Reactivation of unaccusative and unergative verbs in Mandarin

Intransitives can be classified into two subclasses: unaccusative verbs and unergative verbs. According to the Unaccusative Hypothesis, the difference between unaccusatives and unergatives lies in where the single argument is generated in the underlying syntactic structure. Subjects of unaccusative verbs are base-generated in the object position and moved to the subject positions. Subjects of unergative verbs, however, are external and thus are not resulted from arguments moving from the object position. If the Unaccusative Hypothesis is correct, a trace is left at the original place for unaccusative verbs when movement occurs but no trace for unergative verbs. Friedmann et al. (2008) used the cross-modal lexical priming paradigm to examine the Unaccusative Hypothesis but their results could only lend limited support for the Unaccusative Hypothesis. Since the argument of Mandarin unaccusative verbs can occur preverbally and postverbally, it offers us a balanced testing ground to re-examine reactivation during sentence comprehension. Results of the current study lend support for the Unaccusative Hypothesis. When the argument occurred preverbally, a V-shaped line was observed. An inverted V-shaped line was observed when the argument occurred postverbally. For unergative verbs, the line showed a decay of reactivation.

Polysemy: A Second Language Pedagogical Concern

<p>This thesis is an examination of polysemy and its effects on second language learners, revealing it as a greater concern than it is normally accorded in pedagogical research. Arguing against a reliance on the dictionary to determine the number of senses a given word has, it begins with a thorough exploration of the concept, both from diachronic and synchronic perspectives, by contrasting it with the related concepts of homonymy and monosemy. A monosemic stance is argued for, which does not deny the existence of polysemy but argues for a framework in which contextual variations of a word are not considered discrete meanings. The British National Corpus is consulted for data demonstrating that instances of a word that may appear as discrete units of meanings actually form a single, unified usage. With monosemy redistributed to account for more than it normally does, and with polysemy relegated solely to semantics (factoring out syntax, pragmatics, etc.), polysemy becomes a considerably less sloppy concept, revealing that, at a top-down level, there are essentially only two varieties. The first of these is 'lexical metaphor,' in which there is a clear literalmetaphoric divide between uses, and the second is 'vicariant polysemy' in which senses are discrete but not synchronically explainable by metaphor. Using Hoey's notion of lexical priming, the factored-out elements of syntax, collocation, etc. are returned to, but strictly as effects of the semantic process of sense generation that should not be mistaken for the cause, though they frequently are. The second part of this thesis moves from the theoretical to the applied, reviewing the sparse literature on the subject. Techniques for raising awareness of the issue among students are discussed as are dictionary skills relevant to polysemy and homonymy. Attention is then turned toward homonymy, examining the problem it poses to word lists and providing the beginning of a solution by revealing which words on the General Service List are homonymic and giving the relative frequency of each meaning. A technique to assist learners in acquiring additional meanings of homonyms is examined, as is a technique for guessing new or novel meanings of polysemes in context.</p>

Polysemy: A Second Language Pedagogical Concern

<p>This thesis is an examination of polysemy and its effects on second language learners, revealing it as a greater concern than it is normally accorded in pedagogical research. Arguing against a reliance on the dictionary to determine the number of senses a given word has, it begins with a thorough exploration of the concept, both from diachronic and synchronic perspectives, by contrasting it with the related concepts of homonymy and monosemy. A monosemic stance is argued for, which does not deny the existence of polysemy but argues for a framework in which contextual variations of a word are not considered discrete meanings. The British National Corpus is consulted for data demonstrating that instances of a word that may appear as discrete units of meanings actually form a single, unified usage. With monosemy redistributed to account for more than it normally does, and with polysemy relegated solely to semantics (factoring out syntax, pragmatics, etc.), polysemy becomes a considerably less sloppy concept, revealing that, at a top-down level, there are essentially only two varieties. The first of these is 'lexical metaphor,' in which there is a clear literalmetaphoric divide between uses, and the second is 'vicariant polysemy' in which senses are discrete but not synchronically explainable by metaphor. Using Hoey's notion of lexical priming, the factored-out elements of syntax, collocation, etc. are returned to, but strictly as effects of the semantic process of sense generation that should not be mistaken for the cause, though they frequently are. The second part of this thesis moves from the theoretical to the applied, reviewing the sparse literature on the subject. Techniques for raising awareness of the issue among students are discussed as are dictionary skills relevant to polysemy and homonymy. Attention is then turned toward homonymy, examining the problem it poses to word lists and providing the beginning of a solution by revealing which words on the General Service List are homonymic and giving the relative frequency of each meaning. A technique to assist learners in acquiring additional meanings of homonyms is examined, as is a technique for guessing new or novel meanings of polysemes in context.</p>

Book Review

The significance of Patterson's work Understanding Metaphor Through Corpora: A Case Study of Metaphors in Nineteenth Century Writing is that only through corpus linguistics have we been able to apply real empirical evidence to our arguments of what metaphor is. By demonstrating that metaphor is supposed to be approached from a linguistic perspective along with a psycholinguistic one, Patterson succeeds in drawing readers' attention to the efficacy and the benefits of combining corpus linguistic methodology with the theory of lexical priming. Thus, the volume is an essential reader for students and researchers in corpus linguistics, metaphor studies, lexicography, semantics, and pragmatics.

