lexical retrieval
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Author(s):  
Kitaek Kim ◽  
Hyunwoo Kim

Abstract This study investigated the unresolved issue of potential sources of heritage language attrition. To test contributing effects of three learner variables – age of second language acquisition, length of residence, and language input – on heritage children's lexical retrieval accuracy and speed, we conducted a real-time word naming task with 68 children (age 11–14 years) living in South Korea who spoke either Chinese or Russian as a heritage language. Results of regression analyses showed that the participants were less accurate and slower in naming target words in their heritage language as their length of residence in Korea and the amount of Korean input increased. The age of Korean acquisition did not significantly influence their performance. These findings support the claim that heritage speakers’ language experience is a more reliable predictor of first language attrition than age of acquisition. We discuss these findings in light of different approaches to explaining language attrition.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zhiming Bao ◽  
Luwen Cao ◽  
Kunmei Han ◽  
Lin Li ◽  
Jia Wen Hing ◽  
...  

Abstract It is well-documented that patients with semantic dementia and Alzheimer’s disease present with difficulty in lexical retrieval and reversal of the concreteness effect in nouns and verbs. Little is known about the lexical phenomena before the onset of symptoms. We anticipate that there are linguistic signs in the speech of people who suffer from mild cognitive impairment (MCI), the prodromal stage of dementia. Here, we report the results of a novel corpus-linguistic approach to the early detection of cognitive impairment. We recorded 40 hours of natural, unconstrained speech of 188 English-speaking Singaporeans; 90 are diagnosed with MCI (51 amnestic, 39 nonamnestic), and 98 are cognitively healthy. The recordings yield 327,470 words, which are tagged for parts of speech. We calculate the per-minute speech rates and concreteness scores of nouns and verbs, and of all tagged words, in our dataset. Our analysis shows that the two measures of nouns and verbs identify different subtypes of MCI. Compared with healthy controls, subjects with amnestic MCI produce fewer but more abstract nouns, whereas subjects with nonamnestic MCI produce fewer but more concrete verbs. Cognitive impairment is manifested in ordinary language before the presentation of clinical symptoms, and can be detected through non-invasive corpus-based analysis of natural speech.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Guilherme D. Garcia ◽  
Natália Brambatti Guzzo

Categorical approaches to lexical stress typically assume that words have either regular or irregular stress, and imply that only the latter needs to be stored in the lexicon, while the former can be derived by rule. In this paper, we compare these two groups of words in a lexical decision task in Portuguese to examine whether the dichotomy in question affects lexical retrieval latencies in native speakers, which could indirectly reveal different processing patterns. Our results show no statistically credible effect of stress regularity on reaction times, even when lexical frequency, neighborhood density, and phonotactic probability are taken into consideration. The lack of an effect is consistent with a probabilistic approach to stress, not with a categorical (traditional) approach where syllables are either light or heavy and stress is either regular or irregular. We show that the posterior distribution of credible effect sizes of regularity is almost entirely (96.28%) within the region of practical equivalence, which provides strong evidence that no effect of regularity exists in the lexical decision data modelled. Frequency and phonotactic probability, in contrast, showed statistically credible effects given the experimental data modelled, which is consistent with the literature.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mahmoud Medhat Elsherif ◽  
Jon Catling

Age of acquisition (AoA) is a measure of learning experience and a strong predictor of lexical retrieval. According to the integrated view, the AoA effect results from the development of semantic representations and the mappings between these representations. This has not been considered in morphologically complex words. The integrated account predicts that the AoA effect should be larger in tasks requiring greater semantic processing and any AoA effects should be shown in the early processes of word recognition. The present study investigates these predictions in compound words, which differ from monomorphemic words in terms of ease of mapping and semantic processes in lexical retrieval. Forty-eight participants completed a compound lexeme segmentation (CLS) task, in which participants named either the head or modifier depending on the number above the compound word, to establish how semantics are involved in processing the head and the modifier. The results demonstrated that semantics influenced the naming of the modifier to a greater extent than the head, with the AoA effect being larger in the modifier than the head. Our findings provide evidence that aligns with the multiple origins of AoA effects in the language processing system.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Paula Speer

<p>Individuals with nonfluent aphasia are able to produce many words in isolation, but have great difficulty producing sentences. Most research to date has compared accuracy across different types of sentence structures, focussing on grammatical aspects that may be compromised in nonfluent aphasia. However, based on the premise that lexical elements activate their associated grammatical frames as well as vice versa, lexical content may also be of vital importance. For example, rapid access to lexical elements – particularly ones appearing early in the sentence - may be crucial, especially if the sentence plan is weakly activated or rapidly decaying. The current study investigated the effect of different aspects of lexical content on nonfluent aphasic sentence production. Five participants with nonfluent aphasia, four participants with fluent aphasia and eight controls completed two picture description tasks eliciting subject-verb-object sentences (e.g., the dog is chasing the fox). Based on existing evidence suggesting that common words are accessed more rapidly than rarer ones, Experiment 1 manipulated the frequency of sentence nouns, thereby varying their speed of lexical retrieval by varying the frequency of sentence nouns. Nonfluent participants' accuracy was consistently higher for sentences commencing with a high frequency subject noun, even when errors on those nouns were themselves excluded. This was not the case for the fluent participants. Experiment 2 manipulated the semantic relationship between subject and object nouns. Previous research suggests that phrases containing related words may be challenging for individuals with nonfluent aphasia, possibly because lexical representations are inadequately tied to appropriate structural representations. The nonfluent participants produced sentences less accurately when they contained related lexical items, even when those items were in different noun phrases. The fluent participants exhibited the opposite trend. Finally, the relationship between the patterns observed in Experiment 1 and 2 and lesion location in the aphasic participants was explored by analysing magnetic resonance scans. We discuss the implications of our findings for theoretical accounts of sentence production more generally, and of nonfluent aphasia in particular. More precisely, we propose that individuals with nonfluent aphasia are disproportionately reliant on activated lexical representations to drive the sentence generation process, an idea we call the Content Drives Structure (COST) hypothesis.</p>


