Bilingual Mental Lexicon

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.

The relative frequency of occurrence of words in language has been shown to have extremely powerful effects on perceptual and cognitive processes used in word recognition and lexical access. Although different theories of word perception account for the effects of word frequency with different mechanisms,
all current theories assume that a mental representation of the experienced frequency of words exists in some form in the lexicon. However, except for published norms of word frequency counts, no data are available on the familiarity of words. Thus, it is quite important to measure the judged
familiarity of words to develop a database of experienced frequency information that would give researchers more precise control of word frequency in perceptual and memory experiments. The present study collected familiarity ratings and response times for 20,000 words in the Mirriam-Webster Pocket
Dictionary. Summary statistics on these data are reported. These findings support the claim that although rated word familiarity and frequency counts are related, they are by no means equivalent. This database of familiarity ratings therefore provides a more valid estimate of the psychological correlate of word frequency than computational analyses of corpora of text. In addition, these familiarity data can be used to provide more direct estimates of the size of the mental lexicon than have been made by previous studies.

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).

In a previous  study,  Paivio  and  Lambert  (1981)  reported  superior  recall
for  imaged  than for verbally  coded  words and superior  recall for bilingually  than
unilingually  coded  words in French-English  bilinguals.  While  these  results
support a dual  coding  view of bilingual  memory,  they do  not rule out a
levels-of-processing  account,  since the bilingual  coding  task  (translation)  involved a deeper level of processing  than the unilingual one (copying). In the
present  study, a synonym generation  task was compared to translation, copying,
and imaging in  Spanish-English bilinguals and English  monolinguals.  Although words  in the synonym condition  were  better  recalled  than  copied  words,  imaged
and  translated  words  were better  remembered  than  synonyms. It  is argued  that
a dual  coding  view  offers a more  parsimonious  account  of these  findings.

What might the study of language processing look like if the canonical language user were assumed to be bilingual? In this chapter we offer some reflections on how the origins, assumptions and practices of psycholinguistics constructed a particular view of language and of the typical language user, with distinct consequences for the construction of bilingualism as an object of inquiry. We suggest that if psycholinguistics is to fully embrace its “bilingual turn” it will benefit from exploring new ways of conceptualizing and approaching the study of bilingual language processing rather than uncritically adopting questions and approaches that were initially framed to understand single language use. Specifically, we suggest that research designs that allow language phenomena to emerge rather than be expressly manipulated or restricted by researchers’ preconceived assumptions and that build in a broader range of variables and consider an expanded range of bilingual groups will advance our understanding of the bilingual mental lexicon in important ways.

