Explores the use of directives through an analysis of a 2.5 million word corpus of published articles, textbooks, and second language student essays, and through interviews with insider informants on their perceptions and practices. (Author/VWL)

The grounding of symbols in computational models of linguistic abilities is one of the fundamental properties of psychologically plausible cognitive models. In this article, we present an embodied model for the grounding of language in action based on epigenetic robots. Epigenetic robotics is one of the new cognitive modeling approaches to…

Dividing attention across multiple words occasionally results in misidentifications whereby letters apparently migrate between words. Previous studies have found that letter migrations preserve within-word letter position, which has been interpreted as support for position-specific letter coding. To investigate this issue, the authors used word…

This article compares two military investigative reports using the techniques of corpus linguistics and drawing on the interpretive framework provided by politeness theory and critical discourse analysis. The corpus data for the study comprise two bodies of texts investigating the Kandahar "friendly fire" incident of 17 April 2002: The…

In a recent "Cognition" paper ("Cognition" 85 (2002) B21), Bornkessel, Schlesewsky, and Friederici report ERP data that they claim "show that online processing difficulties induced by word order variations in German cannot be attributed to the relative infrequency of the constructions in question, but rather appear to reflect the application of…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to present a computational approach and a toolset to infer spatial displacements as they occur in route narrative documents and report on first experiments done to produce computer-aided learning (CAL) applications and instructional design editors that exploit the inferred georeferenced itineraries.…

P. Bloom's (1990) data on subject omission are often taken as strong support for the view that child language can be explained in terms of full competence coupled with processing limitations in production. This paper examines whether processing limitations in learning may provide a more parsimonious explanation of the data without the need to…

Many recent models of language comprehension have stressed the role of distributional frequencies in determining the relative accessibility or ease of processing associated with a particular lexical item or sentence structure. However, there exist relatively few comprehensive analyses of structural frequencies, and little consideration has been…

Text analytics refers to the process of analyzing unstructured data from documented sources, including open-ended surveys, blogs, and other types of web dialog. Text analytics has enveloped the concept of text mining, an analysis approach influenced heavily from data mining. While text mining has been covered extensively in various computer…

Generalised access to the Internet and globalisation has led to increased demand for translation services and a resurgence in the use of machine translation (MT) systems. MT post-editing or the correction of MT output to an acceptable standard is known to be one of the ways to face the huge demand on multilingual communication. Given that the use…

It is argued that pessimistic assessments of the adequacy of artificial neural networks (ANNs) for natural language processing (NLP) on the grounds that they have a finite state architecture are unjustified, and that their adequacy in this regard is an empirical issue. First, arguments that counter standard objections to finite state NLP on the…

Computer programs for linguistic analysis of language samples from bilingual children were surveyed in order to evaluate their usefulness. Eight programs which could be implemented on the UCLA IBM 370/3033 computer were considered. It was determined that the Computer Assisted Language Analysis System was the most promising in terms of capabilities…

This report describes the current version of the Why System, a script-based Socratic tutor which uses tutoring strategies formulated as production rules. The current system is capable of carrying on a dialogue about the factors influencing rainfall by presenting different cases to the student, asking for predictions, probing for relevant factors,…

The strategy for PASP proposed here is characterized by the: (1) ad hoc nature of some of its parts; (2) use of a linear string grammar, (3) definition of probability rules, (4) translation of those rules into a priori rules for the string grammar, (5) context sensitivity, and (6) flexibility of the system. (Author/KM)