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This article introduces the Children and Young People's Books-Lexicon (CYP-LEX), a large-scale lexical database derived from books popular with children and young people in the United Kingdom. CYP-LEX includes 1,200 books evenly distributed across three age bands (7–9, 10–12, 13+) and comprises over 70 million tokens and over 105,000 types. For each word in each age band, we provide its raw and Zipf-transformed frequencies, all parts-of-speech in which it occurs with raw frequency and lemma for each occurrence, and measures of count-based contextual diversity. Together and individually, the three CYP-LEX age bands contain substantially more words than any other publicly available database of books for primary and secondary school children. Most of these words are very low in frequency, and a substantial proportion of the words in each age band do not occur on British television. Although the three age bands share some very frequent words, they differ substantially regarding words that occur less frequently, and this pattern also holds at the level of individual books. Initial analyses of CYP-LEX illustrate why independent reading constitutes a challenge for children and young people, and they also underscore the importance of reading widely for the development of reading expertise. Overall, CYP-LEX provides unprecedented information into the nature of vocabulary in books that British children aged 7+ read, and is a highly valuable resource for those studying reading and language development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Artificial language learning research has become a popular tool to investigate universal mechanisms in language learning. However, often it is unclear whether the found effects are due to learning, or due to artefacts of the native language or the artificial language, and whether findings in only one language will generalise to speakers of other languages. The present study offers a new approach to model the influence of both the L1 and the target artificial language on language learning. The idea is to control for linguistic factors of the artificial and the native language by incorporating measures of wordlikeness into the statistical analysis as covariates. To demonstrate the approach, we extend Linzen and Gallagher (2017)’s study on consonant identity pattern to evaluate whether speakers of German and Mandarin rapidly learn the pattern when influences of L1 and the artificial language are accounted for by incorporating measures assessed by analogical and discriminative learning models over the L1 and artificial lexicon. Results show that nonwords are more likely to be accepted as grammatical if they are more similar to the trained artificial lexicon and more different from the L1 and, crucially, the identity effect is still present. The proposed approach is helpful for designing cross-linguistic studies.

Copyright of Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica is the property of El Colegio de Mexico AC and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The following article deals with peculiarities of unique lexical compatibility in classical prose of the XIX century and contains preliminary results of the cross-disciplinary corpus research performed by group of scientists of the Ural Federal University. This project suggests creation of individual syntagmatic profiles for the famous Russian writers. With works of I.A. Goncharov as an example and compared to the texts of other authors special context surrounding for words zhizn (life) and zhit (live) is systematized. Initial material is extracted through comparative statistical analysis of bigrams lexical pairs, when used in the same phrase context. Lexems zhizn (life) and zhit (live) are one of the most frequent words in Russian language, however, each author tends to use them in his own, special context surrounding. Novels by I.A. Goncharov (A Common Story, Oblomov, The Precipice, Frigate Pallada) provide relatively more issues of authors individual lexical compatibility for these words, than texts created by others; in addition a full list of syntagmatically active words for Goncharovs texts is represented in this article. Context analysis is conducted to show, how semantic connections between words in contexts reflect conceptual characteristics of Goncharovs idiostyle. Comments on the individual use of words zhizn (life) and zhit (live) by other writers A.P. Chekhov, L.N. Tolstoy, I.S. Turgenev and F.M. Dostoevsky are given. Conclusions are drawn about perspectives of performing comparative statistical analysis of lexical syntagmatics in modern philology

Lexical system is an essential component of any natural language. Frequency word lists are a convenient representation of words functional activity in language as a whole or in some particular text. The parameters and properties of frequency word lists are in the center of attention of NLP experts, since they are used in numerous practical applications related to attribution of authorship, text automatic clustering and classification. The article explores frequency word lists of Russian fiction in the period of 1900-1930, which was marked by a series of dramatic historical events and presents unique statistical data on the most frequent words, parts of speech and keywords, and their dynamics. Special attention is paid to the issues of statistical consistency of frequency word list parameters, which becomes especially relevant when studying big text data. The study was carried out on the basis of fiction texts, which by the variety of topics, lexical and stylistic diversity reflects the variability of linguistic forms better than the other written text genres. In terms of the text corpus size and character, the research of this kind is being carried out for the first time.

