Zipf’s laws of meaning in Catalan

In his pioneering research, G. K. Zipf formulated a couple of statistical laws on the relationship between the frequency of a word with its number of meanings: the law of meaning distribution, relating the frequency of a word and its frequency rank, and the meaning-frequency law, relating the frequency of a word with its number of meanings. Although these laws were formulated more than half a century ago, they have been only investigated in a few languages. Here we present the first study of these laws in Catalan. We verify these laws in Catalan via the relationship among their exponents and that of the rank-frequency law. We present a new protocol for the analysis of these Zipfian laws that can be extended to other languages. We report the first evidence of two marked regimes for these laws in written language and speech, paralleling the two regimes in Zipf’s rank-frequency law in large multi-author corpora discovered in early 2000s. Finally, the implications of these two regimes will be discussed.

The Advent and Fall of a Vocabulary Learning Bias from Communicative Efficiency

Biosemiosis is a process of choice-making between simultaneously alternative options. It is well-known that, when sufficiently young children encounter a new word, they tend to interpret it as pointing to a meaning that does not have a word yet in their lexicon rather than to a meaning that already has a word attached. In previous research, the strategy was shown to be optimal from an information theoretic standpoint. In that framework, interpretation is hypothesized to be driven by the minimization of a cost function: the option of least communication cost is chosen. However, the information theoretic model employed in that research neither explains the weakening of that vocabulary learning bias in older children or polylinguals nor reproduces Zipf’s meaning-frequency law, namely the non-linear relationship between the number of meanings of a word and its frequency. Here we consider a generalization of the model that is channeled to reproduce that law. The analysis of the new model reveals regions of the phase space where the bias disappears consistently with the weakening or loss of the bias in older children or polylinguals. The model is abstract enough to support future research on other levels of life that are relevant to biosemiotics. In the deep learning era, the model is a transparent low-dimensional tool for future experimental research and illustrates the predictive power of a theoretical framework originally designed to shed light on the origins of Zipf’s rank-frequency law.

Vulgäre und derbe Idiome im Deutschen. Einige Bemerkungen zu ihrer Bedeutung, Frequenz, Stilmarkierung und ihrem Gebrauch

In the context of this article, the crude and vulgar idioms mentioned in Duden-11 “Redewendungen” will be examined in terms of their motivation, meaning, frequency, style marking and their usage. First, they will be extracted from this dictionary and examined according to their origins. Next, they will be categorized concerning their subjects. Furthermore, the style tags used in the dictionary will be tested. This will be done by contrasting them to reference corpora before carrying out a survey among native speakers. Finally, a list of common, relatively frequent idioms will be created, which can then be used primarily in foreign language didactics.

A Probe Into Chinese University Students’ English Lexical Ambiguity

Disagreements arise on the differences of semantic processing of different ambiguous words in the perspective of psycholinguistics. This paper compares the differences of the semantic processing of different types of ambiguous words of Chinese English learners by using a multiple semantic priming experiment with short. The results demonstrate the advantage in semantic processing of words of homonymy of Chinese English Learners in the multiple semantic priming experiment, but the advantage in semantic processing of words of polysemy does not always take place, as it is relevant to learners’ English levels and words’ meaning frequency. The effect of semantic processing of polysemous words is greater than that of synonymous words.

Loan Words as Patternsof Real and Virtual Language Personality’s Speech Behaviour

The article deals with the problems of filling cognitive-semantic gaps by borrowings-anglicisms denoting intolerant behavior. The authors present an analysis of some of the most frequent lexical units in different aspects: the meaning, frequency of use and word-formation potential of these lexemes are described, the specificity of the use of these lexemes in real and virtual communication are considered. Special attention is paid to media texts and the functioning of borrowings in the headlines. The authors also establish the features of assimilation of the vocabulary, its determinologization and transition to the active thesaurus of native speakers. Analyzing the level of development of these lexemes, the authors conclude that this group of vocabulary is gradually being included in the active thesaurus of native speakers. The article also presents some results of the analysis of the perception of the borrowings by native speakers of the recipient language. About 20 lexical units were analyzed.

Lexical accessing for ambiguous words among advanced Chinese L2 learners

This study investigated factors associated with and strategies used by advanced Chinese L2 learners in accessing the meanings of commonly used polysemous words (lexically ambiguous words) in sentential reading. The participants included 26 learners of Chinese from a Midwest university in the US. The results showed that word frequency, meaning frequency of polysemous words, and learners’ knowledge of polysemous words affected successful lexical access in sentential contexts. Learners mainly used five types of strategies to solve lexical ambiguity problems, of which three were more frequently used: contextual cues, the intra-word analysis method, and the dominant meaning cue. Contextual cues were the most frequently used strategy.

Token Frequency Effects in Homophone Production: An Elicitation Study

In natural production, adults differentiate homophones prosodically as a function of the frequency of their intended meaning. This study compares adult and child productions of homophones to determine whether prosodic differentiation of homophones changes over development. Using a picture-based story-completion paradigm, isolated tokens of homophones were elicited from English-learning children and adult native English speakers. These tokens were measured for duration, vowel duration, pitch, pitch range, and vowel quality. Results indicate that less frequent meanings of homophones are longer in duration than their more frequent counterparts in both adults and children. No other measurement differed as a function of meaning frequency. As speakers of all ages produce longer tokens of lower frequency homophones, homophone differentiation does not change over development, but is included in children’s early lexicons. These findings indicate that production planning processes alone may not fully account for differences in homophone duration, but rather that the differences could be learned and represented from experience even in the early stages of lexical acquisition.

NEW EMPIRICAL RESULTS OF SOME PROCESSES HIGHLIGHTED IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF LEXICAL ABILITIES IN 8 TO 11-12 YEAR OLDS

We have verified the hypothesis claiming the presence of less advanced cognitive processes in the development of lexical abilities, in primary school children. The empirical data was gathered from a sample of 472 third grade students, 495 fourth grade students and 521 fifth grade students, with an approximate male-female gender balance; students belong to a middle range of socio-economic and cultural backgrounds, and do not present learning, reading, or writing disabilities or difficulties. The study was conducted in a two-phase experimental design. The first phase saw the gathering of word definitions from a sample of 100 participants, both female and male, for each grade from third to fifth, belonging to the same demographic constituency and sharing the same scholastic qualities as the subjects of the second phase. The second phase involved the completion of 8 tests already verified through item analysis, each with 4 multiple-choice answers evaluating lexical abilities, in which the less advanced processes were among the wrong answers. We verified the presence of said processes, such as tautologies, graphophonemic linking, consecutive effects, image values, and dominant meaning-frequency relationship in the development of lexical abilities of the participants.