Reports on the development of a prototype computerized abstractor's assistant called TEXNET, a text network management system. Features of the system discussed include semantic dependency links; displays of text structure; basic text editing; extracting; weighting methods; and listings of frequent words. (Contains 25 references.) (LRW)

Elicited acceptability ratings from native-English-speaking adults for regular and irregular past tense forms and their stems, in sentence contexts, analyzing them for frequency and phonological neighborhood effects. Results indicate that irregular past tenses are retrieved from associative memory, whereas regular past tenses are produced by a…

Narratives of the dreams of 145 early adolescents were tape-recorded and transcribed, and the frequencies of various grammar forms and common words were calculated. The most common nouns were "house" and "mother;" the most common verbs were "go" and "do." Results indicate that linguistic features of dream narrative are affected by age and sex.…

The authors assert that vocabulary development is one of the most important things teachers can promote for students--cognitively, culturally, socially, and in preparation for standardized tests. A broad-based review of the literature reveals solid reasons for using systematic vocabulary instruction, which is especially helpful with youngsters…

In studies of episodic recognition memory, low-frequency words (LF) have higher hit rates (HR) and lower false alarm rates (FAR) than do high-frequency words (HF), which is known as the mirror pattern. A few findings have suggested that requiring a task at study may reduce or eliminate the LF-HR advantage without altering the LF-FAR effect. Other…

Participants were German dyslexic readers (13-year-olds) who--compared to English dyslexic readers--suffer mainly from slow laborious reading and less from reading errors. The eye movements of eleven dyslexic boys and age-matched controls were recorded during reading of text passages and pseudoword lists. For both text and pseudoword reading, the…

Models of speech production disagree on whether or not homonyms have a shared word-form representation. To investigate this issue, a picture-naming experiment was carried out using Dutch homonyms of which both meanings could be presented as a picture. Naming latencies for the low-frequency meanings of homonyms were slower than for those of the…

This paper investigates the use of multi-word sequences in two important university registers: classroom teaching and textbooks. Following Biber et al. (1999), we take a frequency driven approach to the identification of multi-word sequences, referred to as "lexical bundles". We compare the lexical bundles in classroom teaching and textbooks to…

This paper is a response to Paul Meara's (2005) critique of the Lexical Frequency Profile (LFP). Using simulated data, he challenges the claim that LFP is a sensitive and reliable tool for assessing vocabulary use in L2 speakers. In my response to his paper, I discuss the nature of lexical competence, in light of which LFP results should be…

Plaut and Booth developed a distributed connectionist model of written word comprehension and evaluated it against empirical findings on individual and developmental differences in semantic priming in visual lexical decision. Borowsky and Besner raised a number of challenges for this model. First, the model was not shown to be capable of…

Current models of word production offer different accounts of the representation of homophones in the lexicon. The investigation of how the homophone status of a word affects lexical access can be used to test theories of lexical processing. In this study, homophones appeared as word distractors superimposed on pictures that participants named…

This article presents a theory of visual word recognition that assumes that, in the tasks of word identification, lexical decision, and semantic categorization, human readers behave as optimal Bayesian decision makers. This leads to the development of a computational model of word recognition, the Bayesian reader. The Bayesian reader successfully…

The frequency of occurrence of compound nominal phrases (CNP) in medical English literature was compared to the frequency of occurrence in general English. Ten medical English and 10 general English sample texts of 2,000 words each were selected to record and analyze the CNPs. CNPs were defined as those items made up of at least two individual…

A study was conducted to answer the question, "What are the basic words in a list of words kindergarten through sixth grade students will frequently encounter in their reading?" The study was limited to the words the students would encounter in their textbooks (including basals). A corpus of 7,230 words was then analyzed by two raters to…