Code-Switching Across Brainstorming Sessions: Implications for the Revised Hierarchical Model of Bilingual Language Processing

Abstract. The revised hierarchical model (RHM) of bilingual language processing posits independent word form representations for the dominant language (L1) and the nondominant language (L2), facilitated translation from L2 words to L1 words, access to common concepts for L1 and L2, and stronger activation of concepts for L1 than for L2. Spanish-English and English-Spanish bilinguals brainstormed for two sessions; half switched languages (L1-L2 or L2-L1) and half stayed in the same language (L1-L1 or L2-L2) across sessions. In both sessions, L1 brainstorming resulted in more efficient idea productivity than L2 brainstorming, supporting stronger concept activation for L1, consistent with the RHM. Switching languages from L2 to L1 resulted in the most efficient idea productivity in Session 2, suggesting that switching to L1 not only permits strong concept activation, but also the activation of concepts that are relatively different than those activated by L2, inconsistent with the RHM. Switching languages increased the proportion of Session 1 ideas repeated during Session 2, despite instructions not to repeat. This finding suggests that there is activation of concepts as well as word forms in same language brainstorming and that this dual activation aids in following instructions not to repeat, consistent with the RHM. It is suggested that the RHM be re-specified to accommodate the notion that L1 and L2 access relatively different concepts.

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Building neural network models for morphological and morpheme analysis of texts

Proceedings of the Institute for System Programming of RAS ◽

10.15514/ispras-2021-33(4)-9 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 33 (4) ◽

pp. 117-130

Author(s):

Alexander Sergeevich Sapin

Keyword(s):

Neural Network ◽

Language Processing ◽

High Performance ◽

Morphological Analysis ◽

Morphological Characteristics ◽

Network Models ◽

Word Form ◽

Neural Network Models ◽

Russian Word ◽

Word Forms

Morphological analysis of text is one of the most important stages of natural language processing (NLP). Traditional and well-studied problems of morphological analysis include normalization (lemmatization) of a given word form, recognition of its morphological characteristics and their morphological disambiguation. The morphological analysis also involves the problem of morpheme segmentation of words (i.e., segmentation of words into constituent morphs and their classification), which is actual in some NLP applications. In recent years, several machine learning models have been developed, which increase the accuracy of traditional morphological analysis and morpheme segmentation, but performance of such models is insufficient for many applied problems. For morpheme segmentation, high-precision models have been built only for lemmas (normalized word forms). This paper describes two new high-accuracy neural network models that implement morphemic segmentation of Russian word forms with sufficiently high performance. The first model is based on convolutional neural networks and shows the state-of-the-art quality of morphemic segmentation for Russian word forms. The second model, besides morpheme segmentation of a word form, preliminarily refines its morphological characteristics, thereby performing their disambiguation. The performance of this joined morphological model is the best among the considered morpheme segmentation models, with comparable accuracy of segmentation.

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Measuring Word Learning Ability in Sequential Bilingual Children

Perspectives on Communication Disorders and Sciences in Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Populations ◽

10.1044/cds17.1.25 ◽

2010 ◽

Vol 17 (1) ◽

pp. 25-32 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

Pui Fong Kan

Keyword(s):

Word Learning ◽

Learning Ability ◽

Bilingual Children ◽

Word Knowledge ◽

Typically Developing ◽

Learning Skills ◽

Word Forms ◽

The Individual ◽

Novel Word Learning ◽

L1 And L2

Abstract The purpose of this article is to look at the word learning skills in sequential bilingual children—children who learn two languages (L1 and L2) at different times in their childhood. Learning a new word is a process of learning a word form and relating this form to a concept. For bilingual children, each concept might need to map onto two word forms (in L1 and in L2). In case studies, I present 3 typically developing Hmong-English bilingual preschoolers' word learning skills in Hmong (L1) and in English (L2) during an 8-week period (4 weeks for each language). The results showed gains in novel-word knowledge in L1 and in L2 when the amount of input is equal for both languages. The individual differences in novel word learning are discussed.

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Why Words Are Hard for Adults With Developmental Language Impairments

Journal of Speech Language and Hearing Research ◽

10.1044/1092-4388(2013/12-0233) ◽

2013 ◽

Vol 56 (6) ◽

pp. 1845-1856 ◽

Cited By ~ 33

Author(s):

Karla K. McGregor ◽

Ulla Licandro ◽

Richard Arenas ◽

Nichole Eden ◽

Derek Stiles ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Language Impairment ◽

