Summarizes a range of theoretical approaches to language acquisition. Argues that language representations emerge from interactions at all levels from brain to society. Connectionism, which provides a set of computational tools for exploring the conditions under which emergent properties arise, is discussed, and simulations of emergence of…

Pinpoints specificities of computer-aided corpus-based work in foreign language pedagogic contexts and assesses how they can feed into language teaching and learning practices generally, despite the ostensible pedagogic and processing shortcomings of corpus-based work in these kinds of contexts. (Author/VWL)

Presents a new dimension of lexical variation--contextual distinctiveness. CD is a corpus-derived summary measure of the frequency distribution of the contexts in which a word occurs, and it is naturally compatible with contextual theories of semantic representation and meaning. An experiment shows that CD is a better predictor of lexical decision…

The author replies to a critique a paper he wrote on defining applied linguistics as a field of inquiry and the extent to which corpus analysis can properly inform its practices. (Author/VWL)

We report an experiment in which subjects named 120 pictures, consisting of series of five pictures drawn from each of 24 semantic categories (and intermixed with 45 fillers). The number of intervening trials (lag) between successive presentations of members of the same category varied from two to eight. Subjects' naming latencies were slowed by…

This paper surveys work on applying the insights of lexicalized grammars to low-level discourse, to show the value of positing an autonomous grammar for low-level discourse in which words (or idiomatic phrases) are associated with discourse-level predicate-argument structures or modification structures that convey their syntactic-semantic meaning…

The distinction between singular and plural enters into linguistic phenomena such as morphology, lexical semantics, and agreement and also must interface with perceptual and conceptual systems that assess numerosity in the world. Three experiments examine the computation of semantic number for singulars and plurals from the morphological…

The target article represents a significant advance in the level of sophistication applied to models of bilingual word recognition, and Dijkstra and van Heuven are to be congratulated on this endeavour. Bearing in mind the success of the (computational) BIA model in capturing detailed patterns of experimental data, I look forward to future…

This article presents an overview of current automatic sign recognition research. A review of recent studies, as well as on our own research, has identified several problem areas that hamper successful sign recognition by a computer. Some of these problems are shared with automatic speech recognition, whereas others seem to be unique to automatic…

For many purposes, it is useful to collect a corpus of texts all produced to the same stimulus, whether to measure performance (as on a test) or to test hypotheses about population differences. This paper examines several methods for measuring similarities in phrasing and content and demonstrates that these methods can be used to identify…

Writing researchers have developed various methods for investigating the writing process since the 1970s. The early 1980s saw the occurrence of the real-time computer-aided study of the writing process that relies on the protocols generated by recording the computer screen activities as writers compose using the word processor. This article…

Research articles (RAs) have been recognized as a distinct genre in the English-using discourse community because of their unique writing conventions. Despite the great number of studies on the analysis of the textual or phrasal aspects of abstracts of RAs, few have been transformed into actual teaching materials for EFL graduate students. The…

The data for this study consisted of a longitudinal corpus of narratives from 17 English second language (L2) children, mean age of 5;4 years at the outset, with first languages (Lls) that do not have definite/indefinite articles (Chinese, Korean and Japanese) and Lls that do have article systems (Spanish, Romanian and Arabic). We examined these…

Learner corpora, electronic collections of spoken or written data from foreign language learners, offer unparalleled access to many hitherto uncovered aspects of learner language, particularly in their error-tagged format. This article aims to demonstrate the role that the learner corpus can play in CALL, particularly when used in conjunction with…

This study introduces a new computer-based methodology, "concgramming", that has as its primary aim the automatic identification of the phraseological profile and hence the "aboutness", of a text or corpus. It is argued that this methodology can be employed by language learners and teachers to raise awareness of the importance of the…