Neighborhood frequency is a crucial variable to know the nature of word recognition. Different from alphabetic scripts, neighborhood frequency in Chinese is usually confounded by component character frequency and neighborhood size. Three experiments were designed to explore the role of the neighborhood frequency effect in Chinese and the stimuli…

Examining post-election statements made by UC System, UT-Austin, and UW-Madison executive leadership, this study employs word frequency, collocation, and a three-pronged latent semantic analysis to explicate the associative diction, major concepts, and institutional priorities expressed by said leadership to answer the research question,…

The study of homophones--words with different meanings that sound the same--has great potential to inform models of language production. Of particular relevance is a phenomenon termed "frequency" inheritance, where a low-frequency word (e.g., "deer") is produced more fluently than would be expected based on its frequency…

Adjectives, like nouns and verbs, are one of the three major classes of lexical words. But, unlike nouns and verbs, they emerge late in acquisition. In Catalan, as in many other languages, their use is closely linked to the literate lexicon learned at school-age. Thus, the use of adjectives can be a good indicator of later language development.…

"Although" is a frequently used subordinating conjunction in English. However, non-nativeness is often observed in Chinese EFL learners' "although" output during pedagogical practice. This paper aims at exploring the characteristics of Chinese EFL learners' "although" employment in Chinese EFL learners' writing. The…

This study investigates how figurative language is processed by learners of a second language (L2). With an experiment testing L2 comprehension of figurative expressions in three categories, each combining shared and unshared first language (L1) and L2 lexical representations and conceptual representations in a different way, the study…

Extracting and representing semantic information from large scale corpora is at the crux of computer-assisted knowledge generation. Semantic information depends on collocation extraction methods, mathematical models used to represent distributional information, and weighting functions which transform the space. This dissertation provides a…

Despite the current importance given to L2 vocabulary acquisition in the last two decades, considerable deficiencies are found in L2 students' vocabulary size. One of the aspects that may influence vocabulary learning is word frequency. However, scholars warn that frequency may lead to wrong conclusions if the way words are distributed is ignored.…

The present cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary study was aimed at exploring the similarities and differences between English and Indonesian research articles from the disciplines of applied linguistics and chemistry in terms of frequency of usage of hedges (e.g. "perhaps," "may") and boosters (e.g. "clearly,"…

Experimental evidence on word frequency and its effect on speech production and perception are discussed. Methods of estimating word frequency and psychometric methods used are explained. (RM)

Magnitude estimation was employed to find the numerical equivalents of 39 expressions of frequency ranging from never to always, and 44 expressions of amount ranging from none to all. The results were generalizable across three age-education-occupation levels and unaffected by whether ratings were an important or unimportant issue. Geometric means…

This work represents an effort to develop empirical algorithms useful for measuring alliteration. The resulting rankings compare not unfavorable with an intuitive ranking. (Author)

The study of registers in language is the study of language as it varies according to "use." The situation in which language is used imposes certain constraints on the structure and lexical ingredients of the language. In this report, the author investigates the use of verbs in two different registers in English. The frequency of verbs in both…