The pioneering research of G. K. Zipf on the relationship between word frequency and other word features led to the formulation of various linguistic laws. Here we focus on a couple of them: the meaning-frequency law, i.e. the tendency of more frequent words to be more polysemous, and the law of abbreviation, i.e. the tendency of more frequent words to be shorter. Here we evaluate the robustnes...

Alessandra Buonanno, Günter Sigl, Georg G. Raffelt, Hans-Thomas Janka, Ewald Müller GReCO, Institut d’Astrophysique de Paris, C.N.R.S., 98 bis boulevard Arago, F-75014 Paris, France b AstroParticule et Cosmologie (APC), 11, place Marcelin Berthelot, F-75005 Paris, France Max-Planck-Institut für Physik (Werner-Heisenberg-Institut), Föhringer Ring 6, 80805 München, Germany Max-Planck-Institut für...

Abstra ct. Thi s pap er describes a connectioni st mod el of prin t-tosound transformation ("word naming" or "reading aloud" ). T he associative network it uses is based on published stu dies of oral reading, and simulat ion res ults are compare d to experiment al data in t he psy chological literature. Th e results ob ta ined are of interest for two separa te reasons. Fir st , the print-to-sou...

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Syllables exist in most, if not all, languages as a basic unit of prosodic and rhythmic structure. For native English speakers, the number of syllables a given word contains is often intuitively clear (e.g., Liberman et al., 1974). This is so even though it has been extremely difficult to agree on a phonetic definition of syllables (Ohala, 1990). While syllables are found in all languages, at t...

Lexical frequency and phonological neighbourhood density have been found to influence vowel production. This experiment investigated the effect of lexical frequency and phonological neighbourhood density on vowel space expansion in words and nonwords. Twenty speakers produced words varying in phonological neighbourhood density and word frequency and produced nonwords that varied in neighbourhoo...

Brlek et al. (2008) studied smooth infinite words and established some results on letter frequency, recurrence, reversal and complementation for 2-letter alphabets having same parity. In this paper, we explore smooth infinite words over n-letter alphabet {a1, a2, · · · , an}, where a1 < a2 < · · · < an are positive integers and have same remainder when divided by n. And let ai = n · qi + r, qi ...

Previous research has identified robust effects on segmental production of lexical factors like word frequency, predictability or neighborhood density. One question that remains unanswered is whether such lexical effects hold also at the suprasegmental level. This study investigates whether lexical factors such as usage frequency affect tone production in Cantonese. We recorded Cantonese monosy...

In order to assess the role of visual, lexical, and contextual information on word identification during Korean sentence reading, a self-paced reading experiment was conducted. It was found, in regard to word length variables, that the number of syllables and the number of visual features affected reading times significantly, but the other sub-lexical units (i.e., phonemes and letters) did not....

Current models of word recognition generally assume that word units orthographically similar to a stimulus word are involved in the visual recognition of this word. We refer to this set of orthographically similar words as an orthographic neighborhood. Two experiments are presented that investigate the ways in which the composition of this neighborhood can affect word recognition. The data indi...