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Paula Speer

<p>Individuals with nonfluent aphasia are able to produce many words in isolation, but have great difficulty producing sentences. Most research to date has compared accuracy across different types of sentence structures, focussing on grammatical aspects that may be compromised in nonfluent aphasia. However, based on the premise that lexical elements activate their associated grammatical frames as well as vice versa, lexical content may also be of vital importance. For example, rapid access to lexical elements – particularly ones appearing early in the sentence - may be crucial, especially if the sentence plan is weakly activated or rapidly decaying. The current study investigated the effect of different aspects of lexical content on nonfluent aphasic sentence production. Five participants with nonfluent aphasia, four participants with fluent aphasia and eight controls completed two picture description tasks eliciting subject-verb-object sentences (e.g., the dog is chasing the fox). Based on existing evidence suggesting that common words are accessed more rapidly than rarer ones, Experiment 1 manipulated the frequency of sentence nouns, thereby varying their speed of lexical retrieval by varying the frequency of sentence nouns. Nonfluent participants' accuracy was consistently higher for sentences commencing with a high frequency subject noun, even when errors on those nouns were themselves excluded. This was not the case for the fluent participants. Experiment 2 manipulated the semantic relationship between subject and object nouns. Previous research suggests that phrases containing related words may be challenging for individuals with nonfluent aphasia, possibly because lexical representations are inadequately tied to appropriate structural representations. The nonfluent participants produced sentences less accurately when they contained related lexical items, even when those items were in different noun phrases. The fluent participants exhibited the opposite trend. Finally, the relationship between the patterns observed in Experiment 1 and 2 and lesion location in the aphasic participants was explored by analysing magnetic resonance scans. We discuss the implications of our findings for theoretical accounts of sentence production more generally, and of nonfluent aphasia in particular. More precisely, we propose that individuals with nonfluent aphasia are disproportionately reliant on activated lexical representations to drive the sentence generation process, an idea we call the Content Drives Structure (COST) hypothesis.</p>


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sol Lago ◽  
Shayne Sloggett ◽  
Zoe Schlueter ◽  
Wing Yee Chow ◽  
Alexander Williams ◽  
...  

Previous studies have shown that speakers of languages such as German, Spanish, and French reactivate the syntactic gender of the antecedent of a pronoun to license gender agreement. As syntactic gender is assumed to be stored in the lexicon, this has motivated the claim that pronouns in these languages reactivate the lexical entry of their antecedent noun. In contrast, in languages without syntactic gender such as English, lexical retrieval might be unnecessary. We used eye-tracking while reading to examine whether antecedent retrieval involves rapid semantic and phonological reactivation. We compared German and English. In German, we found early sensitivity to the semantic but not to the phonological features of the pronoun’s antecedent. In English, readers did not immediately show either semantic or phonological effects specific to coreference. We propose that early semantic facilitation arises due to syntactic gender reactivation, and that antecedent retrieval varies cross-linguistically depending on the type of information relevant to the grammar of each language.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (11) ◽  
pp. 1371
Author(s):  
Stephanie M. Grasso ◽  
Elizabeth D. Peña ◽  
Nina Kazemi ◽  
Haideh Mirzapour ◽  
Rozen Neupane ◽  
...  

Anomia is an early and prominent feature of primary progressive aphasia (PPA) and other neurodegenerative disorders. Research investigating treatment for lexical retrieval impairment in individuals with progressive anomia has focused primarily on monolingual speakers, and treatment in bilingual speakers is relatively unexplored. In this series of single-case experiments, 10 bilingual speakers with progressive anomia received lexical retrieval treatment designed to engage relatively spared cognitive-linguistic abilities and promote word retrieval. Treatment was administered in two phases, with one language targeted per phase. Cross-linguistic cognates (e.g., rose and rosa) were included as treatment targets to investigate their potential to facilitate cross-linguistic transfer. Performance on trained and untrained stimuli was evaluated before, during, and after each phase of treatment, and at 3, 6, and 12 months post-treatment. Participants demonstrated a significant treatment effect in each of their treated languages, with maintenance up to one year post-treatment for the majority of participants. Most participants showed a significant cross-linguistic transfer effect for trained cognates in both the dominant and nondominant language, with fewer than half of participants showing a significant translation effect for noncognates. A gradual diminution of translation and generalization effects was observed during the follow-up period. Findings support the implementation of dual-language intervention approaches for bilingual speakers with progressive anomia, irrespective of language dominance.


Author(s):  
Andreas Opitz ◽  
Denisa Bordag

Abstract Previous research has shown that orthographic marking may have a function beyond identifying orthographic word forms. In two visual priming experiments with native speakers and advanced learners of German (Czech natives) we tested the hypothesis that orthography can convey word-class cues comparable to morphological marking. We examined the effect of initial letter capitalization of nouns (a specific property of German orthography) on the processing of five homonymous and grammatically ambiguous forms. Both populations showed the same pattern of results: deverbal nouns (conversions) patterned together with countable nouns while in a previous study (with eliminated orthographic word-class cues) they patterned together with infinitives. Together, findings suggest that orthographic cues can trigger word-class-specific lexical retrieval/access. They also suggest a lexical entry structure in which conversion nouns, infinitives, and inflected verbal forms share a category-neutral parent node and that specified subnodes are accessed only when specifying cues are available and/or necessary for processing.


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