This paper considers the problem of automatically inducing role-semantic annotations in the FrameNet paradigm for new languages. We introduce a general framework for semantic projection which exploits parallel texts, is relatively inexpensive and can potentially reduce the amount of effort involved in creating semantic resources. We propose projection models that exploit lexical and syntactic i...

Speakers of English and Tamil differ widely in which relational roles they overtly express with a verb. This study provides new information about how speakers of these languages differ in their descriptions of the same scenes and how explicit mention of roles and other scene elements vary with the properties of the scenes themselves. Specifically, we find that English speakers, who in normal sp...

It is a general assumption in linguistic theory that the categories of tense, aspect and mood are inflectional categories of verbal classes only.1 However, there are a number of languages around the world in which nominals and other NP constituents are also inflected for tense, aspect and mood (henceforth TAM). That nominals may be inflected for TAM has been noted in the grammatical description...

What do people attend to when describing the locations of objects in space? This paper describes a study of the ways in which speakers of seventeen languages describe static spatial relations, delving into the meanings of two kinds of spatial relational terms evident crosslinguistically: specific spatial terms and generalized spatial terms. The findings provide support for the importance of geo...

This study has three purposes: the first is to study if there is any stability in the way we interpret different emotions and attitudes from prosodic patterns, the second is to see if this interpretation is dependent on the listeners cultural and linguistic background, and the third is to find out if there is any reoccurring relation between acoustic and semantic properties of the stimuli. Reco...

The role of test translation and test adaptation for Cross-Linguistic Instruments (CLIs)or multilingual tests is of vital importance given the increasing international use of high stakes assessments which affect and help make educational policy. Test developers have traditionally relied upon either expert-dependent or psychometric methods to create comparable CLIs. The problem with expertdepend...

Research suggests that more cases of dyslexia are diagnosed in populations that speak languages with highly opaque writing systems, such as the United States, the United Kingdom, or France, and fewer cases of dyslexia are diagnosed in populations that speak language with transparent writing systems, such as Italy, Spain, or Mexico. This disparity can be explained by the differences in how dysle...

Many studies in cognitive science address how people categorize objects, but there has been comparatively little research on event categorization. This study investigated the categorization of events involving material destruction, such as “cutting” and “breaking”. Speakers of 28 typologically, genetically, and areally diverse languages described events shown in a set of video-clips. There was ...