In this paper we aim to model the organization and processing of Bangla polymorphemic words in the mental lexicon. Our objective is to determine whether the mental lexicon accesses a polymorphemic word as a whole or decomposes the word into its constituent morphemes and then recognize them accordingly. To address this issue, we adopted two…

Graduate school recommendations are an important part of admissions in higher education, and natural language processing may be able to provide objective and consistent analyses of recommendation texts to complement readings by faculty and admissions staff. However, these sorts of high-stakes, personal recommendations are different from the…

This study entailed two short-term memory (STM) experiments investigating the importance of vowel diacritics for the temporary retention of three distinct Hebrew word list types: heterophonic homographs, non-homographs and homophonic homographs. Eighty university students participated in each experiment, with half of them tested with word lists…

Conceptual representations are at the heart of our mental lives, involved in every aspect of cognitive functioning. Despite their centrality, a long-standing debate persists as to how the meanings of concepts are represented and processed. Many accounts agree that the meanings of concrete concepts are represented by their individual features, but…

Describes the Torus Model of phonological space, which illustrates the usefulness of distinctive feature theory. (AM)

While there has been considerable success in isolating the dimensions of acoustic information that are important in perceiving and identifying speech sounds, very little is known about how the information from the various acoustic dimensions is put together in order to actually accomplish identification. Proposes and tests a model of these…

Describes a computer-based connectionist-type network model that correctly identified the gender of a set of French nouns, relying solely on information inherent in the nouns' structures, in the absence of explicit rules for evaluating nouns, through discovering criterial gender-specific features through examples of masculine and feminine nouns.…

Outlines a hierarchical model of acquisition of second-language phonology, based on the scrutinization of contexts and evocation of appropriate rules through contact situations in which a conflict emerges between the native and target phonologies. (23 references) (Author/CB)

Are words read visually (by means of a direct mapping from orthography to semantics) or phonologically (by mapping from orthography to phonology to semantics)? The authors addressed this long-standing debate by examining how a large-scale computational model based on connectionist principles would solve the problem and comparing the model's…

Recommends a "gapless" scheme for organizing phonemes into patterns in writing descriptions of specific languages. It is the distinctive function rather than the distinctive feature which provides symmetry. (MLA)

Reports on a longitudinal study of the acquisition of the voicing contrast in American English word-initial stop consonants as measured by voice-onset time. The rate and nature of the developmental process are discussed in relation to two competing models of phonological acquisition and two hypotheses regarding the skills being learned. (Author/AM)

The authors present data from 2 feature verification experiments designed to determine whether distinctive features have a privileged status in the computation of word meaning. They use an attractor-based connectionist model of semantic memory to derive predictions for the experiments. Contrary to central predictions of the conceptual structure…

Reviews studies in which perceptual cue trading data have been compared with computational models and examines the perception of contrast between the voiceless fricative "s" and the voiceless affricate "ts." Nine subjects listened to a total of 6 tokens each of 193 stimuli and labeled each stimulus as containing either of the…

Many decisions critical to instruction in the classrom are made prior to the beginning of the school day, and, in some cases, prior to the beginning of the school year. The allocation of time to subject areas, the organization of pupils for instructional purposes, and the determination of the content and emphasis of tasks within subject areas are…

A model of phoneme identification is proposed which describes the process by which continuous acoustic featural information about the place of articulation and the voicing of speech sounds is integrated during phoneme identification. (AM)