A previous computational model (Joordens & Besner, 1994) has suggested that during lexical access, ambiguous words tend toward a blend state; that is, network activations settle into an incorrect state that is a mixture of the multiple representations of the ambiguous item. It has been suggested that this blend state actually aids lexical decision (LD) for ambiguous items as the blend state cre...

The pervasive ambiguity of language allows sentences that differ in just one lexical item to have rather different inference patterns. This would be no problem if the different lexical items fell into clearly definable and easy to represent classes. But this is not the case. To draw the correct inferences we need to look how the referents of the lexical items in the sentence (or broader context...

The Possible Word Constraint limits the number of lexical candidates considered in speech recognition by stipulating that input should be parsed into a string of lexically viable chunks. For instance, an isolated single consonant is not a feasible word candidate. Any segmentation containing such a chunk is disfavored. Five experiments using the head-turn preference procedure investigated whethe...

[1] Introduction: We would like to argue in this paper, first, that in order to make syntactic tests for scope interpretation of wh-questions in Japanese repeatable, we must take prosody into consideration. Second, we propose that focused wh-phrases come to be associated with some formal feature showing up in a higher functional projection at LF, which is distinct from any version of wh-movemen...

Although the semantic analysis and the grammatical distribution are treated as separate issues in linguistic theories, there is a close interconnection between the two in that the differences in the lexical meanings are often realized at the levels both of the grammatical function and of the lexical collocation. This is the basic assumption utilized when we design and develop Knowledge Base of ...

The Minimalist Grammars (MGs) proposed by Stabler(1997) have tree-shaped derivations (Harkema, 2001b; Michaelis, 2001a). As in categorial grammars, each lexical item is an association between a vocabulary element and complex of features, and so the “yields” or “fringes” of the derivation trees are sequences of these lexical items, and the string parts of these lexical items are reordered in the...

Productive phonological processes including English coronal place assimilation appear to neutralize some lexical contrasts, and thus pose problems for spoken word recognition. The current work explores two questions: (1) can strong spontaneous assimilation create lexical ambiguity, and (2) how do listeners resolve potential lexical ambiguity. Two form priming experiments explored lexical activa...

What is the underlying representation of lexical knowledge? How do we know whether a given string of letters is a word, whereas another string of letters is not? There are two competing models of lexical processing in the literature. The first proposes that we rely on mental lexicons. The second claims there are no mental lexicons; we identify certain items as words based on semantic knowledge....

Since nobody knows how to draw the line between lexical expressions and grammatical devices, it is natural to suppose that, in some sense, the transition from lexicon to grammar is a gradual one. There is a continuum, it seems, bounded by purely lexical items on one end and purely grammatical items on the other, with many expressions lying somewhere between these opposites. This, at any rate, i...