Mental Lexicon

The purpose of this paper is to draw on recent studies of bilingualism and emotions to argue for three types of modifications to the current models of the bilingual lexicon. The first modification involves word categories: I will show that emotion words need to be considered as a separate class of words in the mental lexicon, represented and processed differently from abstract and concrete words. The second modification involves conceptual representations: I will demonstrate that emotion concepts vary across languages and that bilinguals' concepts may, in some cases, be distinct from those of monolingual speakers. The third modification involves emotionality: I will argue that emotionality is an important feature of the bilingual lexicon, where different languages and word types display different levels of emotionality. I will also show how differential emotionality affects code-switching and language choice in bi-and multilinguals. The purpose of this paper is to draw on recent studies of bilingualism and emotions to argue that future models of the bilingual lexicon need to acknowledge – where relevant – not only linguistic and cognitive but also affective aspects of the lexicon. I will begin with a discussion of definitions of emotion and emotion-laden words. Then, I will argue that the incorporation of the affective dimension in the mental lexicon needs to take place on three levels. On the lexical level, emotion and emotion-laden words need to be considered as a separate class of words in the mental lexicon, because recent research shows that these words are represented and processed differently from abstract and concrete words. On the conceptual level, models need to address cross-linguistic differences in emotion concepts and ways in which bilinguals' representations may differ from those of monolingual speakers. On the processing level, models need to incorporate the affective processing dimension, recognizing affective priming effects and differences in emotionality across bilinguals' languages and word types. Unlike the study of visual or auditory processing, the study of emotion and emotion-laden words and of affective processing cannot be limited to the lab, because words do not have immutable meanings or stable affective dimensions – rather their meanings and affective connotations are internalized, constructed, and negotiated in context. Consequently, where possible, I will triangulate the findings of laboratory studies of bilingual affective processing and representation with findings of sociolinguistic, ethnographic, and clinical studies. In some cases I will also appeal to bi-and multilinguals' self-reports to complement the experimental data, to highlight the human dimension of this research, and to draw on people's insights about the interplay between

Research suggests that young children use a script-based slot-filler strategy to develop categories. Children are reported to develop a taxonomic strategy by about age 8. The purpose of this study was to examine how bilingual (Spanish-English) children used taxonomic versus slot-filler strategies in a categorygeneration task presented in each language. Results indicated that although younger bilingual children (M age = 5;1) generated approximately equal numbers of items in both conditions, older bilingual children (M age = 6;5) were beginning to demonstrate a taxonomic bias. Furthermore, although bilingual children tended to generate similar numbers of items in each language under the different conditions, comparisons between the two languages indicated that a large proportion (68.40%) of items was unique to either language.

We present results from cross-modal priming experiments on German participles and noun plurals. The experiments produced parallel results for both in¯ectional systems. Regular in¯ection exhibits full priming whereas irregularly in¯ected word forms show only partial priming: after hearing regularly in¯ected words (-t participles and -s plurals), lexical decision times on morphologically related word forms (presented visually) were similar to reaction times for a base-line condition in which prime and target were identical, but signi®cantly shorter than in a control condition where prime and target were unrelated. In contrast, prior presentation of irregular words (-n participles and -er plurals) led to signi®cantly longer response times on morphologically related word forms than the prior presentation of the target itself. Hence, there are clear priming differences between regularly and irregularly in¯ected German words. We compare the ®ndings on German with experimental results on regular and irregular in¯ection in English and Italian, and discuss theoretical implications for single versus dual-mechanism models of in¯ection. q 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

The mental lexicon stores words and information about words. The lexicon is seen by many researchers as a network, where lexical units are nodes and the different links between the units are connections. Based on the analysis of a word association network, in this article we show that different kinds of associative connections exist in the mental lexicon. Our analysis is based on a word association database from the agglutinative language Hungarian. We use communitiesclosely knit groupsof the lexicon to provide evidence for the existence and coexistence of different connections. We search for communities in the database using two different algorithms, enabling us to see the overlapping (a word belongs to multiple communities) and non-overlapping (a word belongs to only one community) community structures. Our results show that the network of the lexicon is organized by semantic, phonetic, syntactic and grammatical connections, but encyclopedic knowledge and individual experiences are also shaping the associative structure. We also show that words may be connected not just by one, but more types of connections at the same time.

"This paper compares various approaches to argument structure. We start out presenting the lexical proposal that we want to defend in this paper. We then introduce phrasal proposals that are common in Construction Grammar. A historical section describes the oscillation between early lexical proposals in Categorial Grammar, phrasal approaches in phrase structure grammar (early Transformational Grammar, GPSG) back to lexical approaches in HPSG and Minimalism. We argue that there were good reasons for returning to lexical models and that the respective issues are not addressed in phrasal approaches. We go on discussing approaches that assume that sematnically compatible verbs are inserted into phrasal constructions and point out that lexical specification of valence plays an important role in various levels of description and that phrasal models can not account for this. A similar criticism applies to so-called Neodavidsonian approaches, which are discussed in a separate section.

We will show that certain relations between constructions cannot be captured with inheritance or unification but require transformations or lexical rules, and hence in non-transformational syntax the lexical approach is the only option.

