WordNet is an on-line lexical reference system whose design is inspired by current

: When some items in a menu are selected more frequently than others, as is often the case, designers or individual users may be able to speed performance and improve preference ratings by placing several high-frequency items at the top of the menu. Design guidelines for split menus were developed and applied. Split menus were implemented and tested in two in situ usability studies and a controlled experiment. In the usability studies performance times were reduced by 17 to 58% depending on the site and menus. In the controlled experiment split menus were significantly faster than alphabetic menus and yielded significantly higher subjective preferences. A possible resolution to the continuing debate among cognitive theorists about predicting menu selection times is offered. We conjecture and offer evidence that, at least when selecting items from pull-down menus, a logarithmic model applies to familiar (high-frequency) items and a linear model applies to unfamiliar (low-frequency) ite...

The automatic derivation of word pronunciations from input text is a central task for any text-to-speech system. For general English text at least, this is often thought to be a solved problem, with manually-derived linguistic rules assumed capable of handling `novel' words missing from the system dictionary. Data-driven methods, based on machine learning of the regularities implicit in a large pronouncing dictionary, have received considerable attention recently but are generally thought to perform less well. However, these tentative beliefs are at best uncertain without powerful methods for comparing text-to-phoneme subsystems. This paper contributes to the development of such methods by comparing the performance of four representative approaches to automatic phonemisation on the same test dictionary. As well as rule-based approaches, three data-driven techniques are evaluated: pronunciation by analogy (PbA), NETspeak and IB1-IG (a modified k-nearest neighbour method). Issues involved in comparative evaluation are detailed and elucidated. The data-driven techniques outperform rules in accuracy of letter-to-phoneme translation by a very significant margin but require aligned text-phoneme training data and are slower. Best translation results are obtained with PbA at approximately 72% words correct on a reasonably large pronouncing dictionary, compared to something like 26% words correct for the rules, indicating that automatic pronunciation of text is not a solved problem.

Charles and Miller propose that lexical associations between antonymous adjectives are formed via their co-occurrences within the same sentence (the co-occurrence hypothesis), rather than via their syntactic substitutability (the substitutability hypothesis), and that such cooccurrences must take place more often than expected by chance. This paper provides empirical support for the co-occurrence hypothesis, in a corpus analysis of all high-frequency adjectives and their antonyms and of a major group of morphologically derived antonyms (e.g., impossible, un-happy). We show that very high co-occurrence rates do appear to characterize all antonymous adjective pairs, supporting the precondition for the formation of the association; and we find that the syntactic contexts of these co-occurrences raise the intrinsic associability of antonyms when they do co-occur. We show that via one of these patterns, mutual substitution within otherwise repeated phrases in a sentence, the co-occurrence hypothesis captures the generalizations that were the basis for the substitutability hypothesis for the formation of antonymic associations. 1. Antonymic Association Much current research in linguistics is concerned with textual or discourse bases for

The MRC machine usable dictionary contains 150837 words with up to 26 linguistic and psycholinguistic attributes for each. The attributes are from sources that are publicly available, but difficult to obtain and structure into a single dictionary. Three utility programs are described which permit the selection of words defined by a set of specified attribute values, and the attribute values for a set of specified words. These programs permit the construction of word sets for psycholinguistic experiments which control for the attributes specified in the dictionary. The dictionary may also be of use to researchers in artificial intelligence and computer science who require psychological and linguistic descriptions of words. - 2 - Those wishing to construct word sets as stimuli for psycholinguistic experiments must take into account a large number of characteristics of the words (see Cutler, 1981; Whaley, 1978). The Medical Research Council (MRC) Psycholinguistic Database version 1, was...

