Numerous studies have been carried out to find the relation between neighborhood effect and retention of lexical items. This study was an attempt to find such a relationship among Iranian EFL learners. Participants, advanced second English learners, were chosen based on the Oxford Placement Test. Participants completed a lexical decision task that was designed and performed by a computer softwa...

The use of lexical resources in linguistic analysis has expanded rapidly in recent years. However, most lexical resources, such as WordNet or online dictionaries, at this point do not usually indicate figurative meanings, such as conceptual metaphors, as part of a lexical entry. Studies that attempt to establish the relationships between literal and figurative language by detecting the connecti...

The lexical matrix is an integral part of the human language system. It provides the link between word form and word meaning. A simple lexical matrix is also at the center of any animal communication system, where it defines the associations between form and meaning of animal signals. We study the evolution and population dynamics of the lexical matrix. We assume that children learn the lexical...

Several studies suggest that referential choices are influenced by animacy. On the one hand, animate referents are more likely to be mentioned as subjects than inanimate referents. On the other hand, animate referents are more frequently pronominalized than inanimate referents. These effects have been analyzed as effects of conceptual accessibility. In this paper, we raise the question whether ...

People can discriminate real words from nonwords even when the latter are orthographically and phonologically word-like, presumably because words activate specific lexical and/or semantic information. We investigated the neural correlates of this identification process using event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Participants performed a visual lexical decision task under c...

Lexical items play a key role in both language in general and translation in particular. Likewise, equivalence is a controversial concept discussed so widely in translation studies. Some theorists deem it to be fundamental in translation theory and define translation in terms of equivalence. The aim of this study is to identify the problems of lexical gaps in two translations of Nahj al-ba...

In this paper, we describe lexical needs for spoken and written French surface processing, like automatic text correction, speech recognition and synthesis. We present statistical observations made on a vocabulary compiled from real texts like articles. These texts have been used for building a recorded speech database called BREF. Machine Communication), this database is intended for dictation...

Six experiments examined the proposal that an item of long-term knowledge can be simultaneously inhibited and activated. In 2 directed forgetting experiments items to-be-forgotten were found to be inhibited in list-cued recall but activated in lexical decision tasks. In 3 retrieval practice experiments, unpracticed items from practiced categories were found to be inhibited in category-cued reca...

It is a much-debated issue whether one should assume separate lexical entries for participles used in passive and perfect constructions or whether there is just one lexical entry that is used in different ways depending on whether a passive or perfect auxiliary is present in the clause. In previous work I criticized approaches trying to analyze the passive with one lexical entry for making empi...