Obiettivo della proposta è illustrare i punti in comune tra apprendenti sinofoni e non sinofoni nell’acquisizione dell’italiano L2.
Nell’acquisizione dell’italiano L2, apprendenti sinofoni e non sinofoni affrontano le medesime sfide: la processazione scritta delle parole, il trattamento in tempo reale delle informazioni e la formazione del lessico mentale, strettamente connesso alla creazione delle vie di lettura. Un canale importante, nell’acquisizione guidata della L2, è la comprensione scritta, che si attiva attraverso la lettura. Secondo il modello neuropsicologico “a due vie”, la lettura delle lingue con sistema di scrittura alfabetico, e sillabico, avviene mediante due sottoprocessi, denominati “vie”: la via indiretta (o fonologica) e la via diretta (o lessicale). Il nativo di italiano L1 che impara a leggere passa dalla condizione di lettore inesperto, che usa solo la via indiretta, a lettore esperto, che usa in parallelo entrambe le vie, con una predominanza per quella diretta (l’unica che dà rapidamente accesso al sistema semantico).
Il cinese si contraddistingue, rispetto all’italiano, per essere una lingua isolante e per avere un sistema di scrittura logografico (o, meglio, morfografico). Mentre l’apprendente italofono di cinese L2 possiede solo un Lessico Ortografico italiano di Input (o Area Visiva per la Forma della Parola) e deve formare un ulteriore magazzino ortografico per i caratteri, l’apprendente sinofono di italiano L2, già abituato al sistema di scrittura alfabetico grazie al pinyin e all’inglese, deve imparare le regole di conversione grafema/fonema e progredire nella via di lettura diretta, al pari di qualunque altro apprendente. Nel leggere la L2, e formare, mediante la via diretta, la nuova grammatica mentale, ogni apprendente dovrà liberarsi di euristiche di lettura istintive e inerziali, che si innescano per default davanti a ogni stringa, e creare nuove memorie ortografiche, semantiche, fonologiche e di lavoro (il buffer) cui attingere al posto di quelle della L1. La creazione e il consolidamento di schemi di lettura “sintonizzati” con l’italiano sono dunque due ostacoli con cui si confrontano apprendenti di tutte le madrelingue.
Secondo il già citato Modello a Due Vie, il Lessico Ortografico di Input (il magazzino delle rappresentazioni ortografiche) è in collegamento con il Sistema Semantico (una memoria a lungo termine contenente tutte le informazioni associate alle parole). L’apprendente, di qualsiasi L1, deve imparare a processare non una, ma più forme in competizione, in rapporto sintagmatico e paradigmatico tra di loro. In lui si va dunque formando un lessico mentale contenente la morfologia e la sintassi dell’italiano. I magazzini di memoria, coinvolti nella via diretta, e il lessico mentale, coinvolto nella formazione di rappresentazioni astratte, sono pertanto legati. Inoltre, l’apprendente processerà per iscritto la L2 tanto più rapidamente quanto più avrà formato un lessico mentale forte, perché la processazione delle parole è legata alla formazione del lessico mentale. Anche se il sinofono è abituato a rapporti sintagmatici e paradigmatici tipici di una lingua isolante, molto diversi da quelli dell’italiano, nel processo di lettura in L2 egli esegue un compito che sottostà ai vincoli fisici propri della lettura, come un qualsiasi altro apprendente di italiano.

High word frequency and neighborhood density contribute to the accuracy and speed of word production in English adults (e.g., Vitevitch & Sommers 2003), and characterize early words in child English (e.g., Storkel 2004). The present study investigated a speech corpus of child German (ages 2;00-3;00) to further the understanding of the influence of frequency and density on production. Results for four children suggest that, contrary to English, words produced early are not from denser neighborhoods in an adult lexicon than later words. As in English, frequent words are produced before less frequent words. Implications on theory and methodology are discussed.

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.

En este trabajo indaga en la construcción del lexicón bilingüe a través de un experimento de priming semántico de lectura y escritura en bilingües, nativos de español y hablantes con alto dominio del inglés como segunda lengua. Se observará cómo la lectura en L1 o L2 influye en la posterior producción en L1 o L2 de listas de vocabulario, así como en la disponibilidad léxica de las palabras producidas. Los resultados, que muestran una clara desigualdad por categorías y una prevalencia del priming intralenguas sobre el interlenguas, se interpretarán a la luz del Modelo jerárquico revisado de Kroll y Stewart (1994).

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 ...

Motivacija za ovaj rad proizlazi iz spoznaje da je sve veći broj ljudi dvojezičan i da dvojezični govornici funkcioniraju drugačije od jednojezičnih. Takva saznanja zahtijevaju i od istraživača različitih struka da dvojezičnost uzmu u obzir kao jednu od varijabli u svojim istraživanjima, čak i kada dvojezičnost nije glavni predmet istraživanja. U posljednjih je 30-ak godina zabilježen značajan porast broja radova na temu dvojezičnosti, posebno onih vezanih za organizaciju mentalnog rječnika, tj. leksikona. U ovom se radu daje pregled najčešće korištenih istraživačkih paradigmi s njihovim prednostima i nedostacima, kao i nalaza iz tog područja. Rad je koncipiran u tri glavna dijela. U prvom će dijelu biti kratko definirani glavni pojmovi vezani uz istraživanje dvojezičnosti te će biti prikazana najvažnija istraživačka pitanja koja se vežu uz to područje istraživanja. U drugom će se dijelu rada prikazati najvažnije metode kojima se pokušava odgovoriti na istraživačka pitanja te će se napraviti evaluaciju metoda, odnosno dat će se odgovor na pitanje u kojoj mjeri pojedine metode mogu odgovoriti na postavljene probleme. Također, u nastavku će biti dane preporuke koje metode koristiti za koje istraživačke probleme. Treći se dio rada odnosi na ključne metodološke faktore o kojima istraživač mora voditi računa prilikom koncipiranja istraživanja i konstrukcije istraživačkog nacrta. Također, dane su preporuke kako kontrolirati te faktore ili ako ih nije moguće kontrolirati, kako umanjiti njihov učinak na zavisnu varijablu. Ključne riječi: dvojezičnost, dvojezično semantičko pamćenje, metodologija istraživanja dvojezičnosti, dvojezični mentalni leksikon Uvod Uspješno usvajanje i korištenje jezika podrazumijeva pohranjivanje velikog broja riječi u dugoročno pamćenje. Te se riječi trebaju povezati sa svojim značenjem i gramatičkim pravilima za uporabu. Uporaba jezika dobiva novu dimenziju kada

