On the Connection Between Language Change and Language Processing.

Previous studies provided evidence for a connection between language processing and language change. We add to these studies with an exploration of the influence of lexical-distributional properties of words in orthographic space, semantic space, and the mapping between orthographic and semantic space on the probability of lexical extinction. Through a binomial linear regression analysis, we investigated the probability of lexical extinction by the first decade of the twenty-first century (2000s) for words that existed in the first decade of the nineteenth-century (1800s) in eight data sets for five languages: English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish.

The role of information theory for compound words in Mandarin Chinese and English.

We investigate the role of information-theoretic measures for compound word reading in two languages: Mandarin Chinese and English. For each language, we report the results of two analyses: a time-to-event analysis using piece-wise additive mixed models (PAMMs) and a causal inference analysis with causal additive models (CAMs). We use the PAMM analyses to gain insight into the temporal profile of the effects of information-theoretic measures in the word naming task.

The processing of pseudoword form and meaning in production and comprehension: A computational modeling approach using linear discriminative learning.

Pseudowords have long served as key tools in psycholinguistic investigations of the lexicon. A common assumption underlying the use of pseudowords is that they are devoid of meaning: Comparing words and pseudowords may then shed light on how meaningful linguistic elements are processed differently from meaningless sound strings. However, pseudowords may in fact carry meaning.

A word or two about nonwords: Frequency, semantic neighborhood density, and orthography-to-semantics consistency effects for nonwords in the lexical decision task.

For the most part, the effects of lexical-distributional properties of words on visual word recognition are well-established. More uncertainty remains, however, about the influence of these properties on lexical processing for nonwords. The work presented here investigates the mechanisms that guide nonword processing through an analysis of lexical decision latencies for 18,547 words and 27,079 nonwords in the British Lexicon Project (Keuleers, Lacey, Rastle, & Brysbaert, 2012) using piecewise generalized mixed models (pamms; Bender, Groll, & Scheipl, 2018; Bender & Scheipl, 2018; Bender, Scheipl, Hartl, Day, & Küchenhoff, 2018).

NDRA: A single route model of response times in the reading aloud task based on discriminative learning.

We present the Naive Discriminative Reading Aloud (ndra) model. The ndra differs from existing models of response times in the reading aloud task in two ways. First, a single lexical architecture is responsible for both word and non-word naming.

Chinese lexical database (CLD) : A large-scale lexical database for simplified Mandarin Chinese.

We present the Chinese Lexical Database (CLD): a large-scale lexical database for simplified Chinese. The CLD provides a wealth of lexical information for 3913 one-character words, 34,233 two-character words, 7143 three-character words, and 3355 four-character words, and is publicly available through http://www.chineselexicaldatabase.

The Mismeasurement of Mind: Life-Span Changes in Paired-Associate-Learning Scores Reflect the "Cost" of Learning, Not Cognitive Decline.

The age-related declines observed in scores on paired-associate-learning (PAL) tests are widely taken as support for the idea that human cognitive capacities decline across the life span. In a computational simulation, we showed that the patterns of change in PAL scores are actually predicted by the models that formalize the associative learning process in other areas of behavioral and neuroscientific research. These models also predict that manipulating language exposure can reproduce the experience-related performance differences erroneously attributed to age-related decline in age-matched adults.

Discrimination in lexical decision.

In this study we present a novel set of discrimination-based indicators of language processing derived from Naive Discriminative Learning (ndl) theory. We compare the effectiveness of these new measures with classical lexical-distributional measures-in particular, frequency counts and form similarity measures-to predict lexical decision latencies when a complete morphological segmentation of masked primes is or is not possible. Data derive from a re-analysis of a large subset of decision latencies from the English Lexicon Project, as well as from the results of two new masked priming studies.

Distinct ERP signatures of word frequency, phrase frequency, and prototypicality in speech production.

Recent studies have documented frequency effects for word n-grams, independently of word unigram frequency. Further studies have revealed constructional prototype effects, both at the word level as well as for phrases. The present speech production study investigates the time course of these effects for the production of prepositional phrases in English, using event related potentials (ERPs).

The myth of cognitive decline: non-linear dynamics of lifelong learning.

As adults age, their performance on many psychometric tests changes systematically, a finding that is widely taken to reveal that cognitive information-processing capacities decline across adulthood. Contrary to this, we suggest that older adults'; changing performance reflects memory search demands, which escalate as experience grows. A series of simulations show how the performance patterns observed across adulthood emerge naturally in learning models as they acquire knowledge.

Sidestepping the combinatorial explosion: an explanation of n-gram frequency effects based on naive discriminative learning .

Arnon and Snider ((2010). More than words: Frequency effects for multi-word phrases. Journal of memory and language, 62, 67-82) documented frequency effects for compositional four-grams independently of the frequencies of lower-order n-grams.

An amorphous model for morphological processing in visual comprehension based on naive discriminative learning.

A 2-layer symbolic network model based on the equilibrium equations of the Rescorla-Wagner model (Danks, 2003) is proposed. The study first presents 2 experiments in Serbian, which reveal for sentential reading the inflectional paradigmatic effects previously observed by Milin, Filipović Đurđević, and Moscoso del Prado Martín (2009) for unprimed lexical decision. The empirical results are successfully modeled without having to assume separate representations for inflections or data structures such as inflectional paradigms.