Three sections are devoted to arguments from language acquisition, psycholinguistics, and statistics. We show that contrary to frequent claims the respective experiments do not provide evidence for phrasal constructions.

We conclude that argument structure properties should be represented together with lexical items. "

We studied mental representations of literal, metonymically different, and metaphorical
senses in Russian adjectives. Previous studies suggested that in polysemous words,
metonymic senses, being more sense-related, were stored together with literal
senses, whereas more distant metaphorical senses had separate representations. We
hypothesized that metonymy may be heterogeneous with respect to its mental storage.
“Whole-part” metonymy (“sad person” – “sad eyes”), which is cognitively closer to the
literal sense and more regular, should be stored differently from temporal, causal or
resultative metonymy (“sad person” – “sad time;” “sad person” – “sad news;” “lead.ADJ
ball” – “lead.ADJ poisoning”), which is irregular and semantically distant from the literal
sense. We conducted an online experiment with semantic clustering task in which the
participants were asked to classify sentences with a literal, proximal metonymic, distal
metonymic, or metaphorical sense of an adjective into virtual baskets so that sentences
with the same perceived sense were put in the same basket. Our results showed that
proximal metonymies were grouped together with the literal sense and with each other
more often than with distal metonymies and metaphors. Distal metonymies, in turn, were
grouped with literal senses more often than with metaphors. Overall, we concluded that
literal senses and proximal metonymies were stored in single representations, distal
metonymies formed hybrid representations with literal senses, and metaphors were
stored separately from literal senses. Additionally, we discovered that perception of
semantic differences is affected by the surrounding senses: distal metonymies were
more discernible from literal senses when presented with proximal metonymies, and
less so when presented with metaphors.

Roelofs, A., and R. H. Baayen
The authors report a study in Dutch that used an on-line preparation paradigm to test the issue of semantic dependency versus morphological autonomy in the production of polymorphemic words. Semantically transparent complex words (likeinput in English) and semantically opaque complex words (likeinvoice) showed clear evidence of morphological structure in word-form encoding, since both exhibited an equally large preparation effect that was much greater than that for morphologically simple words (likeinsect). These results suggest that morphemes may be planning units in the production of complex words, without making a semantic contribution, thereby supporting the autonomy view. Language production establishes itself as a domain in which morphology may operate “by itself” (Aronoff, 1994) without recourse to meaning.

Both Standard Chinese (SC) high-and low-rising tones sound like the rising tone in Jinan Mandarin (JM) Chinese. Acoustically (Experiment 1), the JM rising tone overlaps with both SC rising tones, but more with the high-rising tone than with the low-rising tone. Perceptually (Experiment 2), the JM rising tone was more likely identified as the SC high-rising tone by SC monolinguals. Experiment 3 examined the role of this two-to-one interlingual tonal mapping in bilingual lexical access. Final high-rising SC pseudo-words were more frequently and more quickly accepted as JM real words than final low-rising SC pseudo-words were. However, both high-and low-rising SC pseudo-words triggered equivalent facilitatory semantic priming on JM real-word targets. The results suggest that different tones are represented in the bilinguals' mental lexicon in terms of fine-grained and sometimes overlapping acoustic specifications. Lexical activation and semantic activation are partially independent.

& The morphosyntactic decomposition of German compound words and a proposed function of linking elements were examined during auditory processing using event-related brain potentials. In Experiment 1, the syntactic gender agreement was manipulated between a determiner and the initial compound constituent (the ''nonhead'' constituent), and between a determiner and the last constituent (''head''). Although only the head is (morpho)syntactically relevant in German, both constituents elicited a left-anterior negativity if its gender was incongruent. This strongly suggests that compounds are morphosyntactically decomposed. Experiment 2 tested the function of those linking elements which are homophonous to plural morphemes. It has been previously suggested that these indicate the number of nonhead con-stituents. The number agreement was manipulated for both constituents analogous to Experiment 1. Number-incongruent heads, but not nonhead constituents, elicited an N400 and a subsequent broad negativity, suggesting that linking elements are not processed as plural morphemes. Experiment 3 showed that prosodic cues (duration and fundamental frequency) are employed to differentiate between compounds and single nouns and, thereby, betwen linking elements and plural morphemes. Number-incongruent words elicited a broad negativity if they were produced with a single noun prosody; the same words elicited no event-related potential effect if produced with a compound prosody. A dual-route model can account for the influence of prosody on morphosyntactic processing. &

English Noun+Noun compounding has garnered the attention of morphologists due to characteristics that involve its semantics (Bauer & Tarasova, 2010; Jackendoff, 2009), degree of productivity (Bauer, Beliaeva, & Tarasova, 2019; Maguire, Wisniewski, & Storms, 2010) and possible paradigmatic nature (Bagasheva, in press; Boyé & Schalchli, 2016). This article addresses the above questions from an inclusive perspective with the aim bringing together various unsolved issues in the study of this morphological process. The experiment exploits data from the BNC Sampler and the Oxford English Dictionary, from which morphological and semantic information is extracted in order to fathom the contribution of nominal root compounding to the lexicon. The results show that the paradigmatic nature, semantics and high productivity of NN compounding are all closely interrelated, which explains certain characteristics associated to the current status of this process and its role in the enrichment of the lexicon.