In this project, I plan to list the first 50 words Emanuela and Cristian acquired, look at the rate of acquisition of these words, group them based on grammatical classes, and discuss their rate of distribution. I then plan to extend my investigation to the next 50 words for each of the children, and repeat the investigation on the words from 51 to 100. I will then cumulate the distribution tables for the first 50 and the next 50 for both Emanuela and Christian, and discuss the rate of distribution for the first 100 words they acquired. Finally, I will compare the rates of distribution for the first and last 50 words for both Emanuela and Cristian, and draw conclusions on the results.

This approach to the work on my project follows loosely research performed by Ferguson and Farwell, Stoel-Gammon and Cooper, and Pine (Berko 134; Berko 320-321). The first and the second groups of researchers performed phonological investigations on the first 50 words of children. Pine collected data on the first 100 words of seven children, and grouped the words based on their functions—attention, labeling, description, demand, and protest (Berko 320-321).  I decided to research the first 50 words on my children, extend the investigation to another 50 words, and in the end analyze the trends in lexicon acquisition through a cumulation of all the data.

High word frequency and neighborhood density contribute to the accuracy and speed of word production in English adults (e.g., Vitevitch & Sommers 2003), and characterize early words in child English (e.g., Storkel 2004). The present study investigated a speech corpus of child German (ages 2;00-3;00) to further the understanding of the influence of frequency and density on production. Results for four children suggest that, contrary to English, words produced early are not from denser neighborhoods in an adult lexicon than later words. As in English, frequent words are produced before less frequent words. Implications on theory and methodology are discussed.

This dissertation investigates how cognates are organized in the bilingual mental lexicon and examines whether orthography in one language, via phonological representations, influences the processing of cognates and false friends in the other language. In light of the framework of two well-known models of bilingual visual word recognition, the Bilingual Interactive Activation (BIA) and the Bilingual Interactive Activation Plus (BIA+), the premise is that there is activation from orthography to phonology across a bilingual’s two languages and that this activation is modulated by the degree of orthographic and phonological code overlap.

Two objective metrics were used to assess crosslinguistic similarity of Portuguese-English cognates and false friends that were selected for a cross-language lexical decision task with masked priming. Dynamic time warping (DTW), an algorithm that was originally conceived to compare different speech patterns in automatic speech recognition and to measure acoustic similarity between two time-dependent sequences, was used to compute crosslinguistic phonological similarity. The Normalized Levenshtein Distance (NLD), an algorithm that calculates the minimum number of single-character insertions, deletions or substitutions required to change one word into another and normalizes the result by their lengths, was used to compute crosslinguistic orthographic similarity. Portuguese-English bilinguals who acquired their second language after reaching puberty, and English functional monolinguals who grew up speaking primarily English were recruited to participate in the experimental task.

Based on collected reaction time and accuracy data, mixed-effects models analyses are used to estimate the individual effects of crosslinguistic orthographic, phonological and semantic similarity and the role each of them, along with English proficiency, word frequency and length play in the organization of the Portuguese-English bilingual mental lexicon.

