Bilingual Mental 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 Parasitic Hypothesis, formulated to account for early stages of vocabulary development in second language learners, claims that on initial exposure to a word, learners automatically exploit existing lexical material in the L1 or L2 in order to establish an initial memory representation. At the level of phonological and orthographic form, it is claimed that significant overlaps with existing forms, i.e. cognates, are automatically detected and new forms are subordinately connected to them in the mental lexicon. In the study reported here, English nonwords overlapping with real words in Spanish (pseudocognates), together with noncognate nonwords, were presented to Spanishspeaking learners of English in a word familiarity task. Participants reported significantly higher levels of familiarity with the pseudocognates and showed greater consistency in providing translations for them. These results, together with measures of the degree of overlap between nonword stimuli and translations, were interpreted as evidence for the automatic use of cognates in early word learning.

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.

Are idioms stored in memory in ways that preserve their surface form or language or are they represented amodally? We examined this question using an incidental cued recall paradigm in which two word idiomatic expressions were presented to adult bilinguals proficient in Russian and English. Stimuli included phrases with idiomatic equivalents in both languages (e.g., “empty words/пустые слова”) or in one language only (English - e.g., “empty suit/пустой костюм”or Russian - e.g., “empty sound/пустой звук”), or in neither language (e.g., “empty rain/пустой дождь”).  If idioms are stored in a language-specific format, then phrases with idiomatic equivalents in both languages would have dual representation, and should therefore be more easily recalled than phrases with idiomatic meaning in only one language. This result was obtained. As such, the findings support the dual coding theory of memory (Paivio, 2014) and are also compatible with models of the bilingual lexicon that include language tags or nodes.

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.

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.

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.

This study assesses the effects of word familiarity and general pro ciency on cross-linguistic in uence (CLI) at the level of verbal frames. EFL learners at three pro ciency levels chose between two versions of a sentence differing only in verbal frame (the target L2 frame or the frame of the L1 equivalent). Choice of L1 frame was taken as an instance of CLI. Verbs were known to learners, but varied in familiarity. Comparisons of CLI rates across word groups and pro ciency levels show an independent effect of pro ciency, suggesting that as pro ciency increases, learners become less reliant on L1 for frame information.

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.

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).

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.

In their paper, Meara and Olmos Alcoy (2010) attempted to find a means of estimating productive second language (L2) vocabulary size based on the premise that many known lexical items simply do not appear in learner-produced texts. To do so, they borrowed an ecological model, in which a capture-recapture formula, the Petersen estimate (Petersen, 1896), is used to estimate the number of animals existing in a given environment. As the authors are probably the only vocabulary acquisition researchers searching for applicable models in the 19th century swimming habits of plaice in the German Sea, they should indeed be commended for their original approach. There are, however, a number of aspects to this approach that should be reconsidered before this model can accurately be applied to vocabulary.

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