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This study investigates the role of emotional linguistic input in learning novel words with abstract and concrete denotations. It is widely accepted that concrete concepts are processed more easily than abstract ones. Several theories of vocabulary acquisition additionally propose that learning of concrete concepts puts greater weight on sensorimotor information while abstract concepts put greater weight on emotional information. In this study, proficient adult speakers of English read novel words denoting concrete and abstract concepts (e.g., boat vs religion) embedded in informative passages with different emotional valence (positive, neutral and negative). After five exposures to each novel word in an emotionally consistent context, participants were tested on orthographic and semantic vocabulary learning and provided valence judgments of these novel words. Readers successfully learned orthographic form and meaning of novel words, with a concreteness advantage seen in both tasks measuring semantic learning. Critically, valence of linguistic contexts was more influential for novel words with concrete denotations. In line with previous reports, the transfer of context emotionality to novel words (i.e., semantic prosody) took place in concrete stimuli and not abstract stimuli, even though they were both embedded in emotional contexts. An equal advantage was seen for semantic learning of novel words with both concrete and abstract denotations seen in positive contexts. These findings provide counter-evidence to theories advocating greater reliance of abstract concept learning on emotional information. / Thesis / Master of Science (MSc) / “The girl walked her plurk down the street.” Did you think of a dog? Adults are constantly learning new words by inferring the meaning through context. By making small changes to word and sentence stimuli we can study how semantic properties such as emotion (positive, neutral, or negative) and concreteness (e.g., "lamp" is a physical object that can be touched, making it high in concreteness, while "hope" cannot be touched and is therefore low in concreteness, or abstract) interact. In the current study, we manipulate contexts to vary in emotionality and words to vary in concreteness. Participants read short passages containing new words and were given a surprise test after that measured how well they learned the emotionality, forms, and meanings of the new words. This study presents new insight for theories of how new words are learned and stored in the brain and have implications for language learning materials.

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The aim of this study was to examine how providing functional information affects three year olds’ word learning. Previous work has demonstrated that children use perceptual or functional information about an object to aid in word learning. That is, they tend to base word meaning on the shape of the item (e.g., Jones, Smith, & Landau, 1991) or on its function (e.g., Kemler-Nelson et al, 2000). The authors asked whether there were additive effects of functional and perceptual cues on word learning and generalization,either immediately after training, or one to two days later. Thirteen typically developing children were taught four novel words in a play paradigm. They were provided with functional and perceptual information for two of the objects, and given perceptual information only for the other two. The children were exposed to multiple exemplars of each object taught, and allowed to manipulate the items. The children were tested for receptive and expressive knowledge of the words seven to eleven minutes after teaching, and one to two days later.Children did not perform better than chance levels on receptive tasks in any condition, nor did they perform above floor levels on expressive tasks. It is concluded that additional functional information does not enhance word learning for young children in this paradigm.

The contribution of this dissertation is how model measurement allows examination of the balance between what is practical in terms of consumer concerns versus what is optimal in terms of cost control. Essay 1 examines a research framework that incorporates various service recovery strategies and simultaneously evaluates their comparative influences. Essay 2 evaluates the complex interrelationships among different factors related to the post-complaint behavioral process. Essay 3 fills a research gap by examining the role of brand equity by operationalizing a reflective model using PLS in operations management (OM) research. These three essays provide insight into the quality management domain and the value that is achieved via a data driven examination of theory. Moreover, this research will provide operations management practitioners a basis to carry out future research on quality management phenomena as well as insight into how to balance cost control and service recovery strategies with the goal of achieving a competitive advantage.

Some scholars say that Russian syntax has free word order. However, other researchers claim that the basic word order of Russian is Subject, Verb, Object (SVO). Some researchers also assert that the use of different word orders may be influenced by various factors, including positions of discourse topic and focus, and register (spoken, fiction, academic, non-academic). In addition, corpora have been shown to be useful tools in gathering empirical linguistic data, and modern advances in computing have made corpora freely available and their use widespread. The Russian National Corpus is a large corpus of Russian that is widely used and well suited to syntactic research. This thesis aims to answer three research questions: 1) If all six word orders in Russian are possible, what frequencies of each order will I find in a data sample from the Russian National Corpus? 2) Do the positions of discourse topic and focus influence word order variations? 3) Does register (spoken, fiction, academic, non-academic) influence word order variations? A sample of 500 transitive sentences was gathered from the Russian National Corpus and each one was analyzed for its word order, discourse pattern, and register. Results found that a majority of the sentences were SVO. Additionally, a majority of the sample contained the topic before the focus, and most of the sample were from the non-academic register. A chi-square analysis for each research question showed statistically significant results. This indicates that the results were not a product of chance, and that discourse patterns and register influence word order variations. These findings provide evidence that there is a predominant word order in Russian.

