This is a reference work containing free association norms for over 2000 words in the English language collected over the last eight years from groups of 40-50 British English speakers aged between 17 and 45. These norms provide the information that, for example, 67% of people give dog as the first word they think of in response to the word cat, that 24% give the word society in response to the word pillar, and given the name Michael, 65% say Jackson, whereas less than 5% say Heseltine or Caine. These norms will be of use to researchers and students in many fields of psychology, especially language and memory, where the degree of association between pairs of words is often an important experimental variable. The main part of the book contains an alphabetical list of all associative responses and their frequency for each of the 2464 stimulus words. In addition, there is an index of stimulus words organised according to semantic category to aid selection of experimental materials. Full methodological details of the collection and compilation of the data are also provided in the introduction.

Cognitive and Computational Strategies for Word Sense Disambiguation examines cognitive strategies by humans and computational strategies by machines, for WSD in parallel. Focusing on a psychologically valid property of words and senses, author Oi Yee Kwong discusses their concreteness or abstractness and draws on psycholinguistic data to examine the extent to which existing lexical resources resemble the mental lexicon as far as the concreteness distinction is concerned. The text also investigates the contribution of different knowledge sources to WSD in relation to this very intrinsic nature of words and senses.

As natural language processing spans many different disciplines, it is sometimes difficult to understand the contributions and the challenges that each of them presents. This book explores the special relationship between natural language processing and cognitive science, and the contribution of computer science to these two fields. It is based on the recent research papers submitted at the international workshops of Natural Language and Cognitive Science (NLPCS) which was launched in 2004 in an effort to bring together natural language researchers, computer scientists, and cognitive and linguistic scientists to collaborate together and advance research in natural language processing. The chapters cover areas related to language understanding, language generation, word association, word sense disambiguation, word predictability, text production and authorship attribution. This book will be relevant to students and researchers interested in the interdisciplinary nature of language processing. - Discusses the problems and issues that researchers face, providing an opportunity for developers of NLP systems to learn from cognitive scientists, cognitive linguistics and neurolinguistics - Provides a valuable opportunity to link the study of natural language processing to the understanding of the cognitive processes of the brain

Explores the process of word selection in second language use and the factors which determine the writer's choice of words.

This book examines key issues in theories of what language is and what happens in the mind during second language acquisition (SLA), inspiring readers to think in new and exciting ways about language learning and teaching. Chapters, written by both established and rising star scholars, provide cutting-edge insights and new empirical findings on major topics of formal and cognitive linguistics, psycholinguistics and second language development, and offer a coherent, wide-ranging, reader-friendly examination of learner-internal factors in SLA. The first section of the book focuses on issues that are pertinent to our understanding of language acquisition, particularly in relation to syntax. The second section comprises empirical chapters on syntax, the lexicon, phonetics/phonology and language production in English and other languages. These chapters refer to theories and frameworks from within SLA to enable the reader to grasp the key questions and issues that are currently relevant. The final section focuses on research relating to how second language (L2) learners make transitions from one stage of development to the next; it covers state-of-the-art psycholinguistic research concerning how L2 acquisition occurs in real time, and includes discussion of models of L2 development both in and out of the classroom.

This collection of papers and abstracts stems from the third meeting in the series of Sperlonga workshops on Cognitive Models of Speech Processing. It presents current research on the structure and organization of the mental lexicon, and on the processes that access that lexicon. The volume starts with discussion of issues in acquisition and consideration of questions such as, 'What is the relationship between vocabulary growth and the acquisition of syntax?', and, 'How does prosodic information, concerning the melodies and rhythms of the language, influence the processes of lexical and syntactic acquisition?'. From acquisition, the papers move on to consider the manner in which contemporary models of spoken word recognition and production can map onto neural models of the recognition and production processes. The issue of exactly what is recognised, and when, is dealt with next - the empirical findings suggest that the function of something to which a word refers is accessed with a different time-course to the form of that something. This has considerable implications for the nature, and content, of lexical representations. Equally important are the findings from the studies of disordered lexical processing, and two papers in this volume address the implications of these disorders for models of lexical representation and process (borrowing from both empirical data and computational modelling). The final paper explores whether neural networks can successfully model certain lexical phenomena that have elsewhere been assumed to require rule-based processes.

What is the basis of our ability to assign meanings to words or to objects? Such questions have, until recently, been regarded as lying within the province of philosophy and linguistics rather than psychology. However, recent advances in psychology and neuropsychology have led to the development of a scientific approach to analysing the cognitive bases of semantic knowledge and semantic representations. Indeed, theory and data on the organisation and structure of semantic knowledge have now become central and hotly debated topics in contemporary psychology. This special issue of Memory brings together a series of papers from established laboratories that are at the forefront of semantic memory research. The collection includes papers presenting theoretical overviews of the field as well as papers containing new experimental findings. A variety of approaches to the problems of analysing semantic knowledge and semantic representations are included in this volume. For example, experimental studies of normal subjects are included together with neuropsychological investigations of patients with impaired semantic memory and computational models of the representation of knowledge in normality and disease. This collection will therefore be essential reading for researchers and others who are interested in memory function. It will also be of interest to cognitive scientists, linguists, philosophers and others who have puzzled over the many complex and central questions that probe the roots of our ability to understand meaning.

The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Science emphasizes the research and theory most central to modern cognitive science: computational theories of complex human cognition. Additional facets of cognitive science are discussed in the handbook's introductory chapter.

Atthestartofthe21stcentury,wearenowwellonthewaytowardsaknowled- intensive society, in which knowledge plays ever more important roles. Thus, research interest should inevitably shift from information to knowledge, with the problems of building, organizing, maintaining and utilizing knowledge - coming centralissues in a wide varietyof ?elds. The 21stCentury COE program “Framework for Systematization and Application of Large-scale Knowledge - sources (COE-LKR)” conducted by the Tokyo Institute of Technology is one of several early attempts worldwide to address these important issues. Inspired by this project, LKR2008 aimed at bringing together diverse contributions in cognitive science, computer science, education and linguistics to explore design, construction, extension, maintenance, validation and application of knowledge. Respondingtoourcallforpapers,wereceived38submissionfromavarietyof researchareas.EachpaperwasreviewedbythreeProgramCommitteemembers. Since we were aiming at an interdisciplinary conference covering a wide range of topics concerning large-scale knowledge resources (LKR), each paper was assigned a reviewer from a topic area outside the main thrust of the paper. This reviewer was asked to assess whether the authors described the moti- tion and importance of their work in a comprehensible manner even for readers in other research areas. Following a rigorous reviewing process, we accepted 14 regular papers and 12 poster papers.

This handbook addresses words in all their multifarious aspects and brings together scholars from every relevant discipline to do so. The many subjects covered include word frequencies; sounds and sound symbolism; the structure of words; taboo words; lexical borrowing; words in dictionaries and thesauri; word origins and change; place and personal names; nicknames; taxonomies; word acquisition and bilingualism; words in the mind; word disorders; and word games, puns, and puzzles. Words are the most basic of all linguistic units, the aspect of language of which everyone is likely to be most conscious. A 'new' word that makes it into the OED is prime news; when baby says its first word its parents reckon it has started to speak; knowing a language is often taken to mean knowing its words; and languages are seen to be related by the similarities between their words. Up to the twentieth century linguistic description was mainly an account of words and all the current subdivisions of linguistics have something to say about them. A notable feature of human languages is the sheer vastness of their word inventories, and scholars and writers have sometimes deliberately increased the richness of their languages by coining or importing new items into their word-hoards. The book presents scholarship and research in a manner that meets the interests of students and professionals and satisfies the curiosity of the educated reader.