Normal Development ◽

Declarative Memory ◽

Poor Performance ◽

Language Impairments ◽

Learning Problems ◽

Word Form ◽

Word Meanings ◽

Word Forms ◽

Similarities And Differences

Purpose To determine whether word learning problems associated with developmental language impairment (LI) reflect deficits in encoding or subsequent remembering of forms and meanings. Method Sixty-nine 18- to 25-year-olds with LI or without (the normal development [ND] group) took tests to measure learning of 16 word forms and meanings immediately after training (encoding) and 12 hr, 24 hr, and 1 week later (remembering). Half of the participants trained in the morning, and half trained in the evening. Results At immediate posttest, participants with LI performed more poorly on form and meaning than those with ND. Poor performance was more likely among those with more severe LI. The LI–ND gap for word form recall widened over 1 week. In contrast, the LI and ND groups demonstrated no difference in remembering word meanings over the week. In both groups, participants who trained in the evening, and therefore slept shortly after training, demonstrated greater gains in meaning recall than those who trained in the morning. Conclusions Some adults with LI have encoding deficits that limit the addition of word forms and meanings to the lexicon. Similarities and differences in patterns of remembering in the LI and ND groups motivate the hypothesis that consolidation of declarative memory is a strength for adults with LI.

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Context and paradigms

The Mental Lexicon ◽

10.1075/ml.10.3.01coh ◽

2015 ◽

Vol 10 (3) ◽

pp. 313-338 ◽

Cited By ~ 6

Author(s):

Clara Cohen

Keyword(s):

Current Work ◽

Yield Reduction ◽

Exemplar Model ◽

Word Form ◽

Pronunciation Variation ◽

Growing Body ◽

Word Forms ◽

Verbal Agreement

A small but growing body of research on English and Dutch has found that pronunciation of affixes in a word form is sensitive to paradigmatic probability – i.e., the probability of using that form over other words in the same morphological paradigm. Yet it remains unclear (a) how paradigmatic probability is best measured; (b) whether an increase in paradigmatic probability leads to phonetic enhancement or reduction; and (c) by what mechanism paradigmatic probability can affect pronunciation. The current work examines pronunciation variation of Russian verbal agreement suffixes. I show that there are two distinct patterns of variation, corresponding to two different measures of paradigmatic probability. One measure, pairwise paradigmatic probability, is associated with a pronunciation pattern that resembles phonetic enhancement. The second measure, lexeme paradigmatic probability, can show enhancement effects, but can also yield reduction effects more similar to those of contextual probability. I propose that these two patterns can be explained in an exemplar model of lexical storage. Reduction effects are the consequence of faster retrieval and encoding of an articulatory target, while effects that resemble enhancement result when the pronunciation target of both members of a pair of competing word forms is shifted towards the more frequent of two.

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Language Usage and Second Language Morphosyntax: Effects of Availability, Reliability, and Formulaicity

Frontiers in Psychology ◽

10.3389/fpsyg.2021.582259 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 12 ◽

Author(s):

Rundi Guo ◽

Nick C. Ellis

Keyword(s):

Second Language ◽

Language Acquisition ◽

Language Processing ◽

Fixed Effects ◽

Second Language Learners ◽

Large Body ◽

Elicited Imitation ◽

Short Delay ◽

Word Forms ◽

Generalized Linear Mixed Effects

A large body of psycholinguistic research demonstrates that both language processing and language acquisition are sensitive to the distributions of linguistic constructions in usage. Here we investigate how statistical distributions at different linguistic levels – morphological and lexical (Experiments 1 and 2), and phrasal (Experiment 2) – contribute to the ease with which morphosyntax is processed and produced by second language learners. We analyze Chinese ESL learners’ knowledge of four English inflectional morphemes: -ed, -ing, and third-person -s on verbs, and plural -s on nouns. In Elicited Imitation Tasks, participants listened to length- and difficulty-matched sentences each containing one target morpheme and typed the whole sentence as accurately as they could after a short delay. Experiment 1 investigated lexical and morphemic levels, testing the hypotheses that a morpheme is expected to be more easily processed when it is (1) highly available (i.e., occurring in frequent word-forms), and (2) highly reliable (i.e., occurring in lemma words that are consistently conjugated in the form containing this morpheme). Thirty sentences were made for each morpheme, divided into three Availability-Reliability Distribution (ARD) groups on the basis of corpus analysis in the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA; Davies, 2008-): 10 target words high in availability, 10 high in reliability, and 10 low in both reliability and availability. Responses were scored on whether the target morpheme was accurately reproduced given the provision of the correct lemma. A generalized linear mixed-effects logit model (GLMM) revealed fixed effects of morpheme type, availability, and reliability on the accuracy of morpheme provision. There were no effects of lemma frequency. Experiment 2 successfully replicated these results and extended the investigation to explore phrasal formulaicity by manipulating the frequency of the four-word strings in which the morpheme was embedded. GLMMs replicated the effects of word-form availability and reliability and additionally revealed independent phrase-superiority effects where morphemes were better reproduced in contexts of higher string-frequency. Taken together, these findings demonstrate that morpheme acquisition reflects the distributional properties of learners’ experience and the mappings therein between lexis, morphology, phraseology, and semantics. These conclusions support an emergentist view of the statistical symbolic learning of morphology where language acquisition involves the satisfaction of competing constraints across multiple grain-sizes of units.

