scholarly journals Fuzzy Lexical Representations in Adult Second Language Speakers

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kira Gor ◽  
Svetlana Cook ◽  
Denisa Bordag ◽  
Anna Chrabaszcz ◽  
Andreas Opitz
Keyword(s):  
Lexical Access ◽  
Lexical Processing ◽  
Input Frequency ◽  
Main Claim ◽  
Lexical Representations ◽  
Storage And Retrieval ◽  
Second Language Speakers ◽  
Core Property ◽  
Phonological Form ◽  
Word Forms

We propose the fuzzy lexical representations (FLRs) hypothesis that regards fuzziness as a core property of nonnative (L2) lexical representations (LRs). Fuzziness refers to imprecise encoding at different levels of LRs and interacts with input frequency during lexical processing and learning in adult L2 speakers. The FLR hypothesis primarily focuses on the encoding of spoken L2 words. We discuss the causes of fuzzy encoding of phonological form and meaning as well as fuzzy form-meaning mappings and the consequences of fuzzy encoding for word storage and retrieval. A central factor contributing to the fuzziness of L2 LRs is the fact that the L2 lexicon is acquired when the L1 lexicon is already in place. There are two immediate consequences of such sequential learning. First, L2 phonological categorization difficulties lead to fuzzy phonological form encoding. Second, the acquisition of L2 word forms subsequently to their meanings, which had already been acquired together with the L1 word forms, leads to weak L2 form-meaning mappings. The FLR hypothesis accounts for a range of phenomena observed in L2 lexical processing, including lexical confusions, slow lexical access, retrieval of incorrect lexical entries, weak lexical competition, reliance on sublexical rather than lexical heuristics in word recognition, the precedence of word form over meaning, and the prominence of detailed, even if imprecisely encoded, information about LRs in episodic memory. The main claim of the FLR hypothesis – that the quality of lexical encoding is a product of a complex interplay between fuzziness and input frequency – can contribute to increasing the efficiency of the existing models of LRs and lexical access.

Effects of the relationships between forms within and across paradigms on lexical processing and representation

2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 285-310
Author(s):  
Jeff Parker
Keyword(s):  
Lexical Decision ◽  
Lexical Decision Task ◽  
Lexical Access ◽  
Lexical Processing ◽  
Decision Task ◽  
Theoretical Studies ◽  
Priming Task ◽  
Word Forms ◽  
Better Than ◽  
Visual Lexical Decision

Abstract The frequency and distribution of forms within a lexeme’s paradigm affect how quickly forms are accessed (e.g., Kostić, 1991; Milin, Filipović Đurđević, & Moscoso del Prado Martín, 2009; Moscoso del Prado Martı́n, Kostić, & Baayen, 2004). The distribution of forms across paradigms, in contrast, has received little experimental attention. Theoretical studies investigate the distribution of forms across paradigms because forms vary in how predictive they are of other (unknown) forms. Such investigations have uncovered typological tendencies (e.g., Ackerman & Malouf, 2013; Stump & Finkel, 2013) and contribute to explanations of language-specific phenomena (e.g., Sims, 2015; Parker & Sims, To appear). The intersection of these research approaches raises questions about how the distribution of forms within and across paradigms affects lexical access and representation. Based on forms of Russian nouns representing two morphosyntactic property sets and lexemes from three inflection classes, it is shown that speakers are sensitive to differences in form and morphosyntactic property set in a visual lexical decision task. In a priming task, nominative forms prime locative forms better than vice versa regardless of suffix, despite differences between the same forms in the lexical decision task. These results suggest that speakers make generalizations about forms across classes, including at the level of word forms and morphosyntactic property sets.

More Alike Than Unalike: Cross-language Similarity Influences Novel Word Lexicalization in Bilingual Individuals

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pauline Palma ◽  
Marie-France Marin ◽  
k onishi ◽  
Debra Titone
Keyword(s):  
Lexical Decision ◽  
Lexical Decision Task ◽  
Decision Task ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Lexical Representations ◽  
Before And After ◽  
Word Forms ◽  
Explicit Recognition ◽  
Novel Word Learning ◽  
Cross Language

Although several studies have focused on novel word learning and consolidation in native (presumably monolingual) speakers, less is know about how bilinguals add novel words to their mental lexicon. Here, we trained 33 English-French bilinguals on novel word-forms that were neighbors to “hermit” English words (i.e., words with no existing neighbors). Importantly, these English words varied in terms of orthographic overlap with their French translation equivalent (i.e., cognates vs. noncognates). We measured explicit recognition of the novel neighbors and the interaction between novel neighbors and English words through a lexical decision task, both before and after a sleep interval. In the lexical decision task, we found evidence of immediate facilitation for English words with novel neighbors, and evidence of competition after a sleep interval for cognate words only. These results suggest that higher quality of existing lexical representations predicts an earlier onset for novel word lexicalization.

