Acquisition of cumulative conditioning effects on words: Spanish-speaking children’s [subject pronoun + verb] usage

Child language acquisition research has provided ample evidence of lexical frequency effects. This corpus-based analysis introduces a novel frequency measure shown to significantly constrain adult language variation, but heretofore unexplored in child language acquisition research. Among adults, frequent occurrence of a form in a particular discourse context that conditions usage accumulates in memory over time and shapes the lexical representation of that form. This study contributes to the body of research on frequency effects in child language acquisition by testing whether such cumulative conditioning effects are also found among children, and, if so, at what age such effects appear. Specifically, the study investigates the influence of a distributional frequency measure (each verb form’s likelihood of use in a switch vs same-reference discourse context) on variable subject personal pronoun (SPP) expression ( N = 2227) in Spanish (e.g. yo voy ~ voy, both meaning ‘I go’) in the speech of 65 monolingual children in two age cohorts. Results reveal sensitivity to the contextual conditioning of discourse continuity (switch reference) among both the younger (6- and 7-year-olds) and older (8- and 9-year-olds) children in support of previous research. In addition, each verb’s likelihood of use in a switch-reference context significantly predicted the SPP use among the older children, but not the younger ones, suggesting that the cumulative effect of a probabilistic pattern takes time to emerge during childhood. The lexically specific accumulation in memory of contextual conditioning effects supports exemplar models of child language acquisition: each instance of use in discourse contributes to the lexical representation of that form and, over time, plays a role in the creation of morphosyntactic patterns during language development.

Reprezentacje leksykalne pojęć CHRZEST, CHRZEST JANOWY oraz CHRZEST PAŃSKI w średniowieczu. Analiza onomazjologiczna

In the article, the subject of description included continuous and discontinuous autosemantic lexical units used in the medieval language (until the end of the 15th century) to denote two different religious rites described in the New Testament and the rite of Christian initiation in the New Testament and in the Middle Ages in Poland. They are a lexical representation of the concepts of BAPTISM. JOHN’S BAPTISM. LORD’S BAPTISM in the Słownik pojęciowy języka staropolskiego online [Conceptual Old Polish Dictionary online].

Philological analysis of the text: reception of I. A. Bunin's short fiction “The Epitaph”

The object of this research is Ivan Bunin’s prose of the early period – “The Epitaph”. I. A. Bunin is a Neorealist writer of the turn of the XIX – XX centuries, publicist, a unique representative of the white émigré. The subject of this research is the reception of “The Epitaph” by modern audience based on the command of philological text analysis. Having analyzed the traditional semantic components of the literary text (that are part of the concept of “philological text analysis”), the authors offer modern approaches towards representation of the established semantic categories of the text, demonstrate their functionality on the linguistic level, analyze the methods of their lexical representation and verbalization, which determines the novelty of this article. The goal lies in philological analysis of I. A. Bunin's short fiction “The Epitaph”, taking into account the historical-cultural context of its creation, the role of extralinguistic factors in the text, and their reflection on the linguistic level, semantics of the title and keywords in the ideological-thematic content of the work and expression of the authorial position. Alongside the traditional methods of academic philology, such as historical-cultural, biographical, commentary reading, linguistic-stylistic analysis, the research employs the techniques of cognitive linguistics. This article is first to describe the experience of a commentary reading of I. A. Bunin's short fiction “The Epitaph”, which is based on cognition of the semantic components of the work through the prism of a linguostylistic approach within the framework of philological analysis. The authors reveal techniques of reading the text, placing emphasis on the lexical means of representation of the key semantic categories, which on the one hand reflect the writer’s worldview , while on the other – form his individual writing style. Such articulation of the problem determines the prospects for the study of other proses of I. A. Bunin.

Means of Lexical Representation of Spatial Continuum in Early Stories of I. A. Bunin

The question of ways of creating a spatial continuum in the early stories of I. A. Bunin “On the wrong side”, “On the farm” and “On the Donets”, united by a single principle of nomination and included in the first book of the writer’s prose “To the end of the world” (1897) is considered in the article. The semantics of the title actualizes the spatial component of the author’s linguistic picture of the world, which determined the path of linguistic and stylistic analysis of the linguistic material of stories. The authors pay special attention to the means of lexical representation of space as one of the basic linguo-cognitive categories. The novelty of the research lies in the fact that the language material has been identified, systematized and described, which makes it possible to determine the individual author's characteristics in the creation of the spatial continuum of I. A. Bunin’s early stories. The relevance of the study is due to the appeal to the problems of cognitive linguistics. On the basis of statistical, descriptive and linguo-cognitive methods of analysis, the authors identify and describe the means of lexical representation of the spatial model created in the stories of I. A. Bunin, which is characterized by a clear structuredness and individuality of the author’s approach. In the course of the study, the authors come to conclusions that make it possible to characterize the features of the construction of space in the early stories of the writer, taking into account the individual characteristics of the author's world modeling, and also to analyze the linguistic parameters of the idiostyle of I. A. Bunin.

Testing the storage of prosody-induced phonetic detail via auditory lexical decision

This article reports the results of an auditory lexical decision task, testing the processing of phonetic detail of English noun/verb conversion pairs. The article builds on recent findings showing that the frequent occurrence in certain prosodic environments may lead to the storage of prosody-induced phonetic detail as part of the lexical representation. To investigate this question with noun/verb conversion pairs, ambicategorical stimuli were used that exhibit systematic occurrence differences with regard to prosodic environment, as indicated by either a strong verb-bias, e.g., talk (N/V) or a strong noun-bias, e.g., voice (N/V). The auditory lexical decision task tests whether acoustic properties reflecting either the typical or the atypical prosodic environment impact the processing of recordings of the stimuli. In doing so assumptions about the storage of prosody-induced phonetic detail are tested that distinguish competing model architectures. The results are most straightforwardly accounted for within an abstractionist architecture, in which the acoustic signal is mapped onto a representation that is based on the canonical pronunciation of the word.

The effects of multiple linguistic variables on picture naming in American Sign Language

Picture naming tasks provide critical data for theories of lexical representation and retrieval and have been performed successfully in sign languages. However, the specific influences of lexical or phonological factors and stimulus properties on sign retrieval are poorly understood. To examine lexical retrieval in American Sign Language (ASL), we conducted a timed picture naming study using 524 pictures (272 objects and 251 actions). We also compared ASL naming with previous data for spoken English for a subset of 425 pictures. Deaf ASL signers named object pictures faster and more consistently than action pictures, as previously reported for English speakers. Lexical frequency, iconicity, better name agreement, and lower phonological complexity each facilitated naming RTs. RTs were also faster for pictures named with shorter signs (measured by average response duration). Target name agreement was higher for pictures with more iconic and shorter ASL names. The visual complexity of pictures slowed RTs and decreased target name agreement. RTs and target name agreement were correlated for ASL and English, but agreement was lower for ASL, possibly due to the English bias of the pictures. RTs were faster for ASL, which we attributed to a smaller lexicon. Overall, the results suggest that models of lexical retrieval developed for spoken languages can be adopted for signed languages, with the exception that iconicity should be included as a factor. The open-source picture naming dataset for ASL serves as an important, first-of-its-kind resource for researchers, educators, or clinicians for a variety of research, instructional, or assessment purposes.