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.

Linguistic entrenchment and the effect of subjective lexical familiarity in Korean /n/-insertion

Korean shows variable /n/-insertion between a morpheme-final consonant and the initial /i/ or /j/ of a following morpheme. Literature has shown that the appearance of the phenomenon can be affected by various parameters, including social and phonological factors. Exemplar theory contends that a word’s susceptibility to language variation correlates directly with its word frequency, a unitary frequency measure based on a corpus (Pierrehumbert 2001; Bybee 2002). However, given that individuals have different language experience, word frequency rarely addresses individual differences in the same way that self-rated measures of word frequency, known as subjective lexical familiarity, do. This research investigates whether and how the metric of self-rated lexical familiarity affects Korean /n/-insertion. Results indicate that subjective lexical familiarity significantly predicts the appearance of /n/-insertion, such that words more familiar to the speaker show /n/-insertion more often than those that are less familiar.

Refining the Response-Frequency Measure of Media Habit – The role of time pressure

Media habits attract growing attention in communication research. Therefore, valid measures of habit strength are needed. The response-frequency measure of media habit (RFMMH) provides an implicit approach. It does not rely on retrospective self-reports of the habitual character of a behavior. Participants are presented with vignettes referring to various goal situations and choose under time pressure script-based which media device they would use in the respective situation. Choosing the same device across the different goal situations indicates strong general habits. The present paper refines the RFMMH by testing different time pressure levels in a heterogeneous sample to identify the ideal amount of time pressure.

Regular pattern mining on multidimensional databases

Extracting general patterns from a multidimensional database is a tricky task. Designing an algorithm to seek the frequency or no. of occurring patterns and really first-class transaction dimension of a mining pattern, general patterns from a multidimensional database is the objective of the task. Analysis prior to mining required patterns from database hence, Apriori algorithm is used. After the acquiring patterns, they have been improved to many further patterns. Nevertheless, to mine the required patterns from a multidimensional database we use FP development algorithm. Here, now we have carried out a pop-growth procedure to mine fashionable patterns from multidimensional database established on their repute values. Utilizing this opportunity, we studied about recognizing patterns which give the reputation of every object or movements inside the entire database. Whereas Apriori and FP-growth algorithm is determined by the aid or frequency measure of an object set. As a result, to acquire required patterns utilizing these programs one has to mine FP-growth tree recursively which involves extra time consumption. We have utilized a mining process, which is meant for multidimensional recognized patterns. It overcomes the limitations of present mining ways by implementing lazy pruning method followed by showing downward closure property.

The Word Frequency Effect in Word Processing: An Updated Review

The word frequency effect refers to the observation that high-frequency words are processed more efficiently than low-frequency words. Although the effect was first described over 80 years ago, in recent years it has been investigated in more detail. It has become clear that considerable quality differences exist between frequency estimates and that we need a new standardized frequency measure that does not mislead users. Research also points to consistent individual differences in the word frequency effect, meaning that the effect will be present at different word frequency ranges for people with different degrees of language exposure. Finally, a few ongoing developments point to the importance of semantic diversity rather than mere differences in the number of times words have been encountered and to the importance of taking into account word prevalence in addition to word frequency.