Priming and persistence in bilinguals: What codeswitching tells us about lexical priming in sentential contexts*

Most studies on lexical priming have examined single words presented in isolation, despite language users rarely encountering words in such cases. The present study builds upon this by examining both within-language identity priming and across-language translation priming in sentential contexts. Highly proficient Spanish–English bilinguals read sentence-question pairs, where the sentence contained the prime and the question contained the target. At earlier stages of processing, we find evidence only of within-language identity priming; at later stages of processing, however, across-language translation priming surfaces, and becomes as strong as within-language identity priming. Increasing the time between the prime sentence and target question results in strengthened priming at the latest stages of processing. These results replicate previous findings at the single-word level but do so within sentential contexts, which has implications both for accounts of priming via automatic spreading activation as well as for accounts of persistence attested in spontaneous speech corpora.

Sensitivity to distributional properties of the orthography in the spelling of Italian children with dyslexia

The study examines statistical learning in the spelling of Italian children with dyslexia and typically developing readers by studying their sensitivity to probabilistic cues in phoneme-grapheme mappings. In the first experiment children spelled to dictation regular words and words with unpredictable spelling that contained either a high- or a low-frequency (i.e., typical or atypical) sound-spelling mappings. Children with dyslexia were found to rely on probabilistic cues in writing stimuli with unpredictable spelling to a greater extent than typically developing children. The difficulties of children with dyslexia on words with unpredictable spelling were limited to those containing atypical mappings. In the second experiment children spelled new stimuli, that is, pseudowords, containing phonological segments with unpredictable mappings. The interaction between lexical knowledge and reliance on probabilistic cues was examined through a lexical priming paradigm in which pseudowords were primed by words containing related typical or atypical sound-to-spelling mappings. In spelling pseudowords, children with dyslexia showed sensitivity to probabilistic cues in the phoneme-to-grapheme mapping but lexical priming effects were also found, although to a smaller extent than in typically developing readers. The results suggest that children with dyslexia have a limited orthographic lexicon but are able to extract regularities from the orthographic system and rely on probabilistic cues in spelling words and pseudowords.

A Model of Online Temporal-Spatial Integration for Immediacy and Overrule in Discourse Comprehension

During discourse comprehension, information from prior processing is integrated and appears to be immediately accessible. This was remarkably demonstrated by an N400 for “salted” and not “in love” in response to “The peanut was salted/ in love.” Discourse overrule was induced by prior discourse featuring the peanut as an animate agent. Immediate discourse overrule requires a model that integrates information at two timescales. One is over the lifetime and includes event knowledge and word semantics. The second is over the discourse in an event context. We propose a model where both are accounted for by temporal-to-spatial integration of experience into distributed spatial representations, providing immediate access to experience accumulated over different timescales. For lexical semantics, this is modeled by a word embedding system trained by sequential exposure to the entire Wikipedia corpus. For discourse, this is modeled by a recurrent reservoir network trained to generate a discourse vector for input sequences of words. The N400 is modeled as the difference between the instantaneous discourse vector and the target word. We predict this model can account for semantic immediacy and discourse overrule. The model simulates lexical priming and discourse overrule in the “Peanut in love” discourse, and it demonstrates that an unexpected word elicits reduced N400 if it is generally related to the event described in prior discourse, and that this effect disappears when the discourse context is removed. This neurocomputational model is the first to simulate immediacy and overrule in discourse-modulated N400, and contributes to characterization of online integration processes in discourse.

A INFLUÊNCIA DO PRIMING GRAFO-FÔNICO-FONOLÓGICO EM UMA TAREFA DE DECISÃO LEXICAL EM MULTILÍNGUES FALANTES DE PORTUGUÊS (L1), INGLÊS (L2) E FRANCÊS (L3)

Este artigo discute a influência do priming grafo-fônico-fonológico na execução de uma tarefa de decisão lexical realizada por multilíngues. Nesse sentido, buscou-se verificar se semelhanças grafo-fônico-fonológicas entre palavras das línguas estudadas (português, inglês e francês) influenciariam o tempo de reação na tarefa. Com o auxílio do software E-Prime 2.0, foi elaborado um experimento que contou com 90 pares de palavras, das quais metade apresentava supostas semelhanças grafo-fônico-fonológicas entre si, enquanto a outra metade não apresentava tais similaridades. Considerando a Hipótese de Seleção Não-Específica (CONKLIN; MAUNER, 2005), defendeu-se que as supostas semelhanças grafo-fônico-fonológicas entre as línguas promoveriam a ativação de correspondências grafo-fônico-fonológicas distintas, acarretando uma maior competição lexical entre os itens investigados, evidenciada no aumento dos tempos de reação (MACWHINNEY, 2005). Os resultados encontrados indicaram que os tempos de reação foram maiores para os itens que apresentavam as semelhanças grafo-fônico-fonológicas entre prime e palavra-alvo, o que parece apontar para uma possível influência dos níveis de proficiência em cada uma das línguas dos participantes nesses resultados.Palavras-chave: Acesso lexical; priming; influência grafo-fônico-fonológica; multilinguismo; níveis de proficiência.