scholarly journals The relationship between sentence comprehension and lexical-semantic retuning

2021 ◽  
Vol 116 ◽  
pp. 104188
Author(s):  
Rebecca A. Gilbert ◽  
Matthew H. Davis ◽  
M. Gareth Gaskell ◽  
Jennifer M. Rodd
2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca Anne Gilbert ◽  
Matthew H. Davis ◽  
M. Gareth Gaskell ◽  
Jennifer M Rodd

A single encounter with an ambiguous word (e.g. bark, ball) in the context of a less-frequent meaning (e.g. “Sally worried about how crowded the ball would be.”) can shift the later interpretation of the word toward the same subordinate meaning. This lexical-semantic retuning functions to improve future comprehension of ambiguous words. The present paper investigates the relationship between this form of learning and the specific processes that occur during sentence comprehension. One possibility is that lexical-semantic retuning occurs immediately upon hearing the ambiguous word, during initial meaning activation and selection, so priming should be strongest when the disambiguating context is provided before the ambiguous word (prior disambiguation). Alternatively, priming may relate to the degree of reinterpretation needed, which would predict maximal learning when the word is initially misunderstood because the critical context is given after the word (subsequent disambiguation, e.g. “Sally worried that the ball would be too crowded.”). In four experiments, adults listened to prior and subsequent disambiguation sentences, and were later tested on their interpretations of primed and unprimed ambiguous words. The results showed that lexical-semantic retuning can occur for both sentence types. Importantly, however, the emergence of priming for subsequent disambiguation sentences was sensitive to the prime conditions: when the task could potentially be performed without needing to re-analyse the ambiguity, then no significant priming was observed. This is consistent with the ‘good enough’ view of language processing which states that representations can remain as (im)precise as mandated by the situation, and that lexical-semantic retuning operates on the output of good-enough interpretation. More generally, our findings suggest that lexical-semantic retuning is driven by participants’ final interpretation of the word meanings during the prime encounter, regardless of initial meaning activation or misinterpretation.


2021 ◽  
Vol 79 (3) ◽  
pp. 106-112
Author(s):  
YANKINA ELENA V. ◽  

This article is devoted to identifying and describing the main lexical-semantic and stylistic ways of implementing the values in dialogical communication of the basic pair "manager-subordinate". The paper describes the fundamental categories of axiology "value" and "evaluation", also shows the relationship between values and evaluation. The relevance of the chosen topic is determined by the anthropocentric approach of modern linguistic research, as well as by the existing need to supplement with one more descriptive fragment of the world value picture with the linguistic analysis of the actualized values in administrative discourse. The identification of the main lexical-semantic and stylistic ways of implementing values is carried out on the basis of dialogical communication between the manager and subordinates, examples of which are taken from the colloquial speech, as well as Russian fiction of the second half of the 20th century. In the study the author concludes that in the administrative discourse, values as well as anti-values (as opposition) are lexically actualized by means of certain nouns, verbs, adjectives, pronouns, and also adverbs. As for the stylistic ways of actualizing values, we include interrogative, exclamatory sentences, anaphora, and imperative among them.


1988 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 72-81 ◽  
Author(s):  
Beverly B. Wulfeck

The relationship between sentence comprehension and grammaticality judgment was examined for both neurologically intact and agrammatic aphasic subjects. Aphasic subjects were able to make grammaticality judgments and comprehension judgments, but were less accurate than healthy control subjects. However, the tasks appeared dissociated for the aphasic subjects: Both the effects of semantic cues and the hierarchy of difficulty of sentence types differed across the two tasks. Further, the findings suggest that not all aspects of morpho-syntactic processing may be equally disrupted in aphasia. The results argue against both a central deficit view of agrammatic aphasia, and a view suggesting that syntactic processing is intact whereas semantic or thematic mapping is not. Instead, the results indicate that the respective performance domains of comprehension and grammaticality judgment may draw on different processes and/or operate on different aspects of the language input.