Community structure, which refers to the presence of densely connected groups within a larger network, is a common feature of several real-world networks from a variety of domains such as the human brain, social networks of hunter-gatherers and business organizations, and the World Wide Web (Porter et al., 2009). Using a community detection technique known as the Louvain optimization method, 17 communities were extracted from the giant component of the phonological network described in Vitevitch (2008). Additional analyses comparing the lexical and phonological characteristics of words in these communities against words in randomly generated communities revealed several novel discoveries. Larger communities tend to consist of short, frequent words of high degree and low age of acquisition ratings, and smaller communities tend to consist of longer, less frequent words of low degree and high age of acquisition ratings. Real communities also contained fewer different phonological segments compared to random communities, although the number of occurrences of phonological segments found in real communities was much higher than that of the same phonological segments in random communities. Interestingly, the observation that relatively few biphones occur very frequently and a large number of biphones occur rarely within communities mirrors the pattern of the overall frequency of words in a language (Zipf, 1935). The present findings have important implications for understanding the dynamics of activation spread among words in the phonological network that are relevant to lexical processing, as well as understanding the mechanisms that underlie language acquisition and the evolution of language.

Although morphological knowledge has been proposed to enhance second language (L2) vocabulary acquisition, little is known about which morphological process has the greatest impact on lexical acquisition. To address this question, 400 school-learners of English from high schools in Saudi Arabia were presented with a morphological decomposition task of regular and irregular inflection and derivation , and an L2 vocabulary size test. The results indicated some significant levels of correlation between knowledge of regular inflection and derivation, and L2 vocabulary knowledge. Irregular inflection and derivation, on the contrary, were not found to have a significant effect on L2 vocabulary acquisition. Although significant correlations were observed between regular morphology and L2 vocabulary learning, regression analysis showed that only regular inflection processing has a sizable effect on vocabulary uptake. This variable explained about 38% of the variance per se. The findings also revealed no clear effect of the first language (L1) regularity of morphological rules, which apply extensively in Arabic, on acquiring words that are regular in English. The overall findings propose an explicit focus on teaching regular inflectional morphology in the language classroom because of its marked influence found on vocabulary acquisition.

How stable or how permeable to attrition are a multilingual’s first and second languages during life periods characterized by dynamic changes in language-use frequencies? This longitudinal study sheds some light on this issue by investigating changing patterns in a multilingual speaker’s tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) states. Over a period of 10 years, the multilingual recorded more than 100 TOT states, together with 400 non-target word associations, as they occurred with words from the speaker’s five languages (L1 German, L2 Russian, L3 English, L4 Spanish, and L5 Portuguese). During the period, the L1 was consistently used less than the L3 and L4, providing a setting in which L1 attrition might occur. Data were analyzed with respect to the changing frequencies of TOT state occurrence in the different languages, the contribution of each language to the word associations generated during word search, the typological relatedness of targets and associates, and the linguistic context of initial learning of each language. Rates of TOT states and percentages of cross-language word associations and within-language word associations fluctuated in response to dynamic patterns of language use and maintenance, demonstrating the value of data on word-retrieval failure for studies of language attrition. The data reveal that the speaker’s L1 appeared to gain stability after an early period suggestive of attrition, despite low frequency of use overall. This finding supports the view that the L1 is exceptional, highly resistant to attrition, but also suggests that temporary impairment of L1 can occur when a multilingual speaker’s overall set of interacting language systems comes out of balance.

Lexical access tasks are designed to measure efficiency of lexical access, but task demands and methods vary greatly. Many lexical access tasks do not account for confounding factors including competence in other linguistic abilities. In this study, preschoolers were given two lexical access tasks. In the single-category naming (SCN) task, children rapidly named animals. In the multi-category naming (MCN) task, children named one item from each of 10 categories. Children were also tested on vocabulary, syntax, and articulation. First, scores on each task increase with age. Second, the two lexical access scores were only moderately correlated, suggesting that different 'lexical access' tasks measure different abilities. Finally, we compared scores on each of the lexical access tasks with scores on the other linguistic tasks, demonstrating that different linguistic abilities are involved in each task at different ages. Results suggest that even very similar tasks capture different aspects of lexical access, and that the SCN task is a purer lexical access test.

French speaking learners of English encounter persistent difficulty acquiring English [h], thus confusing words like eat and heat in both production and perception. We assess the hypothesis that the acoustic properties of [h] may render detection of this segment in the speech stream insufficiently reliable for second language acquisition. We use the mismatch negativity (MMN) in event-related potentials to investigate [h] perception in French speaking learners of English and native English controls, comparing both linguistic and non-linguistic conditions in an unattended oddball paradigm. Unlike native speakers, French learners of English elicit an MMN response only in the non-linguistic condition. Our results provide neurobiological evidence against the hypothesis that French speakers' difficulties with [h] are acoustically based. They instead suggest that the problem is in constructing an appropriate phonological representation for [h] in the interlanguage grammar.

