Phonologists and psycholinguists draw a three-way distinction amongst real words, possible words, and impossible words.The distinction between real words and possible words provides the foundation for lexical decision experiments. The distinction between possible words and impossible words reveals implicit cognitive generalizations about words in a language, and thereby contributes to the under...

there are several suffixes in creating diminutive words with endearing meanings in the russian language. structures and their meaning variations, make it difficult for iranian pupils to comprehend its concepts which leads to a multitude of errors in translating and instructing this important issue. many foreign and russian researchers and linguists have studied and gone through diminutive words...

play provides opportunities for exploration, experimentation, and manipulation that are essential for constructing knowledge and contributes to the development of representational thought. during play, children examine and refine their learning in light of the feedback they receive from the environment and other people. it is through play that children develop their imaginations and creativity....

Experiment 1 examined whether the semantic transparency of an English unspaced compound word affected how long it took to process it in reading. Three types of opaque words were each compared with a matched set of transparent words (i.e. matched on the length and frequency of the constituents and the frequency of the word as a whole). Two sets of the opaque words were partially opaque: either t...

Infants learn the forms of words by listening to the speech they hear. Though little is known about the degree to which these forms are meaningful for young infants, the words still play a role in early language development. Words guide the infant to his or her first syntactic intuitions, aid in the development of the lexicon, and, it is proposed, may help infants learn phonetic categories.

Inspired by experimental psychological findings suggesting that function words play a special role in word learning, we make a simple modification to an Adaptor Grammar based Bayesian word segmentation model to allow it to learn sequences of monosyllabic “function words” at the beginnings and endings of collocations of (possibly multi-syllabic) words. This modification improves unsupervised wor...