Acquiring the correct meanings of words expressing quantities (seven, most) and qualities (red, spotty) present a challenge to learners. Understanding how children succeed at this requires understanding not only what kinds of data are available to them, but also the biases and expectations they bring to the learning task. The results of our word-learning task with 4 year-olds indicates that a “...

Two experiments investigated the relationship between masked form priming and individual differences in reading and spelling proficiency among university students. Experiment 1 assessed neighbor priming for 4-letter word targets from high- and low-density neighborhoods in 97 university students. The overall results replicated previous evidence of facilitatory neighborhood priming only for low-n...

Today’s managers are required to make decisions in a techno-complex rapid decision-making environment. This environment is data and information based which requires that managers have tools based on data and information quality (DIQ) to supplement their decision-making activities. The researchers propose a decision support paradigm based on Multi-Attribute Utility Theory (MAUT) that employs a D...

Why do people gesture when they speak? The reasons are not entirely clear. This paper tests two hypotheses about the role of gesture in speech production: the Lexical Access Hypothesis, which holds that gesturing aids in lexical access, and the Information Packaging Hypothesis, which holds that gesturing aids in conceptualization. Participants were asked to describe dot patterns that were eithe...

In this study we present an analysis of the lexical quality of social media in the Web, focusing on the Web 2.0, social networks, blogs and micro-blogs, multimedia and opinions. We find that blogs and social networks are the main players and also the main contributors to the bad lexical quality of the Web. We also compare our results with the rest of the Web finding that in general social media...

This article describes the creation and application of the Turk Bootstrap Word Sense Inventory for 397 frequent nouns, which is a publicly available resource for lexical substitution. This resource was acquired using Amazon Mechanical Turk. In a bootstrapping process with massive collaborative input, substitutions for target words in context are elicited and clustered by sense; then, more conte...

Background: This study investigates the role of lexical information in normal and aphasic sentence comprehension. Effects of verb biases in normal comprehension have been well documented in previous studies (e.g., Spivey-Knowlton & Sedivy, 1995; Trueswell, Tanenhaus, & Kello, 1993), but their role in aphasic language processing has largely been ignored (with the exceptions of Menn et al., 1998,...