This paper presents an empirical study that
investigates the vocabulary knowledge of 92 Saudi
university learners of English as a Foreign Language
(EFL) near the start and near the end of their
university studies. Two tests were used to measure
the participants’ vocabulary size: the well-established
Eurocentres Vocabulary Size Test (EVST) (Meara &
Jones, 1990) test and a newly created XK_Lex (Al-
Masrai, 2009), designed to make a more accurate
measurement of vocabulary size. Results suggest that
Saudi university students’ vocabulary size is about
2000 to 3000 words on entry to university and
around 5000 words nearer graduation. These figures
thus emphasise that Saudi university learners’ level
is, on average, some way short of the kind of level
associated with complete fluency in EFL. Thus, the
study suggests further English language support for
the graduated students.

In this chapter, we address the debate between single-system and dual-system models of language by looking at the processing of multi-word phrases. We present findings that challenge the distinction between ‘stored’ and ‘computed’ linguistic forms via two experiments. The first demonstrates parallels in the processing of words and phrases: frequent four-word phrases are processed more quickly than less frequent ones, without any evidence of a frequency threshold. The second experiment shows that idiomatic phrases prime their construction just as well as non-idiomatic phrases, suggesting that they are not stored as analyzed wholes, but instead have internal structure. Taken together, the findings undermine the empirical criteria traditionally used to distinguish between ‘stored’ and ‘computed’ forms: compositional phrases showed frequency effects, even though such effects are often thought to be a marker of lexical storage, while non-compositional forms (idioms) showed evidence of internal structure, unexpected if they are stored as unanalyzed wholes. The findings show that linguistic structures are processed in qualitatively the same way regardless of where they fall on the frequency and compositionality continua, and highlight the utility of models that deal with all linguistic experience in a qualitatively similar fashion, and allow for experience to influence the learning, representation and processing of all linguistic patterns.

So far,the study of new words and the early stages of their lexicalization and institutionalization has focused very much on the structural and semantic changes involved as well as on the gradual spread of words in aspeech community. This paper focuses on insights into the concomitant processes taking place in language users' minds. It takes up ideas on concept-formation and hypostatization put forward in the philosophy of language, word-formation and lexical semantics and relates them to recent evidence on the processing and storage of nonce-formations and recently coined complex words collected by psycholinguists and neurolinguists. The role of frequency of exposure and semantic transparency in the increasing entrenchment of concepts in language users' memories is discussed. Effects of hypostatization -the subjective impression thatthe existence of aword suggests the existenceofaclass of things denoted by the word -are shown to be very strong even in the early phases of the establishment of new words, and pragmatic exploitations of these effects are explored. 1

There exist many different writing systems in the world. This variety of the writing systems raises several important questions related to reading. Do different writing systems entail different forms of information processing in reading? What are the effects of script variations on the processes involved in reading: do they simply constrain peripheral perceptual processes or do they challenge central cognitive processes also? How do script variations affect the organization of lexical representation? etc. In our study, focusing on the latter issue, we sought to explore whether script information is represented in the mental lexicon. We attempted to resolve this problem by studying Korean biscriptals.

Oceanic languages typically make a grammatical contrast between expressions of alienable and inalienable possession. Moreover, further distinctions are made in the alienable category but not in the inalienable category. The
present research tests the hypothesis that there is a good motivation for such a development in the former case. As English does not have a grammaticalized distinction between alienable and inalienable possession, it provides a good
testing ground. Three studies were conducted. In Study 1, participants were asked to write down the first interpretation that came to mind for possessive phrases, some of which contained inherently relational possessums, while
others contained possessums that are not inherently relational. Phrases with non-relational possessums elicited a broader range of interpretations and a lower consistency of a given interpretation across possessor modifiers than
those with relational possessums. Study 2 demonstrated that users assign a default interpretation to a possessive phrase containing a relational possessum even when another reading is plausible. Study 3, a corpus-based analysis of possessive phrase use, showed that phrases with relational possessums have a narrower range of interpretations than those with other possessums. Taken together, the findings strongly suggest that grammatical distinctions between different types of alienable possession are motivated.

A growing number of scholars regard language as social co-ordination. Not only does this overcome stale debate about whether langauge is cognitive or communicative but it opens up new thinking about its evolutionary history. Focusing on populations, the paper outlines and critiques Merlin Donald’s view of the human mind. It endorses the view that the evolutionary emergence of language can be traced to mimesis or what, twenty years ago, was called the “ability to produce conscious self-initiated representational acts that are intentional” (Donald, 1991: 168). However, ecological critique rejects the original theory’s appeal to symbolic models. I therefore argue that, while Donald is regarded as likely to be correct about the evolutionary basis of language (and languaging), it is possible to simplify his account. Instead of positing 3 evolutionary thresholds (mimesis, language and writing), mimetic skills may themselves be sufficient to ground all the slow processes of human cognition. Indeed, like tool-making, they probably co-evolved with vocal coordination. As cultures developed tools together with ‘public language’, we gained skills in using distributed cognition –ways of living that were later extended by external resources such as, for example, writing, religions, laws and technologies.

