper is focused on a concept-based query language that permits querying by using only application domain concepts. The query language has features making it simple and transparent for end-users: each query operation is completely defined by its result signature and nested operation’s signatures; a query’s signature represents an unordered set of application domain concepts; join predicates...

When http: URIs are used to refer to things not on the Web as opposed to web pages, ambiguity arises on the Web. Both humans and machines need to solve the question of what someone is actually referring to when they use a http: URI, especially if that URI can be used both to refer to a web page and a thing that is not on the Web. We propose a multi-tiered solution we called “Web Proper Names” t...

This article describes a finite-state cascade for the extraction of person names in texts in French. We extract these proper names in order to categorize and to cluster texts with them. After a finite-state pre-processing (division of the text in sentences, tagging with dictionaries, etc.), a series of finite-state transducers is applied one after the other to the text and locates left and righ...

This paper discusses several relevant issues concerning the pronunciation of proper names. Although it was motivated by the experience of the ONOMASTICA European project, it reeects a personal view, not constituting, therefore, an oocial document of the project. The major outcome of the project was the production of two important linguistic resources: the set of 11 national pronunciation lexica...

In the framework of the SI-TAL (Integrated Systems for the Automatic Treatment of Language) project the lexical coverage of IWN has been extended by adding, besides two grammatical categories not encoded in EWN (i.e. adjectives and adverbs), a set of proper names which are taken into consideration in this paper. This decision was also due to the high degree of incidence of proper names observed...

A common complaint of older adults is that they have trouble remembering names, even the names of people they know well. Two experiments examining this problem are reported in the present article. Experiment I tested episodic memory for surnames and occupations; older adults and younger adults under divided attention performed less well than did full attention younger adults, but showed no disp...