Neural representations of words are thought to have a complex spatio-temporal cortical basis. It has been suggested that spoken word recognition is not a process of feed-forward computations from phonetic to lexical forms, but rather involves the online integration of bottom-up input with stored lexical knowledge. Using direct neural recordings from the temporal lobe, we examined cortical responses to words and pseudowords. We found that neural populations were not only sensitive to lexical status (real vs. pseudo), but also to cohort size (number of words matching the phonetic input at each time point) and cohort frequency (lexical frequency of those words). These lexical variables modulated neural activity from the posterior to anterior temporal lobe, and also dynamically as the stimuli unfolded on a millisecond time scale. Our findings indicate that word recognition is not purely modular, but relies on rapid and online integration of multiple sources of lexical knowledge.

The article considers the possibilities of comparative lexicostatistical analysis to study the individual style (idiostyle) of a literary text author. Within the framework of the concept of idiostyle as a two-dimensional essence two research models connected with the identification of individual-author lexicon and peculiarities of an author’s lexicon compatibility are discussed. Lists of author’s frequency words formed based on the classical prose text corpus of the XIX century (works by L. N. Tolstoy, F. M. Dostoyevsky, A. P. Chekhov, I. S. Turgenev and I. A. Goncharov) are given. These lists were obtained on the basis of intertext and interstyled statistical comparison. According to the experiment, lexical lists are authorized by the philological audience without any specific variants. The applicability of lexical statistics for the creation of individual literary and artistic thesauruses is determined. Subsequent semantic markup makes it possible to determine the most actual spheres of reality for different authors, reflected in literary texts, as well as the spheres-lacunae. Such a model, in particular, allows selecting material for idiostylistic dictionaries in a more objective way. The article considers the principles of the description of an author’s lexical compatibility related to the formalized systematization of n-grams – pairs of words used in one phrase context. On the material of the XX century works the specificity of revealing the patterns of an author’s work with a word is shown. The article presents the description of context syntagmatic relations on the example of V. V. Nabokov’s idiostyle, carried out in comparison with the works of modern writers. Syntagmatic analysis is carried out on the example of the author’s combination of adverb “vdrug” (“suddenly”), which in the novels of Vladimir Nabokov has an original contextual environment. Such an analysis is essentially a fragment of an idiostylistic dictionary of compatibility based on a statistically verified sample of phrasal material.

We study the distribution of vowels in the monosyllabic verbs of Urban Hijazi Arabic, showing that speakers use the presence of a root emphatic consonant to partially predict the quality of stem vowels. The effect of the emphatic is observed in the lexicon, and is productively extended to nonce verbs, showing that speakers generalize over lexical representations that include both vowels and consonants; the purely consonantal representations that are commonly assumed for Arabic are insufficient to capture speakers’ knowledge of consonant-vowel interactions. We propose a probabilistic analysis that learns lexical trends from surface forms and extends them productively to nonce words.

