Word frequencies in natural language follow a highly skewed Zipfian distribution, but the consequences of this distribution for language acquisition are only beginning to be understood. Typically, learning experiments that are meant to simulate language acquisition use uniform word frequency distributions. We examine the effects of Zipfian…

The classic gavagai problem exemplifies the difficulty to identify the referent of a novel word uttered in a foreign language. Here, we consider the reverse problem: identifying the referential part of a label. Assuming "gavagai" indicates a rabbit in a foreign language, it may very well mean ""a" rabbit" or ""that" rabbit". How can a learner know…

A major open question in natural language research is the role of communicative efficiency in the origin and on-line processing of language structures. Here, we use word pairs like "chimp/chimpanzee", which differ in length but have nearly identical meanings, to investigate the communicative properties of lexical systems and the communicative…

The present study investigated how children learn that some verbs may appear in the figure-locative but not the ground-locative construction (e.g., "Lisa poured water into the cup"; "*Lisa poured the cup with water"), with some showing the opposite pattern (e.g., "*Bart filled water into the cup"; "Bart filled the cup with water"), and others…

While many behavioural studies on refractory phenomena in lexical/semantic access have focused on the mechanisms involved in the oral production of names, comprehension tasks have been almost exclusively used in neuropsychological studies on brain damaged patients. We report the results of two experiments on healthy participants conducted by means…

Children's early word production is influenced by the statistical frequency of speech sounds and combinations. Three experiments asked whether this production effect can be explained by a perceptual learning mechanism that is sensitive to word-token frequency and/or variability. Four-year-olds were exposed to nonwords that were either frequent…

While content words (e.g., 'dog') tend to carry meaning, function words (e.g., 'the') mainly serve syntactic purposes. Here, we ask whether 17-month old infants can use one language-universal cue to identify function word candidates: their high frequency of occurrence. In Experiment 1, infants listened to a series of short, naturally recorded…

This study combined artificial language learning (ALL) with conventional experimental techniques to test whether statistical speech segmentation outputs are integrated into adult listeners' mental lexicon. Lexicalization was assessed through inhibitory effects of novel neighbors (created by the parsing process) on auditory lexical decisions to…

There is growing evidence that words that are acquired early in life are processed faster and more accurately than words acquired later, even by adults. As neuropsychological and neuroimaging studies have implicated different brain networks in the processing of action verbs and concrete nouns, the present study was aimed at contrasting reaction…

Everyday speech is littered with disfluency, often correlated with the production of less predictable words (e.g., Beattie & Butterworth [Beattie, G., & Butterworth, B. (1979). Contextual probability and word frequency as determinants of pauses in spontaneous speech. "Language and Speech, 22," 201-211.]). But what are the effects of disfluency on…

Vocabulary growth was suggested to prompt the implementation of increasingly finer-grained lexical representations of spoken words in children (e.g., [Metsala, J. L., & Walley, A. C. (1998). "Spoken vocabulary growth and the segmental restructuring of lexical representations: precursors to phonemic awareness and early reading…

An eye-movement reading experiment investigated whether the ease with which pronouns are processed is affected by the lexical frequency of their antecedent. Reading times following pronouns with infrequent antecedents were faster than following pronouns with frequent antecedents. We argue that this is consistent with a saliency account, according…

Schreuder and Baayen (Schreuder. R., & Baayen, R. H. (1997). How complex simplex words can be. "Journal of Memory and Language" 37, 118-139) report that lexical decision times to nouns are not sensitive to the cumulative frequency of the noun's morphological derivatives in its ''morphological family'', even though such a cumulative frequency…

This study reports two experiments assessing the spelling performance of French first graders after 3 months and after 9 months of literacy instruction. The participants were asked to spell high and low frequency irregular words (Experiment 1) and pseudowords, some of which had lexical neighbours (Experiment 2). The lexical database which children…

Three experiments assessed the contributions of age-of-acquisition (AoA) and frequency to visual word recognition. Three databases were created from electronic journals in chemistry, psychology and geology in order to identify technical words that are extremely frequent in each discipline but acquired late in life. In Experiment 1, psychologists…