Abstract This study builds upon previous research investigating the construct validity of phraseological complexity as an index L2 development and proficiency. Whereas studies have focused on cross-sectional comparisons written productions across proficiency levels, current compares longitudinal in oral elicited over a 21-month period from learners French. We also improve state art by including...

In noun compounds in English, the modifying noun may be singular (mouse-eater) or an irregularly inflected plural (mice-eater), but regularly inflected plurals are dispreferred (*rats-eater). This phenomenon has been taken as strong evidence for dual-mechanism theories of lexical representations, which hold that regular (rule-governed) and irregular (exception) items are generated by qualitativ...

Understanding how linguistic cues map to the environment is crucial for early language comprehension and may provide a way for bootstrapping and learning words. Research has suggested that learning how plural syntax maps to the perceptual environment may show a trajectory in which children first learn surrounding cues (verbs, modifiers) before a full mastery of the noun morpheme alone. The Span...

In this paper, we argue that ordering prenominal modifiers – typically pursued as a supervised modeling task – is particularly wellsuited to semi-supervised approaches. By relying on automatic parses to extract noun phrases, we can scale up the training data by orders of magnitude. This minimizes the predominant issue of data sparsity that has informed most previous approaches. We compare sever...

In this paper, we evaluate five distinct systems of labelled grammatical dependency against the kind of input we require for semantic interpretation, in particular for the deep semantic interpreter underlying a tutorial dialogue system. We focus on the following linguistic phenomena: passive, control and raising, noun modifiers, and meaningful vs. non-meaningful prepositions. We conclude that n...

Three experiments are reported in which rapid sequential visual presentation of sentences--RSVP--was used to determine some perceptual processes in sentence perception. It was found that adjectives, when they are actually or potentially modifiers of a noun, are far less likely to be reported than any other part of the sentence. On the other hand, adjectives which are attribute adjectives are as...

To examine how semantic integration and the scope of advance planning affect utterance planning and subject-verb agreement error rates, participants described picture displays using complex subject noun phrases (e.g., the apple for the pie(s)), with singular head nouns (apple) and local nouns (pie(s)) in prepositional phrase modifiers, and then completed them as full sentences. Semantic integra...

As automated image analysis progresses, there is increasing interest in richer linguistic annotation of pictures, with attributes of objects (e.g., furry, brown. . . ) attracting most attention. By building on the recent “zeroshot learning” approach, and paying attention to the linguistic nature of attributes as noun modifiers, and specifically adjectives, we show that it is possible to tag ima...