This paper presents an empirical study investigating the relationship between first language
(L1) lexical organisation and second language (L2) vocabulary development. The
participants consisted of 191 native Arabic learners of English as a foreign language (EFL)
within higher secondary education in Saudi Arabia. To conduct the study, two receptive
vocabulary size tests (L1 Arabic-Lex and L2 English X-Lex) were used with an L1 lexical
organisation test (ALOT) which was designed for the purpose of the study. Learners' L1
lexical organisation scores were found to be associated with their L1 and L2 receptive
vocabulary scores. However, the strong correlation found between lexical organisation and
the size of the lexicon in learners’ L1 might well suggest that lexical networks and the size of
the lexicon are one unified system. Nevertheless, to find any potential interaction between L1
lexical organisation and size on L2 vocabulary acquisition, ‘moderation’ analyses were
performed. Moderation results revealed three levels of interaction; low, average and high.
The low level shows that a low level of lexical organisation leads to low levels of L1 and L2
vocabulary size. The same relationship trend was logged for average and high levels. These
results thus emphasise the importance of a well-structured L1 mental lexicon on L2
vocabulary acquisition.

It has been suggested that the Romance first person singular indicative constitutes a natural class with the present subjunctive paradigm for the purposes of stem selection (Maiden 2005), thus forming a kind of ‘diagonal syncretism’, as the latter shares no morphosyntactic features with the former. The existence of such patterns has been taken to be an argument for autonomous morphology and the existence of unnatural ‘morphomes’, in the sense of Aronoff (1994). Our experimental investigations with native speakers of Portuguese, Italian, and Spanish reveal that this pattern is underlearned, and that speakers do not generalize it to novel forms, instead preferring the 2nd person singular indicative to the 1st person as the base for the derivation of the subjunctive paradigm (and the 2nd person indicative as opposed to the 2nd person subjunctive as the base for the derivation of the 1st person indicative as well). The results implicate a role for naturalness biases in morphological structure, and an awareness that the first person singular is an unreliable and idiosyncratic base for productive inflectional identity. We then study the underlearning of the L-morphome in terms of historical change in the salience of these patterns. We demonstrate, through means of diachronic corpus studies spanning five centuries, a change in the ratio of first conjugation verbs to second & third conjugation verbs, and a resulting decrease in the relative type frequency of where morphomic verbs reside. If indeed learners need increased evidence in order to incorporate and actively uptake unnatural patterns, this lexical support has dwindled over time. Even though many of the morphomic verbs have maintained a very high token frequency (allowing them to survive as memorized), their productivity has diminished over time, and hence they go unlearned as a generalizable pattern. When the distribution of irregular alternations is overshadowed in the lexicon, a morphologically unnatural pattern may cease to maintain its status as part of the grammar.

Cross-language cognates (words with similar form and meaning in different languages) are of special interest for designing a model of the bilingual lexicon because there is a possibility that they may have overlapping representations between the two languages of a bilingual. Among other effects related to cognates, the cognate facilitation effect was discovered: bilinguals produce and recognize cognates faster than non-cognates. One possibility to explain the cognate facilitation effect is through shared/overlapping representations of cognates and the word frequency effect. Since using a pair of cognates in two languages requires accessing (almost) the same phonological form in connection to (almost) the same concept, the overall frequency of a cognate increases. In a frequency rating task on English words, Russian-English bilinguals rated the frequencies of cognates significantly higher than English monolinguals did. There was no such difference between the bilinguals' and the monolinguals' frequency ratings for non-cognates. Therefore, bilinguals do perceive cognates as having higher frequencies.

The widespread occurrence of ideophones, large classes of words specialized in evoking sensory imagery, is little known outside linguistics and anthropology. Ideophones are a common feature in many of the world’s languages but are underdeveloped in English and other Indo-European languages. Here we study the meanings of ideophones in Siwu (a Kwa language from Ghana) using a pile-sorting task. The goal was to uncover the underlying structure of the lexical space and to examine the claimed link between ideophones and perception. We found that Siwu ideophones are principally organized around fine-grained aspects of sensory perception, and map onto salient psychophysical dimensions identified in sensory science. The results ratify ideophones as dedicated sensory vocabulary and underline the relevance of ideophones for research on language and perception.

Initial vocabulary acquisition is established through mapping second language (L2) word form to the existing first language (L1) meaning. However, although raised by some research, the effect of word translation equivalence on L2 vocabulary uptake is downplayed or disregarded. This study investigates the relationship between L1 lexical translation equivalence and L2 vocabulary acquisition in an experimental setting. A total of 156 native Arabic participants were given a vocabulary test in which they had to identify whether a word was known to them and then to supply the meaning of the word in their L1 and/or L2. The findings showed that L2 words with direct Arabic translation equivalents were significantly learned than words which do not. The study also indicated a smaller word frequency effect on learning words with non-direct L1 translation equivalents.

We describe the use of a weakly supervised bootstrapping algorithm in discovering contrasting semantic categories from a source lexicon with little training data. Our method primarily
exploits the patterns in sentential contexts where different categories of words may appear. Experimental results are presented showing that such automatically categorized terms tend to agree with human judgements.

FORMACIÓN DE PALABRAS Y ENSEÑANZA DEL ESPAÑOL LE/L2 offers a unique combination of theory and practice that guides the reader through the main processes of word formation in Spanish. It provides a detailed analysis of the role of lexical creation in the acquisition of L2 Spanish vocabulary, as well as over a hundred practical self-reflection activities.

