The notion of expectancy grammar as a key to understanding the nature of psychologically real processes that underlie language use is introduced by Oller (1979). A central issue in this notion is that expectancy generating systems are constructed and modified in the course of language acquisition. Thus, one of the characteristics of language proficiency is that it consists of such an expectancy...

the present study aims at investigating the effect of different levels of lexical collocational density on efl learners’ reading comprehension. eighty sophomore students with different levels of proficiency studying at  zand institute of higher education in shiraz, iran were chosen from among eighty five learners based on their score distribution on a reduced toefl test constructed by education...

This paper investigates interactions between collocational properties and methods for organizing them into features for machine learning. In experiments performing an event categorization task, Wiebe et al. (1997a) found that different organizations are best for different properties. This paper presents a statistical analysis of the results across different machine learning algorithms. In the e...

Words are typically encountered in the context of a sentence. Recent studies suggest that the contexts in which a word typically appears can a!ect the way it is recognized in isolation. We distinguish two types of context: collocational, involving speci"c lexical items, and syntactic, involving abstract syntactic structures. We investigate the e!ects of syntactic context using the distribution ...

The present study aims at investigating the effect of different levels of lexical collocational density on EFL learners’ reading comprehension. Eighty sophomore students with different levels of proficiency studying at  Zand Institute of Higher Education in Shiraz, Iran were chosen from among eighty five learners based on their score distribution on a reduced TOEFL test constructed by Education...

The focus of this work is statistical idiosyncrasy (or collocational weight) as a discriminant property of multiword expressions. We formalize and model this property, compile a 2-class dataset of MWE and non-MWE examples, and evaluate our models on this dataset. We present a possible empirical implementation of collocational weight and study its effects on identification and extraction of MWEs...

Word reading is heavily influenced by the information provided by previous context. In this study, we analyzed the neurophysiological bases of sentence reading through the EEG activity elicited during reading the same word embedded in differently constraining contexts: a) a low-constraining context; b) a high-constraining semantic compositional context; c) a high-constraining collocational cont...

ryone is fighting a fierce rearguard action struggling towards the objective of a discrete syntactic classes, all the while being forced by practical necessity to move closer and closer toward an analysis of relationships whenever they want to get anything done. Everyone is still trying to find relationships of classes rather than classes of relationships. In n-gram models relationships are use...

One of the main problems for applied natural language processing is gaps in the lexicon, including missing words and word senses, and inadequate descriptions of word use in context. Traditional lexicography has similar concerns. The availability of large, on-line text corpora provides a straightforward tool for enlarging the stock of words included in a lexicon. The identification of additional...