“ba:y?d” as a persian lexeme is interwoven with modality, a semantic category and therefore has a complicated and thought- provoking semantic nature. this paper uses evidence from persian to investigate the usage of this lexeme and some of its semantic and pragmatic aspects in this language. the results indicate that this lexical category can convey a wide range of modal meanings in different c...

this is a longitudinal case study of two farsi-speaking children learning english: ‘bernard’ and ‘melissa’, who were 7;4 and 8;4 at the start of data collection. the research deals with the initial state and further development in the child second language (l2) acquisition of syntax regarding the presence or absence of copula as a functional category, as well as the role and degree of l1 influe...

Learning categories from examples is a fundamental problem faced by the human cognitive system, and a long-standing topic of investigation in psychology. In this work we focus on the acquisition of natural language categories and examine how the statistics of the linguistic environment influence category formation. We present two incremental models of category acquisition — one probabilistic, o...

Language models are computational techniques and structures that describe word sequences produced by human subjects, and the work presented here considers primarily their application to automatic speech-recognition systems. Due to the very complex nature of natural languages as well as the need for robust recognition, statistically-based language models, which assign probabilities to word seque...