The influence of phonological (i.e., individual sounds), lexical (i.e., whole-word forms) and semantic (i.e., meaning) characteristics on the words known by infants age 1.4 to 2.6 was examined, using an existing database (Dale & Fenson, 1996). For each noun, word frequency, two phonological (i.e., positional segment average, biphone average), two lexical (i.e., neighborhood density, word length...

Evidence from electrophysiological measures such as ERPs (event-related potentials) and MEG (magnetoencephalography) suggest that the first evoked brain response component sensitive to stimulus properties affecting reaction times in word recognition tasks occurs at 300-400 ms. The present study used the stimulus manipulation of Vitevich and Luce (1999) to investigate whether the M350, an MEG re...

Nasal coarticulation has been shown to vary systematically in words depending on the number of phonological neighbors: words with many neighbors are produced with a greater degree of vowel nasality than words with fewer phonological neighbors [9]. This study examines the effect of this systematic low-level variation on lexical perception. The degree of nasality in natural real and nonsense word...

This paper1 discusses the use of recursive chunking of large German corpora (over 300 million words) for the identification and partial classification of significant lexical cooccurrences of adjectives and verbs. The goal is to provide a fine-grained syntactic classification of the data at the levels of subcategorization and scrambling. We analyze the combinatory preferences of adjectives with ...

Lexical-semantic access is affected by the phonological structure of the lexicon. What is less clear is whether such effects are the result of continuous activation between lexical form and semantic processing or whether they arise from a more modular system in which the timing of accessing lexical form determines the timing of semantic activation. This study examined this issue using the visua...

A collocation is a habitual word combination. Collocational knowledge is essential for many tasks in natural language processing. We present a method for extracting collocations from text corpora. By comparison with the SUSANNE corpus, we show that both high precision and broad coverage can be achieved with our method. Finally, we describe an application of the automatically extracted collocati...

Estes and Maddox (2002) suggested that the word frequency mirror effect in episodic recognition memory might be due to word likeness rather than to the frequency of experience with a word per se. We examined their suggestion using a factorial manipulation of frequency and neighborhood density, a measure used in lexical memory research to measure orthographic word likeness. For study with no spe...

Neighborhood density influences adult performance on several word processing tasks. Some studies show age-related effects of density on children’s performance, reflecting a developmental restructuring of the mental lexicon from holistic into segmental representations that may play a role in phonological awareness. To further investigate density effects and their implications for development of ...