Purpose: ParAlg (Paraphasia Algorithms) is a software that automatically categorizes a person with aphasia's naming error (paraphasia) in relation to its intended target on a picture-naming test. These classifications (based on lexicality as well as semantic, phonological, and morphological similarity to the target) are important for…

Using computational simulations, this work demonstrates that it is possible to learn a systematic relation between words' sound and their meanings. The sound-meaning relation was learned from a corpus of phonologically transcribed child-directed speech by using the linear discriminative learning (LDL) framework (Baayen, Chuang, Shafaei-Bajestan,…

An often overlooked but fundamental issue for any comprehensive model of visual-word recognition is the representation of diacritical vowels: Do diacritical and nondiacritical vowels share their abstract letter representations? Recent research suggests that the answer is "yes" in languages where diacritics indicate suprasegmental…

This study seeks to uncover the theoretical bases for the production of the classical Arabic phonetic terms and their elements in the means of generating terms for both lexical semantics and conceptual semantics. The research problem is concerned with examining the roots of generating these phonetic terms and determining the categories of their…

This dissertation examines whether and how psycholinguistic priming, and social knowledge are integrated in the identification of sociolinguistic variants. Using the English variable (ING), the alternation between -ing and -in' (e.g. thinking vs. thinkin') as a testing ground, this dissertation probes whether and how individuals utilize…

Semantic and phonological similarity effects provide critical constraints on the mechanisms underlying language production. In the present study, we jointly investigated effects of semantic and phonological similarity using the continuous naming task. In the semantic condition, Chinese Mandarin speakers named a list of pictures composed of 12…

Items in the mental lexicon have three storage and processing strata, the concept, lemma, and lexeme, which equate to semantic, syntactic and phonological information. Lexical items relate to each other at each stratum. Bilingual lexicons, which contain items from all languages, may contain cognates, items sharing concepts and with overlapping…

Purpose: Research on language planning in adult stuttering is relatively sparse and offers diverging arguments about a potential causative relationship between semantic and phonological encoding and fluency breakdowns. This study further investigated semantic and phonological encoding efficiency in adults who stutter (AWS) by means of silent…

One strategy that children might use to sort words into grammatical categories such as noun and verb is distributional bootstrapping, in which local co-occurrence information is used to distinguish between categories. Words that can be used in more than one grammatical category could be problematic for this approach. Using naturalistic corpus…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to investigate the influence of sign characteristics in a key word signing (KWS) system on the functional use of those signs by adults with intellectual disability (ID). Method: All 507 signs from a Flemish KWS system were characterized in terms of phonological, iconic, and referential characteristics.…

The study of definite descriptions has been a central part of research in linguistics and philosophy of language since Russell's seminal work "On Denoting" (Russell 1905). In that work Russell quickly dispatches analyses of denoting expressions with forms like "no man," "some man," "a man," and "every…

The purpose of this research was to study the Lexico-semantic errors of the Keiyo-speaking standard seven primary school learners of English as a Second Language (ESL) in Keiyo District, Kenya. This study was guided by two related theories: Error Analysis Theory/Approach by Corder (1971) which approaches L2 learning through a detailed analysis of…

Stimuli used in cued language switching studies typically consist of digits or pictures. However, the comparability between both stimulus types remains unclear. In the present study, we directly compared digit and picture naming in a German-English language switching experiment. Because digits represent a semantic group and contain many cognates,…

The effect of test-induced priming on false recognition was investigated in children aged 5, 7, 9, and 11 years using lists of semantic associates, category exemplars, and phonological associates. In line with effects previously observed in adults, nine- and eleven-year-olds showed increased levels of false recognition when critical lures were…

Negation is a unique and fascinating property of human language which has been given extensive theoretical and typological treatment. One categorization divides negation use into metalinguistic negation and descriptive negation (Horn, 1985). Descriptive negation (DN) is the truth-functional semantic operator which has received the most attention…