The regularity of stress patterns in a language depends on "distributional stress regularity", which arises from the pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables, and "durational stress regularity", which arises from the timing of syllables. Here we focus on distributional regularity, which depends on three factors. "Lexical stress patterning"…

This research examines phonological neighbourhoods in the lexicons of children acquiring English. Analyses of neighbourhood densities were done on children's earliest words and on a corpus of spontaneous speech, used to measure neighbours in the target language. Neighbourhood densities were analyzed for words created by changing segments in…

This paper describes a software system intended to help students learn about the process of tagging, the assignment of part-of-speech labels, which is basic to computational linguistics. It does this by (a) making it transparent why words have been analysed in a particular way, and (b) making it straightforward to add items to the system's lexicon…

This dissertation addresses the extent to which linguistic behavior can be described in terms of the projection of patterns from existing lexical items, through an investigation of Korean reduplication. Korean has a productive pattern of reduplication in which a consonant is inserted in a vowel-initial base, illustrated by forms such as "alok"--"t…

The variety and complexity of potentially-related data resources available for querying--webpages, databases, data warehouses--has been growing ever more rapidly. There is a growing need to pose integrative queries "across" multiple such sources, exploiting foreign keys and other means of interlinking data to merge information from diverse…

The goal of this dissertation is to introduce a method for deriving morphemes from Arabic words using stem patterns, a feature of Arabic morphology. The motivations are three-fold: modeling with morphemes rather than words should help address the out-of-vocabulary problem; working with stem patterns should prove to be a cross-dialectally valid…

Deep penetration of personal computers, data communication networks, and the Internet has created a massive platform for data collection, dissemination, storage, and retrieval. Large amounts of textual data are now available at a very low cost. Valuable information, such as consumer preferences, new product developments, trends, and opportunities,…

The deep semantic understanding necessary for complex natural language processing tasks, such as automatic question-answering or text summarization, would benefit from highly accurate word sense disambiguation (WSD). This dissertation investigates what makes an appropriate and effective sense inventory for WSD. Drawing on theories and…

Research on the acquisition of Spanish's two copulas, "ser" and "estar," provides an understanding of the interaction among syntax, semantics, pragmatics, morphology, and vocabulary during development (e.g., Geeslin, 2003a, 2003b; Gunterman, 1992; Ryan & Lafford, 1992). Recent research suggests that linguistic features in the surrounding discourse…

This study examined two major academic genres of writing: argumentative and technical writing. Three hundred eighty-four undergraduate student-produced texts were parsed and analyzed through a computational tool called Coh-Metrix. The results inform the instructional librarians that students used genre-dependent cohesive devices in a limited way…

Foreign language (FL) education has been marked by a monolingual principle that has favoured "intralingual" methodologies. Bakhtin's view of language interillumination--that languages throw light on each other--challenges such language teaching practices radically. Using conversation analysis methods, this article examines transcripts of…

This study considers the acquisition of the verb movement parameter in L3 English by adult Arabic-French bilinguals. The focus is on the nature of the L3 initial state and the contribution of the syntactic (C[subscript HL]) and post-syntactic (phonetic form) modules to the process of parameter resetting. The results of acceptability judgement…

Despite considerable research interest, data-driven learning (DDL) has not become part of mainstream teaching practice. It may be that technical aspects are too daunting for teachers and students, but there seems to be no reason why DDL in its early stages should not eliminate the computer from the equation by using prepared materials on…

Children find object relative clauses difficult. They show poor comprehension that lags behind production into their fifth year. This finding has shaped models of relative clause acquisition, with appeals to processing heuristics or syntactic preferences to explain why object relatives are more difficult than subject relatives. Two studies here…

The stereotypical view of professional academic writing is that it is grammatically complex, with elaborated structures, and with meaning relations expressed explicitly. In contrast, spoken registers, especially conversation, are believed to have the opposite characteristics. Our goal in the present paper is to challenge these stereotypes, based…