scholarly journals Temporal patterns of words with and without suffixes in spontaneous Hungarian

2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-70
Author(s):  
Mária Gósy ◽  
Ákos Gocsál
Keyword(s):  
Lexical Access ◽  
Semantic Representation ◽  
Temporal Patterns ◽  
Spontaneous Speech ◽  
Lexical Representations ◽  
Temporal Properties ◽  
Specific Factors

Temporal properties of words are defined by physiological, psychical, and language-specific factors. Lexical representations are assumed to be stored either in a morphologically decomposed form or in a conceptually non-decomposed form. We assumed that the duration of words with and without suffixes would refer to the route of their lexical access. Measured durations of Hungarian nouns with various lengths produced by 10 speakers in spontaneous utterances revealed significant differences, depending on the words’ morphological structures. Durations of monomorphemic nouns were shorter than those of multimorphemic nouns, irrespective of the number of syllables they contained. Our interpretation is that multimorphemic words are accessed decompositionally in spontaneous speech, meaning that stem activation of the semantic representation is followed by activation of one or more suffixes. Durational differences of monomorphemic and multimorphemic words were not stable across word lengths. The number of suffixes did not influence the words’ temporal patterns. Kokkuvõte. Mária Gósy ja Ákos Gocsál: Sufiksiga ja sufiksita sõnade ajaline struktuur spontaanses ungari keeles. Sõnade ajalised omadused sõltuvad füsioloogilistest, psühholoogilistest ja keelespetsiifilistest teguritest. Eelduste kohaselt on sõnad mentaalses leksikonis representeeritud kas morfeemideks analüüsituna või tervikmõistena. Uurimuses lähtuti eeldusest, et sufiksiga ja sufiksita sõnade kestus viitab sellele, kuidas juurdepääs neile toimub. Mõõdeti kümne kõneleja spontaansetes lausungites produtseeritud eri pikkusega ungari nimisõnade kestust. Ilmnes, et kestus sõltus oluliselt sõna morfoloogilisest ülesehitusest. Tüvisõnade kestus oli tuletiste omast lühem, sõltumata silpide arvust sõnas. Järelduseks saadi, et juurdepääs tuletistele toimub spontaanses kõnes osade kaupa: tüve semantilise representatsiooni aktiveerimisele järgneb sufiksi või sufiksite aktiveerimine. Tüvisõnade ja tuletiste kestuserinevused olid eri pikkusega sõnade puhul erinevad. Sufiksite arv sõna ajalist struktuuri ei mõjutanud. Märksõnad: kestus, nimisõnad, tüvisõnad ja tuletised, leksikaalne juurdepääs, spontaansed lausungid

scholarly journals Unstressed Vowel Reduction Across Majorcan Catalan Dialects: Production and Spoken Word Recognition

2017 ◽  
Vol 61 (3) ◽  
pp. 430-465 ◽  
Author(s):  
Miquel Llompart ◽  
Miquel Simonet
Keyword(s):  
Word Recognition ◽  
Lexical Processing ◽  
Spoken Word Recognition ◽  
Spoken Word ◽  
Decision Task ◽  
Vowel Duration ◽  
Lexical Representations ◽  
Production Study ◽  
Speech Performance

This study investigates the production and auditory lexical processing of words involved in a patterned phonological alternation in two dialects of Catalan spoken on the island of Majorca, Spain. One of these dialects, that of Palma, merges /ɔ/ and /o/ as [o] in unstressed position, and it maintains /u/ as an independent category, [u]. In the dialect of Sóller, a small village, speakers merge unstressed /ɔ/, /o/, and /u/ to [u]. First, a production study asks whether the discrete, rule-based descriptions of the vowel alternations provided in the dialectological literature are able to account adequately for these processes: are mergers complete? Results show that mergers are complete with regards to the main acoustic cue to these vowel contrasts, that is, F1. However, minor differences are maintained for F2 and vowel duration. Second, a lexical decision task using cross-modal priming investigates the strength with which words produced in the phonetic form of the neighboring (versus one’s own) dialect activate the listeners’ lexical representations during spoken word recognition: are words within and across dialects accessed efficiently? The study finds that listeners from one of these dialects, Sóller, process their own and the neighboring forms equally efficiently, while listeners from the other one, Palma, process their own forms more efficiently than those of the neighboring dialect. This study has implications for our understanding of the role of lifelong linguistic experience on speech performance.

