This paper examines links between perfect rhymes and text readability and decoding using a measure of English rhymes called the Perfect Rhymes Dictionary (PeRDict). PeRDict is based on the Carnegie Mellon University Pronouncing Dictionary (the CMUdict) and provides rhyme counts for ~48,000 words in English and for the most frequent 1,000, 2,500,…

This study aimed to establish normative data for 145 words using phonological and semantic association tasks with 242 French schoolchildren, ranging from ages 5 (Grande Section) to 8 (Cours Elémentaire 2), providing a fundamental resource for future research and educational planning. The participants were engaged in two primary tasks: a free…

The world harbours a diversity of some 6,500 mutually unintelligible languages. As has been increasingly observed by linguists, many minority languages are becoming endangered and will be lost forever if not documented. The increased urgency has led to the development of several global endangerment databases and a more fine-grained understanding…

Purpose: This study is aimed to identify the high-frequency vocabulary (HFV), otherwise termed "core vocabulary" for adults with complex communication needs. Method: Three major characteristics of the HFV--a relatively small number of different words (NDW), a relatively high word frequency, and a high word commonality across…

This dissertation studies the acquisition of Mandarin relative clauses (RCs), including the distributional pattern of different RC types in adult child-directed speech (study 1) and four-year-old Mandarin-speaking children's comprehension of different RC types (study 2). An RC is a subordinate clause that modifies a noun and is embedded within a…

Spontaneous verbal repetition is part of early adult-child conversational interchanges. However, most of the studies devoted to verbal repetition analyse child-produced and adult-produced repetition independently. The aim of this study is to analyse verbal repetition sequences that are extended by children and adults participating in turns. We…

Recent research investigating embedded stem priming effects with the masked priming paradigm and pseudoword primes (e.g., "quickify"--"quick") has shown that priming effects can be obtained even when the embedded target word is followed by a non-morphological ending (e.g., "quickald"--"quick"). Here we…

The present paper revolves around MaxiECPC, one of the various sub-corpora that make up ECPC (the European Comparable and Parallel Corpora), an electronic archive of speeches delivered at different parliaments (i.e. the European Parliament-EP; the Spanish Congreso de los Diputados-CD; and the British House of Commons-HC) from 1996 to 2009. In…

This study created a medical word list (MWL) to bridge the gap between non-technical and technical vocabulary. The researcher compiled a corpus containing 155 textbooks across 31 medical subject areas from e-book databases (totaling 15 million running words) and examined the range and frequency of words outside the most frequent 3,000-word…

The present study is based on the theoretical assumptions that frequency of characters and their structural components, as well as the frequency types of structural components, are important to enable learners of Chinese as a foreign language (CFL) to discover the underlying structure of Chinese characters. In the CFL context, since reliable…

A novel text analysis and characterization method involves the generation from text samples of sets of variable-length character strings. These sets are intermediate in number between the character set and the total number of words in a data base; their distribution is less disparate than those of either characters or words. The size of the sets…

This final report of a study which developed a working corpus of spoken and written Portuguese from which syntactical studies could be conducted includes computer-processed data on which the findings and analysis are based. A data base, obtained by taping some 487 conversations between Brazil and the United States, serves as the corpus from which…

The final report on a project to develop a standard corpus of present-day Mandarin Chinese is presented. This corpus consists of words of running text of Chinese prose printed in the Republic of China during the calendar year 1968. The corpus, although originally planned to have a total of 500 samples of 2000 words each, has only 294 samples. Each…

A description of a retrospective document retrieval system is given in which equifrequent fragments are used as language elements for compression coding and retrieval. The critical parameters governing the system are identified, and restrictions imposed by the parameters on the selection of fragments are outlined. Changes necessary in the…

The information service performed by the Royal Institute of Technology handles requests from both university users and from industry. Fourteen data bases are currently used for SDI purposes. The system is of a general nature which permits inclusion of various data bases of completely different tape formats. Any combination of elements of a…