the present study aims at investigating the effect of different levels of lexical collocational density on efl learners’ reading comprehension. eighty sophomore students with different levels of proficiency studying at  zand institute of higher education in shiraz, iran were chosen from among eighty five learners based on their score distribution on a reduced toefl test constructed by education...

The present study aims at investigating the effect of different levels of lexical collocational density on EFL learners’ reading comprehension. Eighty sophomore students with different levels of proficiency studying at  Zand Institute of Higher Education in Shiraz, Iran were chosen from among eighty five learners based on their score distribution on a reduced TOEFL test constructed by Education...

The notion of expectancy grammar as a key to understanding the nature of psychologically real processes that underlie language use is introduced by Oller (1979). A central issue in this notion is that expectancy generating systems are constructed and modified in the course of language acquisition. Thus, one of the characteristics of language proficiency is that it consists of such an expectancy...

Words are typically encountered in the context of a sentence. Recent studies suggest that the contexts in which a word typically appears can a!ect the way it is recognized in isolation. We distinguish two types of context: collocational, involving speci"c lexical items, and syntactic, involving abstract syntactic structures. We investigate the e!ects of syntactic context using the distribution ...

This paper describes a characters-based Chinese collocation system and discusses the advantages of it over a traditiolml word-based systcm. Since wordbreaks are not conventionally marked in Chinese text corpora, a character-based collocation system has the dual advantages of avoiding pre-proccssing distortion and directly accessing sub-lexical information. Furthermore, word-based collocational ...

Natural Language Generation (NLG) systems require access to collocational information to help determine lexical choices constrained both by syntactic and semantic concerns. Constructing linguistic resources to support these decisions can be time-consuming whereas, if the information is extracted automatically, data sparsity limits the variety of the output. This paper reports on a method for ex...

This paper discusses the lexicographical concept of lexical functions (Mel' cuk and Zolkovsky, 1984) and their potential exploitation in the development of a machine translation lexicon designed to handle collocations. We show how lexical functions can be thought to reeect crosslinguistic meaning concepts for collocational structures and their translational equivalents, and therefore suggest th...