Pronunciation by analogy (PbA) is an emerging, data-driven technique with potential application in text-to-speech (TTS) systems, as well as being an influential psychological model of reading aloud. The underlying idea is that a pronunciation for an unknown word (i.e. one not in the dictionary, or lexicon, of the human or machine `reader') is assembled by matching substrings of the input to substrings of known, lexical words, hypothesising a partial pronunciation for each matched substring from the lexical knowledge of the `reader', and concatenating the partial pronunciations. This paper assesses the capability of PbA to derive pronunciations for unknown words of English. As a psychological model, PbA is `underspecified', i.e. the implementor of a simulation of the process faces detailed choices which can only be resolved by trial and error. One goal for this paper is to explore the impact of certain basic implementational choices on the performance of PbA systems. The variables stud...

Many models of speech production assume that one cannot begin to articulate a word before all its segmental units are inserted into the articulatory plan. Moreover, some of these models assume that segments are serially inserted from left to right. As a consequence, latencies to name words should increase with word length. In a series of five experiments, however, we showed that the time to name a picture or retrieve a word associated with a symbol is not affected by the length of the word. Experiments 1 and 2 used French materials and participants, while Experiments 3, 4 and 5 were conducted with English materials and participants. These results are discussed in relation to current models of speech production, and previous reports of length effects are reevaluated in light of these findings. We conclude that if words are encoded serially, then articulation can start before an entire phonological word has been encoded. Uttering words involves a series of processes that begin...

The authors investigated the distinctiveness and interrelationships among visuospatial and verbal memory processes in short-term, working, and long-term memories in 345 adults. Beginning in the 20s, a continuous, regular decline occurs for processing-intensive tasks (e.g., speed of processing, working memory, and long-term memory), whereas verbal knowledge increases across the life span. There is little differentiation in the cognitive architecture of memory across the life span. Visuospatial and verbal working memory are distinct but highly interrelated systems with domain-specific short-term memory subsystems. In contrast to recent neuroimaging data, there is little evidence for dedifferentiation of function at the behavioral level in old compared with young adults. The authors conclude that efforts to connect behavioral and brain data yield a more complete understanding of the aging mind. The present study is a life span approach to understanding visuospatial and verbal working memory and its relationship to long-term memory. It is well-documented that measures of overall cognitive resource such as speed of processing and working memory capacity mediate virtually all age-related variance on higher order cognitive tasks, including long-term memory tasks (Hultsch,

Words and pictures with earlier learned labels are processed faster than words and pictures with later learned labels. This age-of-acquisition (AoA) effect has been extensively investigated in many different types of tasks. This article provides a review of these studies including picture naming, word naming, speeded word naming, word pronunciation durations, lexical decisions, eye fixation times, face recognition, and episodic memory tasks. The measurement and validity of AoA ratings is discussed, along with statistical techniques used for exploring AoA’s influence. Finally, theories of AoA are outlined, and evidence for and against the various theories is presented.

This article presents MANULEX, a Web-accessible database that provides grade-level word frequency lists of nonlemmatized and lemmatized words (48,886 and 23,812 entries, respectively) computed from the 1.9 million words taken from 54 French elementary school readers. Word frequencies are provided for four levels: first grade (G1), second grade (G2), third to fifth grades (G3–5), and all grades (G1–5). The frequencies were computed following the methods described by Carroll, Davies, and Richman (1971) and Zeno, Ivenz, Millard, and Duvvuri (1995), with four statistics at each level (F, overall word frequency; D, index of dispersion across the selected readers; U, estimated frequency per million words; and SFI, standard frequency index). The database also provides the number of letters in the word and syntactic category information. MANULEX is intended to be a useful tool for studying language development through the selection of stimuli based on precise frequency norms. Researchers in artificial intelligence can also use it as a source of information on natural language processing to simulate written language acquisition in children. Finally, it may serve an educational purpose by providing basic vocabulary lists. This article presents MANULEX, 1 the first French linguistic tool that provides grade-based frequency lists of the 1.9 million words found in first-grade, secondgrade, and third- to fifth-grade French elementary school readers. The database contains 48,886 nonlemmatized entries and 23,812 lemmatized entries. It was compiled to supply the French counterpart to such works on the