Objective: Systematic reviews are important in health care but are expensive to produce and maintain. The authors explore the use of automated transformations of Boolean queries to improve the identification of relevant studies for updates to systematic reviews.Materials and Methods: A set of query transformations, including operator substitution, query expansion, and query reduction, were used to iteratively modify the Boolean query used for the original systematic review. The most effective transformation at each stage is identified using information about the studies included and excluded from the original review. A dataset consisting of 22 systematic reviews was used for evaluation. Updated queries were evaluated using the included and excluded studies from the updated version of the review. Recall and precision were used as evaluation measures.Results: The updated queries were more effective than the ones used for the original review, in terms of both precision and recall. The overall number of documents retrieved was reduced by more than half, while the number of relevant documents found increased by 10.3%.Conclusions: Identification of relevant studies for updates to systematic reviews can be carried out more effectively by using information about the included and excluded studies from the original review to produce improved Boolean queries. These updated queries reduce the overall number of documents retrieved while also increasing the number of relevant documents identified, thereby representing a considerable reduction in effort required by systematic reviewers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reviews the methodology to process and analyze the Basic Corpus of Chilean Spanish © (in Spanish Corpus Básico del Español de Chile ©). It focuses on the criteria for ordering linguistic materials, segmentation and lemmatization, using a computer program developed ad hoc for this research and specially prepared to process and analyze Chilean Spanish. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study the distribution of vowels in the monosyllabic verbs of Urban Hijazi Arabic, showing that speakers use the presence of a root emphatic consonant to partially predict the quality of stem vowels. The effect of the emphatic is observed in the lexicon, and is productively extended to nonce verbs, showing that speakers generalize over lexical representations that include both vowels and consonants; the purely consonantal representations that are commonly assumed for Arabic are insufficient to capture speakers' knowledge of consonant-vowel interactions. We propose a probabilistic analysis that learns lexical trends from surface forms and extends them productively to nonce words. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this study is to compare the speeches of two important Czechoslovak politicians - Edvard Beneš and Klement Gottwald. Thematic words (TW) and keywords (KW) of their speeches broadcasted on radio during World War II (1939-1945) are analysed. Although these methods are related, each of them provides different perspectives on the issue. Thematic words are based on the frequency distribution of the analysed text itself, whereas keywords are generated through the comparison of two corpora (namely Beneš versus Gottwald). Since Czech is a highly inflective language, all texts are lemmatized. Beneš led the Czechoslovak government-in-exile in London from 1939 to 1945. Gottwald, as the leader of the Communist Party, emigrated to Moscow in 1938. The results show that their differing political orientations, enhanced by their time in exile, influenced the language of their speeches. Beneš emphasized democratic principles, while Gottwald promoted communist revolutionary ideas. Gottwald's speeches were also considerably more offensive and direct. The results also show that both politicians emphasized the importance of the Soviet Union in World War II, whereas only Beneš mentioned the United Kingdom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In weight-sensitive languages, stress is influenced by syllable weight. As a result, heavy syllables should attract, not repel, stress. The Portuguese lexicon, however, presents a case where weight seems to negatively impact stress: antepenultimate stress is more frequent in light antepenultimate syllables than in heavy ones. This pattern is phonologically unexpected and appears to contradict the typology of weight and stress: it is a case where lexical statistics and the grammar conflict. Portuguese also contains gradient, not categorical, weight effects, which weaken as we move away from the right edge of the word. In this article, I examine how native speakers' grammars capture these subtle weight effects, and whether the negative antepenultimate weight effect is learned or repaired. I show that speakers learn the gradient weight effects in the language, but do not learn the unnatural negative effect. Instead, speakers repair this pattern and generalize a positive weight effect to all syllables in the stress domain. This study thus provides empirical evidence that speakers may not only ignore unnatural patterns, but also learn the opposite pattern.* [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presentation of the corpus of the interventions by Jacques Chirac during his two presidencial terms (1995-2002 and 2002-2007): the different modes of communication, description of the vocabulary, especially the most used words. There is a stability of J. Chirac's communication over the 12 years and a considerable weight of Europe in the main themes. But what meaning did J. Chirac give to this word? To answer this question, we reconstruct the network of associations, oppositions and substitutions that links this word to the other terms of the corpus. The main characteristics of this universe show that President Chirac had a distanced attitude towards the "construction of Europe". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Comparative analysis of political discourses in Canada and Quebec using four corpora: the throne speeches (Canada) and the inaugural speeches (Quebec), from 1867 to the present day, and the occasional speeches made by prime ministers outside of the house of representatives. After a reminder of the standards for the constitution of the corpora, the comparison concerns stylistic and lexicometric indices. A new method is presented in order to study the lexical characteristics within two corpora of nearly the same lengths. The differences between Canada and Quebec reflect the division of powers between the federal and provincial levels, but also different conceptions of power, political action, and relations to citizens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The term mujer occurs with a high frequency (if), dispersion (D) and use (U) in the Basic Corpus of Chilean Spanish (Fi = 340, D = 0, 73 and U = 248, 2). The word man on the other hand, presents a higher rate of occurrence (Fi = 502, D = 0.8 and U = 401.6), which is likely to be since both males and females are referred to as men when denoted as humans beings. This hypothesis seems to be confirmed by a similar distribution in four out of five textual genres (Drama, Narrative, Technical-Scientific and Press), but quite a disparate one in the Essay. 9% of the man and woman occurrences are recorded in Drama and 14% of the occurrences of each term appear in Technical-Scientific texts, with an identical distribution. Unlike these, the occurrences of man reaches 26% in the Essay, twice the rate of woman, precisely because in this genre the term man is more frequently used to encompass both as members of the human species. These statistic differences cannot be directly interpreted as an uneven representation of men and women in Chilean Spanish. However, the combinations these lexical units establish, especially when it comes to predictable units, may give some hints to the conception of men and women in society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with morphological productivity in diachrony, in particular it addresses the issue of the quantitative evaluation of productivity within a given time span. Adopting Baayen’s (1992; 2001; 2008) corpus-based quantitative approach which considers productivity as the probability of encountering a new type when sampling a large corpus, the paper shows the evolution of two competing suffixes -mento/-zione in Old Italian from the 13th to the 16th Centuries. On the basis of four separate corpora drawn from LIZ 4.0 (Letteratura Italiana Zanichelli), it is demonstrated how the productivity of the suffix -mento, within the time span of four centuries, remains constant, while the suffix -zione displays diachronic variability. Apart from diachronic considerations regarding this situation, the paper also highlights some technical aspects, such as the use of LNRE models (implemented in the package zipfR, a tool for lexical statistics in R, cf. Baroni — Evert, 2006; Evert — Baroni, 2007; Baayen, 2008), as well as some well-known limitations and constraints inherent in quantitative analyses of diachronic corpora.

This article studies desinences found in the imperfect subjunctive in Chilean Spanish, by means of the statistical description of -ra and -se verb endings that appear in the Corpus Básico del Español de Chile (Castillo Fadi'c, 2012). Through the analysis of different variables, and based on computational linguistics, corpus linguistics and lexical-statistical tools, we intend to define if these desinences, considered as variants of the same morphological variable, alternate freely or correlate with other variables. Results show the existence of a correlation between the morphological variable studied in the article and the textual world. In addition, grammatical and lexical-semantic factors that may influence on the choice of one or another variant are explored; it would be necessary to study these in depth considering a larger sample. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Itinerarios (1507-7241) is the property of University of Warsaw and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper deals with morphological productivity in diachrony, in particular it addresses the issue of the quantitative evaluation of productivity within a given time span. Adopting Baayen's (1992; 2001; 2008) corpus-based quantitative approach which considers productivity as the probability of encountering a new type when sampling a large corpus, the paper shows the evolution of two competing suffixes -mento/-zione in Old Italian from the 13th to the 16th Centuries. On the basis of four separate corpora drawn from LIZ 4.0 (Letteratura Italiana Zanichelli), it is demonstrated how the productivity of the suffix -mento, within the time span of four centuries, remains constant, while the suffix -zione displays diachronic variability. Apart from diachronic considerations regarding this situation, the paper also highlights some technical aspects, such as the use of LNRE models (implemented in the package zipfR, a tool for lexical statistics in R, cf. Baroni -- Evert, 2006; Evert -- Baroni, 2007; Baayen, 2008), as well as some well-known limitations and constraints inherent in quantitative analyses of diachronic corpora. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Verba: Anuario Galego de Filoloxia is the property of Universidad de Santiago de Compostela, Servicio de Publicaciones and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Synergies Argentine is the property of GERFLINT (Groupe d'Etudes et de Recherches pour le Francais Langue Internationale) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Neural representations of words are thought to have a complex spatio-temporal cortical basis. It has been suggested that spoken word recognition is not a process of feed-forward computations from phonetic to lexical forms, but rather involves the online integration of bottom-up input with stored lexical knowledge. Using direct neural recordings from the temporal lobe, we examined cortical responses to words and pseudowords. We found that neural populations were not only sensitive to lexical status (real vs. pseudo), but also to cohort size (number of words matching the phonetic input at each time point) and cohort frequency (lexical frequency of those words). These lexical variables modulated neural activity from the posterior to anterior temporal lobe, and also dynamically as the stimuli unfolded on a millisecond time scale. Our findings indicate that word recognition is not purely modular, but relies on rapid and online integration of multiple sources of lexical knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we present the first open-access lexical database that provides phonological representations for 120,000 Italian word forms. Each of these also includes syllable boundaries and stress markings and a comprehensive range of lexical statistics. Using data derived from this lexicon, we have also generated a set of derived databases and provided estimates of positional frequency use for Italian phonemes, syllables, syllable onsets and codas, and character and phoneme bigrams. These databases are freely available from phonitalia.org. This article describes the methods, content, and summarizing statistics for these databases. In a first application of this database, we also demonstrate how the distribution of phonological substitution errors made by Italian aphasic patients is related to phoneme frequency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article we propose a technique for computing a standardized Z score capable of defining the specific vocabulary found in a text (or part thereof) compared to that of an entire corpus. Assuming that the term occurrence follows a binomial distribution, this method is then applied to weight terms (words and punctuation symbols in the current study), representing the lexical specificity of the underlying text. In a final stage, to define an author profile we suggest averaging these text representations and then applying them along with a distance measure to derive a simple and efficient authorship attribution scheme. To evaluate this algorithm and demonstrate its effectiveness, we develop two experiments, the first based on 5,408 newspaper articles (Glasgow Herald) written in English by 20 distinct authors and the second on 4,326 newspaper articles (La Stampa) written in Italian by 20 distinct authors. These experiments demonstrate that the suggested classification scheme tends to perform better than the Delta rule method based on the most frequent words, better than the chi-square distance based on word profiles and punctuation marks, better than the KLD scheme based on a predefined set of words, and better than the naïve Bayes approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: We test the claim that acquiring a mass-count language, like English, causes speakers to think differently about entities in the world, relative to speakers of classifier languages like Japanese. We use three tasks to assess this claim: object-substance rating, quantity judgment, and word extension. Using the first two tasks, we present evidence that learning mass-count syntax has little effect on the interpretation of familiar nouns between Japanese and English, and that speakers of these languages do not divide up referents differently along an individuation continuum, as claimed in some previous reports [Gentner, D., & Boroditsky, L. (2001). Individuation, relativity, and early word learning. In M. Bowerman, & S. Levinson (Eds.), Language acquisition and conceptual development (pp. 215–256). Cambridge University Press]. Instead, we argue that previous cross-linguistic differences [Imai, M., & Gentner, D. (1997). A cross-linguistic study of early word meaning: Universal ontology and linguistic influence. Cognition, 62, 169–200] are attributable to “lexical statistics” [Gleitman, L., & Papafragou, A. (2005). Language and thought. In K. Holyoak, & R. Morrison (Eds.), Cambridge handbook of thinking and reasoning (pp. 633–661). Cambridge University Press]. Speakers of English are more likely to think that a novel ambiguous expression like “the blicket” refers to a kind of object (relative to speakers of Japanese) because speakers of English are likely to assume that “blicket” is a count noun rather than a mass noun, based on the relative frequency of each kind of word in English. This is confirmed by testing Mandarin–English bilinguals with a word extension task. We find that bilinguals tested in English with mass-count ambiguous syntax extend novel words like English monolinguals (and assume that a word like “blicket” refers to a kind of object). In contrast, bilinguals tested in Mandarin are significantly more likely to extend novel words by material. Thus, online lexical statistics, rather than non-linguistic thought, mediate cross-linguistic differences in word extension. We suggest that speakers of Mandarin, English, and Japanese draw on a universal set of lexical meanings, and that mass-count syntax allows speakers of English to select among these meanings. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Copyright of Ciencia en su PC is the property of Instituto de Informacion Cientifica y Tecnologica and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The measure of lexical repetition constitutes one of the variables used to determine the lexical richness of literary texts, a value further employed in authorship attribution studies. Although most of the constants for lexical richness actually depend on text length, Yule’s characteristic is considered to be highly reliable for being text length independent. It is not the aim of this paper questioning the validity of K to measure the lexical repeat-rate, nor to evaluate its usefulness in authorship studies, but to review the most accurate procedure to calculate its value in the light of the lack of standardization found in the specific literature. At the same time, the peculiar calculation of Yule’s K by TACT is explained. Our study suggests that standardization will certainly help improve the studies where K is employed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]