This thesis examines the semantic processing of morphologically complex words during visual word recognition. In a series of three experiments this thesis addresses (i) the role semantic transparency during compound word reading, (ii) the nature of the conceptual structure of compound words and its effect on visual word recognition, and (iii) the time-course of semantic access during the visual comprehension of derived words. Chapter 2 documents evidence that the outcome of the compound semantic transparency effect is dependent upon the amount of language experience of the reader. We report that high compound transparency inhibits less experienced readers during naturalistic reading, yet facilitates processing among relatively more experienced readers. This study is the first to demonstrate that semantic processing of compound words is driven by individual reading skill. The study reported in Chapter 3 tests the hypothesis that the conceptual representation of a compound is based on a relational structure linking the compound’s constituents. Across two lexical decision datasets, Chapter 3 reports that greater entropy (i.e., increased competition) among a set of conceptual relations associated with a compound gives rise to longer lexical decision latencies. This finding indicates that the same compound word form is associated with many potential relational meanings, and that these meanings compete for selection during visual word recognition. Chapter 4 concerns the time-course of lexical-semantic access during derived word recognition. Existing accounts of derived word recognition widely disagree about whether access to conceptual information is granted prior to morphological decomposition. We report evidence which shows that the semantics of derived words and their stems are accessed in concert with morphological sources of information. These results challenge theoretical accounts that advocate strictly serial access to (morpho-orthographic then morpho-semantic) lexical cues. Overall, the empirical evidence presented in this thesis suggests that morphological processing involves rapid and concurrent access to many sources of conceptual information. These findings align with a view of complex word processing in which the cognitive system utilizes as many cues as possible in order to maximize the opportunity of obtaining the meaning of the word. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Ambiguity is inherent to human language. In particular, word sense ambiguity is prevalent in all natural languages, with a large number of the words in any given language carrying more than one meaning. Word sense disambiguation is the task of automatically assigning the most appropriate meaning to a polysemous word within a given context. Generally the problem of resolving ambiguity in literature has revolved around the famous quote “you shall know the meaning of the word by the company it keeps.” In this thesis, we investigate the role of context for resolving ambiguity through three different approaches. Instead of using a predefined monolingual sense inventory such as WordNet, we use a language-independent framework where the word senses and sense-tagged data are derived automatically from Wikipedia. Using Wikipedia as a source of sense-annotations provides the much needed solution for knowledge acquisition bottleneck. In order to evaluate the viability of Wikipedia based sense-annotations, we cast the task of disambiguating polysemous nouns as a monolingual classification task and experimented on lexical samples from four different languages (viz. English, German, Italian and Spanish). The experiments confirm that the Wikipedia based sense annotations are reliable and can be used to construct accurate monolingual sense classifiers. It is a long belief that exploiting multiple languages helps in building accurate word sense disambiguation systems. Subsequently, we developed two approaches that recast the task of disambiguating polysemous nouns as a multilingual classification task. The first approach for multilingual word sense disambiguation attempts to effectively use a machine translation system to leverage two relevant multilingual aspects of the semantics of text. First, the various senses of a target word may be translated into different words, which constitute unique, yet highly salient signal that effectively expand the target word’s feature space. Second, the translated context words themselves embed co-occurrence information that a translation engine gathers from very large parallel corpora. The second approach for multlingual word sense disambiguation attempts to reduce the reliance on the machine translation system during training by using the multilingual knowledge available in Wikipedia through its interlingual links. Finally, the experiments on a lexical sample from four different languages confirm that the multilingual systems perform better than the monolingual system and significantly improve the disambiguation accuracy.