Key features:

• Comprehensive theoretical explanations of word formation, including theoretical and pedagogical principles and their implementation in the teaching of L2 Spanish;
• Step-by-step pedagogical introductions to the full range of lexical creation mechanisms in Spanish language, including prefixation, emotive and nonemotive suffixation and composition;
• Carefully-chosen lists of relevant issues on lexical morphology with immediate applicability to the teaching of L2 Spanish;
• Guided activities with an answer key, which helps the reader to connect theory with practice and to become familiar with the key aspects of Spanish lexical morphology;
• Guidelines on how to tackle the teaching of Spanish word formation and vocabulary in an effective and engaging way.
Written in a clear and accessible manner, Formación de palabras y enseñanza del español LE/L2 is an essential resource for teachers of Spanish at all levels. It is also an excellent reference book for language teachers who wish to integrate word formation into the teaching of the Spanish language.

Chuang, Y.-Y., and R. H. Baayen
Naive discriminative learning (NDL) and linear discriminative learning (LDL) are simple computational algorithms for lexical learning and lexical processing. Both NDL and LDL assume that learning is discriminative, driven by prediction error, and that it is this error that calibrates the association strength between input and output representations. Both words’ forms and their meanings are represented by numeric vectors, and mappings between forms and meanings are set up. For comprehension, form vectors predict meaning vectors. For production, meaning vectors map onto form vectors. These mappings can be learned incrementally, approximating how children learn the words of their language. Alternatively, optimal mappings representing the end state of learning can be estimated. The NDL and LDL algorithms are incorporated in a computational theory of the mental lexicon, the ‘discriminative lexicon’. The model shows good performance both with respect to production and comprehension accuracy, and for predicting aspects of lexical processing, including morphological processing, across a wide range of experiments. Since, mathematically, NDL and LDL implement multivariate multiple regression, the ‘discriminative lexicon’ provides a cognitively motivated statistical modeling approach to lexical processing.

Pirrelli, V., C. Marzi, M. Ferro, F. A. Cardillo, R. H. Baayen, and P. Milin
Over the last decades, a growing body of evidence on the mechanisms governing lexical storage, access, acquisition and processing has questioned traditional models of language architecture and word usage based on the hypothesis of a direct correspondence between modular components of grammar competence (lexicon vs. rules), processing correlates (memory vs. computation) and neuro-anatomical localizations (prefrontal vs. temporo-parietal perisylvian areas of the left hemisphere). In the present chapter, we explore the empirical and theoretical consequences of a distributed, integrative model of the mental lexicon, whereby words are seen as emergent properties of the functional interaction between basic, language-independent processing principles and the language specific nature and organization of the input. From this perspective, language learning appears to be inextricably related to the way language is processed and internalized by the speakers, and key to an interdisciplinary understanding of such a way, in line with Tomaso Poggio's suggestion that the development of a cognitive skill is causally and ontogenetically prior to its execution (and sits "on top of it"). In particular, we discuss conditions, potential and prospects of the epistemological continuity between psycholinguistic and computational modelling of word learning, and illustrate the yet largely untapped potential of their integration. We use David Marr's hierarchy to clarify the comple-mentarity of the two viewpoints. Psycholinguistic models are informative about how speakers learn to use language (interfacing Marr's levels 1 and 2). When we move from the psycholinguistic analysis of the functional operations involved in language learning to an algorithmic description of how they are computed, computer simulations can help us explore the relation between speakers' behavior and general learning principles in more detail. In the end, psycho-computational models can be instrumental to bridge Marr's levels 2 and 3, bringing us closer to understanding the nature of word knowledge in the brain.

La disponibilidad léxica (DL) da cuenta del léxico que se encuentra en la mente de los sujetos y de las posibilidades de acceder a las unidades léxicas que lo constituyen. Por medio de la utilización de la herramienta informática DispoGrafo, en esta investigación se identifican los tipos de redes semánticas que construyen estudiantes bogotanos de los grados 5.º y 11.º con respecto al léxico disponible que activan en el centro de interés correspondiente a cuerpo humano. Los resultados obtenidos muestran la existencia de diversos mecanismos semántico-cognitivos y lingüísticos que están en la base de las redes semánticas de análisis.

Abstract: Lexical availability accounts mental lexicon and the access to its lexical units. Using the computer tool DispoGrafo, this research shows semantic webs related to lexical availability of Bogotá, Colombia, students (5 th and 11 th grades). These semantic webs belong to a single topic, human body. Results reveal that cognitive-semantic and linguistic mechanisms underlie these webs.

This study examines Zipf's law as a predictor of the relationship between word frequency and lexical coverage in Arabic. Zipf's law has been applied in a number of languages, such as English, French and Greek, and revealed useful information. However, word derivation processes are far more regular and extensive in Arabic than they are in English and it is suspected that how words are defined may significantly affect the outcome of this kind of analysis. The concept of the lemma as applied to English could be redrawn for Arabic entirely credibly. In this study, Arabic lemmatised frequency lists generated from a large Web-based corpus have been used to calculate coverage. Results show that Zipf's law does apply in Arabic, and the findings suggest that the most frequent 9,000 lemmatised words provide approximately 95% coverage, and 14,000 words give nearly 98% coverage. These results suggest that the relationship between word frequency and coverage in Arabic is comparable, to a certain degree, to English and Greek, but not to French. However, the definition of the lemma used in this study is probably more relevant to European languages than to Arabic and if this was changed it would significantly change the results.