This paper focuses on the issue of the respective roles of form and meaning in the L1 and L2 lexical acquisition. It attempts a critical analysis of the fairly widely-held view in psycholinguίstics, namely that the L2 mental lexicon is more form-oriented than the L1 mental lexicon, which is considered to be more semantically-driven. The findings seem to suggest that the way words are processed is not so much related to the status of the language (Ll or L2) to which they belong, but rather it depends on the level of familiarity of native speakers or learners with particular words at a particular time. Α lexical item will trigger different types of response (form- or meaning-based) at different stages of its internalization into the mental lexicon; the status of the language this word is a token of or the overall proficiency level of a speaker in that language will not determine the type of response. The conclusion, based on the analysis of the findings, is that unfamiliar lexical items tend to elicit form-based responses because they have not yet become part of the speaker's semantic structure while very familiar items are well-integrated into the speaker's mental lexicon, which means that they are well-connected to the networks of lexical meanings, therefore they tend to elicit semantic responses.

The human capacity to categorise new information on the basis of similarity with existing knowledge representations is, perhaps, the most important organising principle for mental representation. It is essential for the development of conceptual relations and networks (Rosch, 1978; Smith and Medin, 1981; Schönpflug, this volume), as well as for the acquisition and organisation of the mental lexicon (Fay and Cutler, 1977; Peters, 1983). In this chapter, we discuss a model of vocabulary acquisition that has as its cornerstone the detection and exploitation of similarity between novel lexical input and prior lexical knowledge. This processing and storage mechanism has been characterised metaphorically as a “parasitic learning strategy” (Hall, 1992), and is hypothesised to constitute a default cognitive procedure, modulated in practice by other factors external to the lexicon. Earlier versions of the parasitic model were developed to explain aspects of L2 vocabulary acquisition (Hall, 1996, 2002; Hall and Schultz, 1994). In the present contribution, we extend the model to L3 (following Ecke and Hall, 1998, 2000; Ecke 2001), using evidence from a corpus of spoken lexical errors in novice learners of L3 German.

This paper focuses on the issue of the respective roles of form and meaning in the L1 and L2 lexical acquisition. It attempts a critical analysis of the fairly widely-held view in psycholinguίstics, namely that the L2 mental lexicon is more form-oriented than the L1 mental lexicon, which is considered to be more semantically-driven. The findings seem to suggest that the way words are processed is not so much related to the status of the language (Ll or L2) to which they belong, but rather it depends on the level of familiarity of native speakers or learners with particular words at a particular time. Α lexical item will trigger different types of response (form- or meaning-based) at different stages of its internalization into the mental lexicon; the status of the language this word is a token of or the overall proficiency level of a speaker in that language will not determine the type of response. The conclusion, based on the analysis of the findings, is that unfamiliar lexical items tend to elicit form-based responses because they have not yet become part of the speaker's semantic structure while very familiar items are well-integrated into the speaker's mental lexicon, which means that they are well-connected to the networks of lexical meanings, therefore they tend to elicit semantic responses.

ABSTRACT
The present study aimed to investigate the possibility of vocabulary acquisition in a context of
reading of two short stories in English. In order to get to our experimental research, we have
started our study writing about cognition, language, reading comprehension and lexical
knowledge. In relation to teaching and learning of vocabulary in L2 through reading, we have
presented studies by Teng (2015 and 2016), Laufer (1997), Ur (2012), Nation and Waring
(1997), Schmitt (2008), among others, which reveal important aspects about lexical knowledge
and the importance of a rich mental lexicon for a better reading comprehension. Among the
strategies of vocabulary acquisition in L2 cited, we stand out studies by Ur (2012) e Holden
(2009), which affirm that establishing connections between word families, cognates between
two languages and relationships between semantic fields, among other things, are relevant and
effective strategies for a better vocabulary acquisition in L2. The participants were ten students
with intermediate and advanced level of reading from a language school in the countryside of
the state of Rio Grande do Sul, south Brazil. In our experimental research, we have carried out
the application of a vocabulary pretest and a mediated reading of two tales by Edgar Allan Poe
in English, during which students were able to negotiate meanings and build concepts about
words. Right after, we have applied the vocabulary posttest, which presented a higher score of
the definitions of the target words in relation to the pretest.The negotiation and experimentation
of meanings and the mediated reading were effective in the process of vocabulary acquisition
in L2. With the analysis of the transcription of the mediated reading, it is possible to notice the
participants’ great cognitive effort to infer the definitions for the key words in the tests.
Key words: Vocabulary acquisition in L2. Mental lexicon. Cognition. Reading