2017 ◽  
Vol 107 ◽  
pp. 9-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shannon M. Sheppard ◽  
Tracy Love ◽  
Katherine J. Midgley ◽  
Phillip J. Holcomb ◽  
Lewis P. Shapiro

2007 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 473-494 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. CHIARA LEVORATO ◽  
MAJA ROCH ◽  
BARBARA NESI

ABSTRACTThe relation between text and idiom comprehension in children with poor text comprehension skills was investigated longitudinally. In the first phase of the study, six-year-old first graders with different levels of text comprehension were compared in an idiom and sentence comprehension task. Text comprehension was shown to be more closely related to idiom comprehension than sentence comprehension. The follow-up study, carried out eight months later on less-skilled text comprehenders, investigated whether an improvement in text comprehension was paralleled by an improvement in idiom comprehension. The development of sentence comprehension was also taken into account. Children who improved in text comprehension also improved in idiom comprehension; this improvement was, instead, weakly related to an improvement in sentence comprehension. The relationship between text and idiom comprehension is discussed in the light of the Global Elaboration Model (Levorato & Cacciari, 1995).


Author(s):  
Holger Hopp

AbstractIn the context of current approaches to anticipation in native and non-native sentence processing, this paper investigates whether late second-language (L2) learners integrate morphosyntax, i.e. case marking, and verb semantics to generate anticipations in L2 sentence comprehension. In a visual-world eye-tracking experiment with 45 L1 English L2 learners of German and 12 German natives, German natives are found to integrate morphosyntactic and lexical-semantic information in anticipatory processing, while L2 learners only rely on lexical-semantic information for prediction. Moreover, there is no indication that increasing proficiency leads to the involvement of morphosyntax in predictive L2 processing. We discuss reasons for the lower sensitivity to morphosyntax in anticipatory L2 sentence processing.


2003 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 349-358 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karen Condouris ◽  
Echo Meyer ◽  
Helen Tager-Flusberg

This study investigated the relationship between scores on standardized tests (Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals [CELF], Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test-Third Edition [PPVT-III], and Expressive Vocabulary Test) and measures of spontaneous speech (mean length of utterance [MLU], Index of Productive Syntax, and number of different word roots [NDWR]) derived from natural language samples obtained from 44 children with autism between the ages of 4 and 14 years old. The children with autism were impaired across both groups of measures. The two groups of measures were significantly correlated, and specific relationships were found between lexical-semantic measures (NDWR, vocabulary tests, and the CELF lexical-semantic subtests) and grammatical measures (MLU, and CELF grammar subtests), suggesting that both standardized and spontaneous speech measures tap the same underlying linguistic abilities in children with autism. These findings have important implications for clinicians and researchers who depend on these types of language measures for diagnostic purposes, assessment, and investigations of language impairments in autism.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-37
Author(s):  
ROCHELLE LIEBER ◽  
INGO PLAG

This paper addresses a fundamental problem of derivational morphology: which meanings are possible for the words of a given morphological category, which forms can be chosen to express a given meaning, and what is the role of the base in these mappings of form and meaning? In a broad empirical study we examine the extent to which two types of nominalizations in English – conversion nouns and -ing nominalizations – can express either eventive or referential readings, can be quantified as either count or mass, and can be based on verbs of particular aspectual classes (state, activity, accomplishment, achievement, semelfactive). Past literature (for example, Grimshaw 1990 Brinton 1995, 1998 Borer 2013) has suggested an association between conversion nominalization, count quantification, and referential reading on the one hand, and between -ing nominalization, mass quantification and eventive reading on the other. Using a subset of the data reported in Andreou & Lieber (2020), we give statistical evidence that the relationship between morphological form, type of quantification, and aspectual class of base verb is neither categorical, as the literature suggests, nor completely free, but rather is probabilistic. We provide both a univariate analysis and a multivariate analysis (using conditional inference trees) that show that the relationship among the variables of morphological form, eventivity, quantification and aspectual class of base is complex. Tendencies sometimes go in the direction suggested by past literature (e.g. -ing forms tend to be eventive), but sometimes contradict past predictions (conversion also tends to be eventive). We also document that an important role is played by the specific verb underlying the nominalization rather than the aspectual class of verb. Finally, we consider what the pattern of polysemy that we uncover suggests with respect to theoretical modeling, looking at syntactic models (Distributed Morphology), lexical semantic models (the Lexical Semantic Framework), Analogical Models, and Distributional Semantics.


