In the present study we investigated how the vocabulary size of English-Italian bilinguals affects reading aloud in Italian (L2) modulating the reader's sensitivity to lexical aspects of the language. We divided adult bilinguals in two groups according to their vocabulary size (Larger - LV, and smaller - SV), and compared their naming performance to that of native Italian (NI) readers. In Exper...

Languages with many speakers tend to be structurally simple while small communities sometimes develop languages with great structural complexity. Paradoxically, the opposite pattern appears to be observed for non-structural properties of language such as vocabulary size. These apparently opposite patterns pose a challenge for theories of language change and evolution. We use computational simul...

The increasing amount of image databases over the last years has highlighted our need to represent an image collection efficiently and quickly. The majority of image retrieval and image clustering approaches has been based on the construction of a visual vocabulary in the so called Bag-of-Visual-words (BoV) model, analogous to the Bag-of-Words (BoW) model in the representation of a collection o...

The objective of this study was to investigate the effects of three different screen sizes (small, medium and large) and two types of multimedia instruction (text only and text with pictorial annotation) on vocabulary learning. One hundred thirty-five Korean middle school students learning English as a foreign language were randomly distributed into six groups and were given a pretest, a self-s...

Vocabulary acquisition is one of the hottest research fields in English learning, which has aroused researchers’ great attention in recent years. However, their focus is on vocabulary size, vocabulary learning strategies and receptive lexical ability, seldom to productive lexical ability. Writing is an important productive ability for EFL learners, and a myriad of writing researches show that i...

A computational-phonological method is presented to automatically adapt the phone transcriptions in a lexicon to improve ASR performance in a number of mid-size recognition tasks. The lexical adaptation approach is based on supervised phoneme loops using cd-HMM segments to find alternatives for the transcriptions, and can be considered as a counterpart of the K-means algorithm but on symbolic l...

Researchers have developed several tests of receptive vocabulary knowledge suitable for use with learners of English, but options are few for learners of French. This situation motivated the authors to create a new vocabulary size measure for French, the Test de la taille du vocabulaire (TTV). The measure is closely modelled on Nation’s (1983) Vocabulary Levels Test (VLT) and follows the guidel...

This study was designed to investigate the relationship between vocabulary size and the speed and accuracy of lexical processing in preschoolers between the ages of 30-46 months using an automatic eye tracking task based on the looking-while-listening paradigm (Fernald, Zangl, Portillo, & Marchman, 2008) and mispronunciation paradigm (White & Morgan, 2008). Children's eye gaze patterns were tra...

The vocabularies of endangered languages surrounded by more prestigious languages are gradually shrinking in size due to the influx of borrowed items. It is easy to observe that in such languages, starting from some frequency rank, the lower the frequency of a vocabulary item, the higher the probability of that item being a borrowed one. On the basis of the data from the Beserman dialect of Udm...