Morpheme recognition and the learning of rules for derivational morphology

1976 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 38-66 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruce L. Derwing
Keyword(s):  
Native Speakers ◽  
Language Learner ◽  
Derivational Morphology ◽  
Lexical Representations ◽  
Linguistic Description ◽  
Phonological Form ◽  
The Common ◽  
Morphological Relationship

Derivational morphology is one of the most difficult and least studied of all the areas of linguistic description (cf. Lightner, 1968:71). There are two main problems which are largely responsible for this. The first is the question of morpheme recognition or lexical identity: how similar in meaning or in sound do two words have to be in order for the linguist or language learner to identify a common morphemic unit and thus to see a morphological relationship between the words? (This problem is discussed in detail in Derwing, 1973: 122-6.) Many of the morphological rules which are proposed by linguists, whether morphophonemic or phonotactic in presumed character, are posited primarily, if not solely, in order to capture certain kinds of supposed ‘lexical redundancies,’ i.e., systematic variations which appear in the phonological form of the same morpheme when the morpheme occurs in different syntactic constructions. The viability of all such rules is thus directly contingent upon the assumption that the words involved do, in fact, share a common morpheme. Consider, for example, the morphophonemic rule which Chomsky proposes for English which changes a /d/ to an /s/ before the suffix /lv/, and the phonotactic rule which changes a /d/ plus /i/ or /y/ into a /ž/ before a vowel (1964:90); both of these rules are motivated by the presumed fact that the English words decisive and decision, for example, contain in their ‘underlying’ or ‘lexical’ representations the common morpheme decide. But how does one decide whether this claim is justified for ordinary native speakers of the language, particularly in some of the more problematical cases discussed in Derwing (1973)?

Dispersion Theory and Phonology

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edward Flemming
Keyword(s):  
Theoretic Model ◽  
Perceptual Space ◽  
Dispersion Theory ◽  
Phonological Constraints ◽  
Perceptual Differences ◽  
Proper Formulation ◽  
Phonological Form ◽  
Word Forms ◽  
Open Question ◽  
Phonetic Realization

Dispersion Theory concerns the constraints that govern contrasts, the phonetic differences that can distinguish words in a language. Specifically it posits that there are distinctiveness constraints that favor contrasts that are more perceptually distinct over less distinct contrasts. The preference for distinct contrasts is hypothesized to follow from a preference to minimize perceptual confusion: In order to recover what a speaker is saying, a listener must identify the words in the utterance. The more confusable words are, the more likely a listener is to make errors. Because contrasts are the minimal permissible differences between words in a language, banning indistinct contrasts reduces the likelihood of misperception. The term ‘dispersion’ refers to the separation of sounds in perceptual space that results from maximizing the perceptual distinctiveness of the contrasts between those sounds, and is adopted from Lindblom’s Theory of Adaptive Dispersion, a theory of phoneme inventories according to which inventories are selected so as to maximize the perceptual differences between phonemes. These proposals follow a long tradition of explaining cross-linguistic tendencies in the phonetic and phonological form of languages in terms of a preference for perceptually distinct contrasts. Flemming proposes that distinctiveness constraints constitute one class of constraints in an Optimality Theoretic model of phonology. In this context, distinctiveness constraints predict several basic phenomena, the first of which is the preference for maximal dispersion in inventories of contrasting sounds that first motivated the development of the Theory of Adaptive Dispersion. But distinctiveness constraints are formulated as constraints on the surface forms of possible words that interact with other phonological constraints, so they evaluate the distinctiveness of contrasts in context. As a result, Dispersion Theory predicts that contrasts can be neutralized or enhanced in particular phonological contexts. This prediction arises because the phonetic realization of sounds depends on their context, so the perceptual differences between contrasting sounds also depend on context. If the realization of a contrast in a particular context would be insufficiently distinct (i.e., it would violate a high-ranked distinctiveness constraint), there are two options: the offending contrast can be neutralized, or it can be modified (‘enhanced’) to make it more distinct. A basic open question regarding Dispersion Theory concerns the proper formulation of distinctiveness constraints and the extent of variation in their rankings across languages, issues that are tied up with the questions about the nature of perceptual distinctiveness. Another concerns the size and nature of the comparison set of contrasting word-forms required to be able to evaluate whether a candidate output satisfies distinctiveness constraints.

Short Article: Tracking the Transition from Sublexical to Lexical Processing: On the Creation of Orthographic and Phonological Lexical Representations

2009 ◽  
Vol 62 (5) ◽  
pp. 858-867 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erin Maloney ◽  
Evan F. Risko ◽  
Shannon O'Malley ◽  
Derek Besner
Keyword(s):  
Lexical Processing ◽  
Reading Aloud ◽  
Read Aloud ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Short Article ◽  
Standard Result ◽  
Lexical Representations ◽  
Lexical Route ◽  
Lower Case ◽  
Dual Route