The present study investigates the relationship between the morphological processing of regular and irregular words and second language (L2) vocabulary acquisition. In considering that monolingual Arabic speakers derive a large number of new words from roots by leaning heavily on the regularity of rules in Arabic (Bar & Dershowitz, 2012; Habash, 2010), they are expected to experience difficulty when developing the lexicon of a language with less regular rules, such as English. To examine this assumption empirically, data were collected by administering an English receptive vocabulary knowledge test that included 100 regular and irregular inflected and derived words to 450 Arabic English as a foreign language (EFL) learners from schools in Saudi Arabia. The test also included pesudowords (non-words) to act as
‘gatekeepers’ against the possibility of guessing. The t-test results revealed a non-significant difference in learners’ uptake of L2 words, whether regular or irregular. However, the study indicates that word frequency plays a statistically significant role in learning L2 vocabulary that is irregularly inflected or derived. The frequency effect on irregular word morphology found in this study is in line with the approach of a dual-route mechanism. This approach suggests that irregular words are not rule-based, so are stored in the mental lexicon as full entries, whereas regular words are not. This article suggests that introducing rules for deriving new words from base forms to EFL learners in the early stages
of learning would be very useful for L2 vocabulary development.

two lexical decision tasks, one with overt and one with masked priming, were carried out in order to explore lexical access and mental representation of coordinative compounds in modern Greek. results of both experiments showed strong priming effects in both first and second constituent recognition when primed by the whole compound, pointing to lexical access through robust decomposition and, consequently, a structured mental representation where both constituents contribute equally. the study provides some initial insights about coordination at the lexical level and also discusses the role of different relational information between constituents during lexical access of compounds.

This paper reports a study on the developmental route of Chinese English learners' mental lexicon by analyzing the responses to high-frequency stimulus words obtained from a crosssectional word association experiment and the responses to low-frequency stimulus words obtained from a longitudinal experiment. The result indicated the following: (1) Semantic associations accounted for most responses to the high-frequency words by four groups of participants and the semantic associations increased in the participants' mental lexicon as they made progress in language proficiency. (2) A large proportion of non-semantic associations accounted for responses to the low-frequency words, but with the increase of language proficiency, the participants' mental lexicon changed steadily from non-semantic to semantic.

This paper investigates the claim that language change (grammaticalization) is driven by cognitive processes, such as schemas and their instantiations. Instead of determining linear stages relating successive states in language evolution, we argue that cognitive schemas are the source of prototypical paths that linguistic items go through in a parallel diffusive fashion during use. The analysis is based on data from Arabic (Classical and colloquial) related to the deictic element ta used in a variety of lexical, morphological, and syntactic constructs. The study proceeds by presenting an overview of the synchronic variation patterns of the element ta and investigating the different cognitive processes involved in all the instantiations of the schema BE IN FRONT OF associated to the element ta.

The experience of embarrassment was explored in two experiments comparing
monolingual and bilingual speakers from cultures varying in the degree of elaboration of the embarrassment lexicon. In Experiment 1, narratives in English or
Korean depicting three types of embarrassing predicaments were to be rated on
their embarrassability and humorousness by Korean-English bilinguals, Korean
monolinguals, and Euro-American monolinguals. All groups judged certain
predicaments (involving social gaffes) to be the most embarrassing. However,
significant group and language differences occurred in judgments of the intensity
of embarrassment and amusement judgments evoked. Euro-Americans exhibited
higher overall levels of amusement than the two Korean groups who, in
turn, reported higher levels of embarrassment, particularly for certain predicament
types and contexts (ingroup members present). Further, for the bilinguals,
inept performance predicaments in English were judged more embarrassing
than those in Korean, whereas all predicament types were judged more amusing
when framed with English emotion labels. Bilinguals also appeared to show a
heightened embarrassability relative to both monolingual groups. Experiment
2 found lexical selection differences in open-ended responses to embarrassing
predicaments depicted in each language, with Euro-Americans preferring to give
justifications or use humor to minimize the embarrassment and Korean-English
bilinguals preferring to give apologies or say nothing. The findings are interpreted
to reflect the influence of culturally-mediated schemas guiding the activation
and processing of emotion vocabulary.

Considerable research has investigated the effect of preschool education on subsequent school success and proposed a positive link between the two. Less research, however, has directly investigated the influence of preschool education on children's vocabulary development. This paper reports on a study that examines the impact of preschool education on children's first language (L1) vocabulary development in early childhood settings and the potential impact this has on the successive acquisition of second language (L2) vocabulary in later school years. To conduct the study, data from 200 Arabic-English successive bilingual children were collected. The data are scores on receptive vocabulary knowledge in L1 and L2 of two groups of fourth grade schoolchildren (with and without preschool education). The results show that: (1) preschool education contributes largely to L1 vocabulary development and L2 vocabulary acquisition; (2) there is a strong link between L1 and L2 receptive vocabulary knowledge; and (3) bilingual mental lexicon size is predicted by preschool education. The present study provides further insights on the relation between preschool education and L1 vocabulary growth and the influence of this on sequential bilingualism. These findings will allow informed decisions on the support for preschool education by parents and educational policymakers.

