Out-Of-Vocabulary (OOV) word utterances are unavoidable in speech recognition since the vocabulary size of a recognition dictionary is limited. And therefore, automatic vocabulary adaptation, which selects unregistered (i.e. OOV) words from relevant documents and registers them to a dictionary with their proper probability values, is an important technique. To improve recognition accuracy, a vo...

Children vary widely in how quickly their vocabularies grow. Can looking at early gesture use in children and parents help us predict this variability? We videotaped 53 English-speaking parent-child dyads in their homes during their daily activities for 90-minutes every four months between child age 14 and 34 months. At 42 months, children were given the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT). ...

Adult semantic networks show small-world structural properties that are believed to support language processing and word retrieval. The focus of this paper is to understand when these properties emerge in lexical development. We believe that they relate to the rate of word acquisition and vocabulary size. To address this, we examine the connectivity patterns of semantic networks of individual c...

Increasing the capacity of recurrent neural networks (RNN) usually involves augmenting the size of the hidden layer, resulting in a significant increase of computational cost. An alternative is the recurrent neural tensor network (RNTN), which increases capacity by employing distinct hidden layer weights for each vocabulary word. However, memory usage scales linearly with vocabulary size, which...

Recent empirical findings in the field of Multilingualism have shown that the mental lexicon of a language learner does not consist of separate entities, but rather of an intertwined system where languages can interact with each other (e.g. Cenoz, 2013; Szubko-Sitarek, 2015). Accordingly, multilingual language learners have been considered differently to second language learners in a growing nu...

Typically developing infants differentiate strong-weak (trochaic) and weak-strong (iambic) stress patterns by 2months of age. The ability to discriminate rhythmical patterns, such as lexical stress, has been argued to facilitate language development, suggesting that a difficulty in discriminating stress might affect early word learning as reflected in vocabulary size. Children with autism spect...

Vocabulary learning is central to reading ability and academic achievement. Vocabulary researchers and educators have viewed its essence as a process of associating the pronunciations and meanings of words in memory, and they have paid little attention to the contribution that spellings might make to vocabulary learning. We review theory and evidence showing that this is a serious oversight. On...

Abstract The measurement of vocabulary size is crucial in applied linguistics research. Although increasing attention has been given to the study Chinese assessment, few reliable and valid tools are available evaluate learners’ receptive size, particularly for teenagers adults. We aim fill this gap by developing LexCH, a quick, free assessment tool that researchers language teachers can readily...