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Similarity-based interference and relative clauses in second language processing

Second language Research ◽

10.1177/02676583211063534 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 026765832110635

Author(s):

Ian Cunnings ◽

Hiroki Fujita

Keyword(s):

Language Processing ◽

Relative Clause ◽

Relative Clauses ◽

Large Body ◽

Interference Effects ◽

Second Language Processing ◽

L2 Processing ◽

Relative Disadvantage ◽

L1 And L2 ◽

Object Relative

Relative clauses have long been examined in research on first (L1) and second (L2) language acquisition and processing, and a large body of research has shown that object relative clauses (e.g. ‘The boy that the girl saw’) are more difficult to process than subject relative clauses (e.g. ‘The boy that saw the girl’). Although there are different accounts of this finding, memory-based factors have been argued to play a role in explaining the object relative disadvantage. Evidence of memory-based factors in relative clause processing comes from studies indicating that representational similarity influences the difficulty associated with object relatives as a result of a phenomenon known as similarity-based interference. Although similarity-based interference has been well studied in L1 processing, less is known about how it influences L2 processing. We report two studies – an eye-tracking experiment and a comprehension task – investigating interference in the comprehension of relative clauses in L1 and L2 readers. Our results indicated similarity-based interference in the processing of object relative clauses in both L1 and L2 readers, with no significant differences in the size of interference effects between the two groups. These results highlight the importance of considering memory-based factors when examining L2 processing.

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Circadian rhythms and second language performance

Studies in Second Language Learning and Teaching ◽

10.14746/ssllt.2017.7.1.3 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 7 (1) ◽

pp. 47-60

Author(s):

Kees De Bot ◽

Fang Fang

Keyword(s):

Second Language ◽

Language Learning ◽

Lexical Access ◽

Language Processing ◽

Language Performance ◽

Intraindividual Variation ◽

The Hours ◽

L1 And L2 ◽

The Impact ◽

Second Language Performance

Human behavior is not constant over the hours of the day, and there are considerable individual differences. Some people raise early and go to bed early and have their peek performance early in the day (“larks”) while others tend to go to bed late and get up late and have their best performance later in the day (“owls”). In this contribution we report on three projects on the role of chronotype (CT) in language processing and learning. The first study (de Bot, 2013) reports on the impact of CT on language learning aptitude and word learning. The second project was reported in Fang (2015) and looks at CT and executive functions, in particular inhibition as measured by variants of the Stroop test. The third project aimed at assessing lexical access in L1 and L2 at preferred and non-preferred times of the day. The data suggest that there are effects of CT on language learning and processing. There is a small effect of CT on language aptitude and a stronger effect of CT on lexical access in the first and second language. The lack of significance for other tasks is mainly caused by the large interindividual and intraindividual variation.

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Morphological Means in Russian: Clarification of the Concept

Vestnik NSU Series History and Philology ◽

10.25205/1818-7919-2021-20-9-23-33 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 20 (9) ◽

pp. 23-33

Author(s):

Galina I. Panova ◽

Tatiana V. Viktorina ◽

Antonina E. Kuzmina

Keyword(s):

Word Order ◽

Morphological Structure ◽

Russian Language ◽

Word Form ◽

Similar Function ◽

Word Forms ◽

The Status ◽

Definition Of ◽

Linguistic Units ◽

The Russian Language

The concept of “morphological / grammatical means” is widely used in studies on the Russian language, although there is no generally accepted interpretation. This work analyzes the reflection of this concept in Russian studies and clarifies the status of those linguistic units that are traditionally referred to as morphological means: form-building affixes, alternating sounds (internal inflection), stress, supplementary word stems, auxiliary words, intonation, as well as word order. Our research has shown that these linguistic units have different functional status in the morphological structure of the Russian language. First, these are categorical, or actually morphological, means, represented by formative affixes and auxiliary words. They are carriers of morphological meanings in the structure of abstracted morphological forms – the basic units of inflectional Russian morphology. Secondly, a non-categorical means, syncretic and accidental for morphology, are supplementary stems that contain not only lexical, but also morphological meaning and thus duplicate the expression of morphological information in a word form with a form-building affix. Thirdly, these are linguistic units that are not elements of the morphological structure, but have morphological significance, which is manifested in their ability to differentiate homonymous morphological forms in the structure of word forms (alternating sounds and stress) or utterances (intonation). Word order can also perform a similar function. The study allows us to clarify the definition of the concept under consideration: morphological means are linguistic units that are carriers of morphological meanings and constituents of morphological forms.

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