2021 ◽  
Vol 65 (1) ◽  
pp. 179-192

Исследование выполнено в русле актуального антропоцентрического направления в лингвистике и связано с изучением активных процессов в современном русском языке, отражающих динамику русского национального менталитета и русской языковой картины мира. В статье рассматривается такое глубинное свойство русской речи, как эмоциональность, которая проявляется в языковых ка-тегориях оценочности и интенсивности.Цель исследования – установление связи между категориями оценочности и интенсивности на материале словообразовательных и лексико-семантических единиц из лексикографических источ-ников и медийных текстов.В результате исследования охарактеризованы словообразовательные и лексико-семантические интенсификаторы в функционально-прагматическом аспекте. К словообразовательным интенси-фикаторам относятся словообразовательные аффиксы, аффиксоиды (в основном размерно-оценоч-ной семантики) и отдельные способы словообразования (в частности некоторые разновидности способа сложения). К лексическим интенсификаторам относятся отдельные виды лексем: оценочно универсальные интенсификаторы; интенсификаторы, тяготеющие к выражению положительной или отрицательной оценки (в определенном контексте); интенсификаторы, выражающие (по сво-ей семантике) положительную или отрицательную оценку. В статье показано такое расширение функционального диапазона интенсификаторов, как оценочная амбивалентность размерно-оце-ночных аффиксов, оксюморонность и амбивалентность лексических интенсификаторов.Одним из векторов развития лексических интенсификаторов является синтагматическое рас-ширение, в результате которого в речи возникают и закрепляются всё новые словосочетания, не соответствующие традиции употребления и нарушающие сложившиеся правила лексической со-четаемости, закрепленные в словарях. Расширение сочетаемости служит условием семантических и оценочных трансформаций интенсификатора. Употребление интенсификатора в оценочно дис-сонирующем окружении выполняет в тексте определенные прагматические и стилистические цели (повышение экспрессивности текста, создание эффекта оксюморона, иронии или шутки). При этом обилие таких употреблений в медийных, художественных тестах и в разговорной речи, а также по-вторяемость моделей синтагматического смещения говорит о динамике развития оценки в классе лексических интенсификаторов в русском языке новейшего периода. Оценочное расширение, когда «положительно ориентированные» интенсификаторы вторгаются в зону негативных явлений, и на-оборот, негативные характеристики – в зону явлений позитивных, рассматривается как тенденция к снятию оценочных ограничений и к универсализации оценки.Явления, описанные в статье, в целом показывают развитие семантической категории интенсив-ности в русском языке XXI века, находящее выражение в динамике таких ее составляющих, как способы словообразования, словообразовательные единицы, лексические единицы.The research is based on the current anthropocentric trend in linguistics and is related to the study of active processes in the modern Russian language reflecting the dynamics of the Russian national mentality and the Russian linguistic image of the world. The paper considers such a deep property of Russian speech as emotionality, which is manifested in the language categories of evaluation and intensity.The purpose of the research is to establish the relationship between the categories of evaluation and intensity based on the material of word-building and lexical-semantic units from lexicographic sources and media texts.As a result of the research, word-building and lexical-semantic intensifiers are characterized in the functional-pragmatic aspect. Word-building intensifiers include word-formative affixes, affixoids (mainly of dimensional-evaluative semantics), and various means of word-building (in particular, some varieties of composition). Lexical intensifiers include certain types of lexemes: evaluative universal intensifiers; intensifiers that tend to express positive or negative evaluation (in a certain context); intensifiers that express (by their semantics) positive or negative evaluation. The paper shows such an extension of the functional range of intensifiers as the estimated ambivalence of dimensional-evaluative affixes, oxymoron quality, and the ambivalence of lexical intensifiers.One of the vectors of the development of lexical intensifiers is syntagmatic expansion, which results in emerging in speech and fixing new word combinations that do not correspond to the tradition of usage and violate the established rules of lexical compatibility fixed in dictionaries. The combinability extension serves as a condition for semantic and evaluative transformations of the intensifier. The use of an intensifier in an evaluative dissonant environment fulfils certain pragmatic and stylistic goals in the text (increasing the expressiveness of the text, creating the effect of an oxymoron, irony, or joke). The abundance of such instances of use in media texts, literary works, and spoken language as well as the repeatability of syntagmatic bias models indicates the dynamics of evaluation in the class of lexical intensifiers in the Russian language of the modern period. Evaluation expansion, when “positively oriented” intensifiers invade the zone of negative phenomena, and vice versa, negative characteristics in the zone of positive phenomena, is considered as a tendency to remove evaluation restrictions and to universalize evaluation.The phenomena described in the paper generally show the development of the semantic category of intensity in the Russian language of the 21st century, which is expressed in the dynamics of its components, such as word-building means, word-building units, and lexical units.


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