Participants read aloud nonword letter strings, one at a time, which varied in the number of letters. The standard result is observed in two experiments; the time to begin reading aloud increases as letter length increases. This result is standardly understood as reflecting the operation of a serial, left-to-right translation of graphemes into phonemes. The novel result is that the effect of letter length is statistically eliminated by a small number of repetitions. This elimination suggests that these nonwords are no longer always being read aloud via a serial left-to-right sublexical process. Instead, the data are taken as evidence that new orthographic and phonological lexical entries have been created for these nonwords and are now read at least sometimes by recourse to the lexical route. Experiment 2 replicates the interaction between nonword letter length and repetition observed in Experiment 1 and also demonstrates that this interaction is not seen when participants merely classify the string as appearing in upper or lower case. Implications for existing dual-route models of reading aloud and Share's self-teaching hypothesis are discussed.

scholarly journals The use and nature of grapheme coding during sub-lexical processing and lexical access

2018 ◽  
Vol 71 (6) ◽  
pp. 1324-1339 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eva Commissaire ◽  
Séverine Casalis
Keyword(s):  
Lexical Access ◽  
Lexical Processing ◽  
Stimulus Onset ◽  
Detection Task ◽  
Single Letter ◽  
Decision Task ◽  
Letter Detection ◽  
Experimental Conditions ◽  
Lexical Route

This work aimed to investigate grapheme coding during sub-lexical processing and lexical access. Using the letter detection task in Experiment 1, we compared letter pairs that could be considered as a grapheme unit or not depending on context (referred to as weakly cohesive complex, e.g., an in chant vs cane) to real two-letter graphemes (highly cohesive complex, e.g., au in chaud) and single-letter graphemes (simple, e.g., a in place). Three experimental conditions were used, one of which was designed to prevent phonological influences. Data revealed that only highly cohesive complex graphemes were processed as units, not the weakly cohesive ones. The same pattern was found across experimental conditions in favor of an orthographic mechanism. In Experiments 2 and 3, a primed lexical decision task was used with two stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs) and two different ranges of lexical frequency. We manipulated the number of graphemes removed from partial primes ( d**che vs do**he-DOUCHE) and relatedness. In contrast to Experiment 1, no evidence was provided in favor of a role of graphemes during lexical access. We suggest that graphemes can be conceived as sub-lexical orthographic units per se but can only be captured within a sub-lexical route to reading.

The influence of grammatical gender and suffix transparency in processing Italian written nouns

2017 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 107-128 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria De Martino ◽  
Giulia Bracco ◽  
Francesca Postiglione ◽  
Alessandro Laudanna
Keyword(s):  
Lexical Decision ◽  
Lexical Access ◽  
Lexical Processing ◽  
Reading Aloud ◽  
Grammatical Gender ◽  
Surface Form ◽  
Alternative Account ◽  
Default Option ◽  
Bare Nouns ◽  
Better Than

Abstract In some languages the grammatical gender of nouns can be probabilistically detected using formal cues; for instance, in Italian, the majority of feminine nouns end in ‘-a’(e.g., casa, ‘home’) and the majority of masculine nouns end in ‘-o’ (e.g., albero, ‘tree’). It has been hypothesized that the match/mismatch between the formal information of the suffix and the abstract grammatical information on gender affects lexical processing of nouns. An alternative account is that a default option available for gender poses constraints to mechanisms of lexical access for words exhibiting gender markers in the surface form. In the present study, nouns with highly predictive gender suffix (regular), nouns whose gender cannot be recovered from surface form (opaque) and nouns with misleading gender suffix (irregular) were compared in two reading aloud and two lexical decision experiments. Results confirmed that regular nouns are processed better than irregular nouns. No difference was detected between masculine and feminine opaque nouns. The results allow the conclusion that a formal gender feature (the gender orthographic regularity) is more likely to affect lexical processing of bare nouns than the activation of a gender default option.

Cumulative context effects and variant lexical representations: Word use and English final t/d deletion

2016 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 175-202 ◽  
Author(s):  
William D. Raymond ◽  
Esther L. Brown ◽  
Alice F. Healy
Keyword(s):  
Context Effects ◽  
Cumulative Exposure ◽  
Word Use ◽  
Lexical Representations ◽  
Word Repetition ◽  
Production Variability ◽  
Word Forms ◽  
Final Segment ◽  
Variant Frequency ◽  
Speech Modeling

AbstractWord production variability is widespread in speech, and rates of variant production correlate with many factors. Recent research suggests mental representation of both canonical word forms and distinct reduced variants, and that production and processing are sensitive to variant frequency. What factors lead to frequency-weighted variant representations? An experiment manipulated following context and word repetition for final t/d words in read, narrative English speech. Modeling the experimentally generated data statistically showed higher final-segment deletion in tokens followed by consonant-initial words, but no evidence of increased deletion with repetition, regardless of context. Deletion rates were also higher the greater a word's cumulative exposure to consonant contexts (measured from distributional statistics), but there was no effect of word frequency. Token effects are interpreted in terms of articulation processes. The type-level context effect is interpreted within exemplar and usage-based models of language to suggest that experiences with word variants in contexts register as frequency-weighted representations.

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