The social networking website Facebook offers to its users a feature called “status updates” (or just “status”), which allows users to create Microposts directed to all their contacts, or a subset thereof. Readers can respond to Microposts, or in addition to that also click a “Like” button to show their appreciation for a certain Micropost. Adding semantic meaning in the sense of unambiguous intended ideas to such Microposts. We can make a start towards semantic web by adding semantic annotation to web resources. Ontology are used to specify meaning of annotations. Ontology provide a vocabulary for representing and communicating knowledge about some topic and a set of semantic relationships that hold among the terms in that vocabulary. For increasing the efficiency of ontology based application there is aneed to develop a mechanism that reduces the manual work in developing ontology. Inthis paper, we proposed Microposts’ ontology construction. In this paper we present a method that extracts meaningful knowledge from microposts shared in social platforms. This process involves different steps for the analysis of such microposts (extraction of keywords, named entities and their matching to ontological concepts).

The way in which the bilingual's two languages can co-exist and interact with each other is crucial for the study of language coactivation. This question has been tackled from the perspective of experimental psycholinguis-tics and that of language contact which can be brought together in the light of different, yet concomitant evidence related to multiple interactions between words from the two languages. Most of these interactions can be accounted for in terms of common and/or parallel morphological representations between the two languages. The two masked priming experiments using cross-script materials reported in this chapter corroborate and extend this hypothesis by showing that different 'levels' of morphological and/or etymological relatedness underlie different priming effects. The morphological priming pattern reflects an organisation of the lexicon based on 'cross-language derivational families', whereby morphologically complex L1 words automatically activate their base word in L2. Evidence that the opposite is not true suggests the existence of a looser link between L2 words and representations at the semantic-conceptual level, while still being compatible with evidence that translation primes induce significant effects in both L2-to-L1 and L1-to-L2 directions. Evidence from language contact supports the idea that the two languages do not behave in a strictly symmetric way. The more tenuous link between L2 vocabulary and a morphological/conceptual level is mirrored by the morphological integration of loan words into a matrix language, as a significant, preliminary step in the direction of a full conceptual integration. Further data from morphological integration in accordance with the cross-language priming data point to a view of the bilingual lexicon as a unified lexico-semantic architecture.

This paper explores the phenomenon of syntagmatic-paradigmatic shift which refers to the typical lexical development of adult native speakers who are found to produce fewer syntagmatic and phonological responses as they grow up and a greater number of paradigmatic responses as their native language develops. The study aims to investigate the existence of the phenomenon in both the L1 and the L2 and to assess its implications for the bilingual mental lexicon. The first section of the paper starts with a critical discussion on the phenomenon of the syntagmatic-paradigmatic shift and points to research which suggests that the shift in response type should be attributed to the development of a word in the lexicon of a native speaker or foreign language learner, regardless of the status of the language (L1 or L2) or the overall level of proficiency of the person involved. The study analyses the word associations of a group of first-year students, all advanced learners of English, at the School of English of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. The word-association test included 50 English words selected from the Kent-Rosanoff list and their translation equivalents in Greek. The next section discusses methodological problems related to the classification of the responses in the paradigmatic or syntagmatic category, arguing for a set of well-defined standards that would allow for a reliable classification of responses. The word¬-association data indicate that there are certain similarities in the L1 and L2 lexical operations of advanced learners; the subjects produce statistically higher numbers of paradigmatic responses and lower numbers of syntagmatic responses in both the L1 and L2, thus pointing to the existence of the syntagmatic-paradigmatic shift in the present study. The results are interpreted in terms of the frequency of the stimulus words used in both languages –something which points to the familiarity of the subjects with the words used. Moreover, evidence of a similar semantic lexical organization in the L1 and L2 lexica comes from the fact that the subjects produce approximately equivalent proportions of semantic responses (both syntagmatic and paradigmatic) in both languages. The few phonologίcal (clang) responses in the L2 seem to reveal the more restricted L2 lexical knowledge of particular subjects with respect to certain stimuli which appeared to be unfamiliar to them; these findings seem to indicate that formal processing plays an important role in the early stages of the integration of a word in the L2 mental lexicon, followed by semantico-pragmatic processing as the word becomes well-integrated in the lexicon.

Lexical inferencing is one of cognitive processing mechanism which plays a pivotal role in second language reading. The present study sought to investigate the impact of topic familiarity and passage sight vocabulary on lexical inferencing and recall of Iranian EFL students. For this purpose, by administrating a Quick Oxford Proficiency Test (QOPT), a sample of 60 students with an age range of 23 to 30 were randomly selected from the population of sophomore students studying English. The test results were used to categorize the students into intermediate and advanced groups, 30 each. Several instruments were utilized to operationalize the variables in the study. First, a cloze procedure consisting of two passages with familiar topics and two with unfamiliar topics was given to measure the participants' lexical inferencing ability. Then, a passage sight vocabulary test was applied to assess students' overall knowledge of words employed in the targeted passages. Finally, after a period of two weeks, a lexical recall test was administered to examine the learners' retention of lexical items which they had already seen in the four cloze passages. The results obtained via relevant statistical techniques revealed that topic familiarity and passage sight vocabulary had a direct bearing on EFL learners' lexical inferencing ability and recall.