In a conversational system, determining the user’s focus of attention is crucial to the success of the system. Motivated by previous psycholinguistic findings, we are currently examining how eye gaze contributes to automated identification of user attention during conversation. In particular, we are developing techniques that can predict an objects’ activation in a given time frame based on use...

This paper demonstrates vocabulary acquisition from psycholinguistics perspective, and tries to explain the questions through exploring the nature and the organization of the mental lexicon. It finally leads to pedagogical implication and provides suggestions for vocabulary teaching. Effective vocabulary instructions should contains the following characteristics: multiple exposures to instructe...

We report psycholinguistic norms for 305 French idiomatic expressions (Study 1). For each of the idiomatic expressions, the following variables are reported: knowledge, predictability, literality, compositionality, subjective and objective frequency, familiarity, age of acquisition (AoA), and length. In addition, we have collected comprehension times for each idiom (Study 2). The psycholinguist...

Metonymic verbs like start or enjoy often occur with artifact-denoting complements (e.g., The artist started the picture) although semantically they require event-denoting complements (e.g., The artist started painting the picture). In case of artifact-denoting objects, the complement is assumed to be type shifted (or coerced) into an event to conform to the verb's semantic restrictions. Psycho...

UNLABELLED In their Covert Repair Hypothesis, Postma and Kolk (1993) suggest that people who stutter make greater numbers of phonological encoding errors, which are detected during the monitoring of inner speech and repaired, with stuttering-like disfluencies as a consequence. Here, we report an experiment that documents the frequency with which such errors are made. Thirty-two people who stutt...

Empirical data in a scientific inquiry hide many things that cannot be uncovered until the field reaches a certain level of maturity. NASA scientists have collected seismic signals from the lunar surface from the 1970s, but they had to wait 40 years before they finally came to learn, thanks to the state-of-the-art technology of the computer analysis, that the moon has a liquid core like the ear...

Disfluency detection is the task of recognizing structural metadata in spoken utterances. It has been the topic of several studies in computational linguistics and psycholinguistics. This paper motivates the need for automatic disfluency detection in a dialogue system and delineates some of the features that characterize a disfluent utterance.

Why are children better language learners than adults despite being worse at a range of other cognitive tasks? Here, we explore the role of multiword sequences in explaining L1-L2 differences in learning. In particular, we propose that children and adults differ in their reliance on such multiword units (MWUs) in learning, and that this difference affects learning strategies and outcomes, and l...

Interestingly, one can show that in the propositional case, this prediction is equivalent toφ(d)⇔ φ(>), i.e. we only need to consider one possible sentence completion β: the tautology. Importantly however, this is only a (very efficient) technical shortcut and lengthy tautologous pieces are not necessary (see Chemla, 2006). This first part of the theory accounts for the core projection facts: p...

A selective review is presented of empirical evidence from different languages concerning phonological development and reading development in children. It is demonstrated that the development of reading depends on phonological awareness in all languages so far studied. However, because languages vary in syllable structure and in the consistency with which phonology is represented by the orthogr...