Learning a new word involves integration with existing lexical knowledge. Previous work has shown that sleepdependent memory consolidation processes are important for the engagement of novel items in lexical competition. We used spaced learning and testing to investigate memory for novel words and their lexicalization across the course of a single day, compared with a day later. We expected tha...

Across languages, clauses containing descriptions of similar events are likely to include the same conceptual components, but these may be distributed differently across the constituents of the clause. Compare, for instance, the English description of a directed motion event in (1a) to its most natural French translation (1b). Both these sentences contain linguistic units expressing the concept...

The authors report 4 experiments exploring the language-switching performance of highly proficient bilinguals in a picture-naming task. In Experiment 1, they tested the impact of language similarity and age of 2nd language acquisition on the language-switching performance of highly proficient bilinguals. Experiments 2, 3, and 4 assessed the performance of highly proficient bilinguals in languag...

In this paper we present a fully lexicalized grammar formalism as a particularly attractive framework for the specification of natural language grammars. We discuss in detail Feature-based, Lexicalized Tree Adjoining Grammars (FB-LTAGs), a representative of the class of lexicalized grammars. We illustrate the advantages of lexicalized grammars in various contexts of natural language processing,...

Languages differ in how they package the components of an event into words to form sentences. For example, while some languages typically encode the manner of motion in the verb (e.g., running), others more often use verbs that encode the path (e.g., ascending). Prior research has demonstrated that children and adults have lexicalization biases; that is, they assume that novel motion verbs will...

In this paper, we attempt to answer the vexing question why it should be the case that only certain types of noun meanings exhibit a mass/count variation in the lexicalization of their semantic properties, while others do not. This question has so far remained unanswered, or been set aside. We will do so by focusing on the role of contextsensitivity (already highlighted in recent theories of th...

The encoding of motion events is known to be challenging for second language (L2) users, particularly if the lexicalization patterns their first (L1) diverge from those L2. This paper analyzes oral and written event descriptions produced by advanced L2 users German, an information-dense satellite-framed language. Based on usage error patterns, we discuss six major challenges with respect and, m...