Human Variation and Lexical Choice (original) (raw)

Good-enough production: Selecting easier words instead of more accurate ones

2021

Dominant theories of language production suggest that word choice—lexical selection—is driven by alignment with the intended message: to talk about a young feline, we choose the most aligned word, kitten. Another factor that could shape lexical selection is word accessibility, or how easy it is to produce a given word (e.g., cat is more accessible than kitten). To test whether producers are also influenced by word accessibility, we designed an artificial lexicon with high- and low-frequency words with word meanings corresponding to compass directions. Participants in a communication game (total N = 181 adults) earned points by producing compass directions, often requiring an implicit decision between a high- vs low-frequency word. A trade-off was observed across four experiments, such that high-frequency words were produced even when less aligned with messages. These results suggest that implicit decisions between words are impacted by accessibility. Of all the times that people hav...

Grounding lexical diversity in human judgments

Language Testing, 2017

The present study discusses the relevance of measures of lexical diversity (LD) to the assessment of learner corpora. It also argues that existing measures of LD, many of which have become specialized for use with language corpora, are fundamentally measures of lexical repetition, are based on an etic perspective of language, and lack construct validity. The proposed solution draws from Zipf’s (1935) emic perspective of language, which views LD as a matter of perception, but which also assumes that competent speakers of a common language share similar perceptions. The present study tests whether this is true and specifically whether untrained human raters will show high levels of inter-rater reliability in their judgments of the levels of LD found in 60 texts extracted from a corpus of narratives written in English by a mix of language learners and native speakers. The results confirm Zipf’s assertion, but also indicate that a relatively large number of motivated raters are needed t...

Investigation into Human Preference between Common and Unambiguous Lexical Substitutions

abdn.ac.uk

We present a study that investigates that factors that determine what makes a good lexical substitution. We begin by observing that there is a correlation between the corpus frequency of words and the number of WordNet senses they have, and hypothesise that readers might prefer common, but more ambiguous words over less ambiguous but also less common ones. We identify four properties of a word that determine whether it is a suitable substitution in a given context, and ask volunteers to rank their preferences between two common but ambiguous lexical substitutions, and two uncommon but also unambiguous ones. Preliminary results suggest a slight preference towards the unambiguous.

Cognitive aspects of lexical availability (2006)

European Journal of Cognitive Psychology, 2006

Lexical availability measures the ease with which a word can be generated as a member of a given category. It has been developed by linguistic studies aimed, among other things, at devising a rational basis for selecting words for inclusion in dictionaries. The measure accounts for the number of people who generated a given word as a member of a designated semantic category and the position in which they produce the word. We present an analysis of lexical availability from a cognitive perspective. Data were analysed for Spanish speakers generating words from five semantic categories—clothes, furniture, body parts, animals, and intelligence. Six properties of words were investigated as potential predictors of lexical availability. Predictors were concept familiarity, typicality, imageability, age of acquisition, word frequency, and word length. Categories differed on these variables, and regression analysis found concept familiarity, typicality, and age of acquisition to be significant predictors of lexical availability. The cognitive basis of these findings and the practical consequences of selecting words on the basis of lexical availability are considered.

Lexical selection in the process of language generation

… of the 25th annual meeting on …, 1987

In this paper we argue that lexical selection plays a more important role in the generation process than has commonly been assumed. To stress the importance of lexicalsemantic input to generation, we explore the distinction and treatment of generating open and closed cla~s lexical items, and suggest an additional classification of the latter into discourse-oriented and proposition-oriented items.

Factors that Determine the Meaning of a Word

Turkish Journal of Computer and Mathematics Education (TURCOMAT), 2021

This study looks at the elements that influence a word's meaning in order to settle a long-running disagreement among lexicalists, constructionists, emergentists, and other schools of thought. The Constructionists place a high value on the following skills that skilled communicators possess: Linguistic competence includes the correct application of grammar and syntax, as well as the capacity to linguistically comprehend communications from other speakers. Lexicism, on the other hand, is a modern generative linguistics theoretical position that claims that the processes and procedures that generate complex words are accounted for by a set of Lexical Rules that are independent of and distinct from the processes and procedures that form simple words. Thus, some factors come to play vital roles to decipher the meaning of words and facilitate successful communication and this article shows how mental ability, linguistic competence, and contextual and grammatical knowledge disambiguate the meaning of a word.

Word Frequency Can Affect What You Choose to Say

Cognitive Science, 2018

Though communicative goals clearly drive word choice in language production, online demands suggest that accessibility might play a role, too. If the benefits of accessibility are important enough to communication, more accessible words (high-frequency words) might be chosen over more accurate, less accessible ones. We used a novel artificial language learning paradigm to test whether high-frequency words are preferred over low-frequency words at a cost of meaning accuracy. Participants learned eight words which corresponded to precise angles on a compass. On test trials, participants viewed angles lying in-between two trained angles and were asked to produce a word for the angle. Across two experiments, we showed that participants extended their use of highfrequency words to more distal angles compared to lowfrequency words. In cases of competition between highand low-frequency words, the former tended to win out even when less accurate, suggesting that accessibility can compromise...

Influence of personal choices on lexical variability in referring expressions

Natural Language Engineering, 2015

Variability is inherent in human language as different people make different choices when facing the same communicative act. In Natural Language Processing, variability is a challenge. It hinders some tasks such as evaluation of generated expressions, while it constitutes an interesting resource to achieve naturalness and to avoid repetitiveness. In this work, we present a methodological approach to study the influence of lexical variability. We apply this approach to TUNA, a corpus of referring expression lexicalizations, in order to study the use of different lexical choices. First, we reannotate the TUNA corpus with new information about lexicalization, and then we analyze this reannotation to study how people lexicalize referring expressions. The results show that people tend to be consistent when generating referring expressions. But at the same time, different people also share certain preferences.

Word frequency and generation effects.

1988

Abstract 1. Nairne, Pusen, and Widner (1985) described an experiment in which they found that, like nonwords, low-frequency words were no more likely to be recognized if they had been self-generated at study than if they had been read. These findings led Nairne et al. to conclude that generation effects depend on the extent to which words are associatively linked to other words in semantic memory, not on lexical representation per se.

A World of Difference: Divergent Word Interpretations Among People

2017

Divergent word usages reflect differences among people. In this paper, we present a novel angle for studying word usage divergence -- word interpretations. We propose an approach that quantifies semantic differences in interpretations among different groups of people. The effectiveness of our approach is validated by quantitative evaluations. Experiment results indicate that divergences in word interpretations exist. We further apply the approach to two well studied types of differences between people -- gender and region. The detected words with divergent interpretations reveal the unique features of specific groups of people. For gender, we discover that certain different interests, social attitudes, and characters between males and females are reflected in their divergent interpretations of many words. For region, we find that specific interpretations of certain words reveal the geographical and cultural features of different regions.