Este trabalho tem como objetivo reunir uma série de entrevistas em italiano e analisar as influências locais sofridas no léxico por um grupo de imigrados italianos residentes em São Bernardo do Campo SP, que vieram para o Brasil durante o segundo fluxo emigratório italiano, entre 1948 e 1960. São indivíduos que possuem formação escolar limitada ao primário ou ao curso fundamental, pela classe social à que pertenciam e pela falta de condições econômicas na época, mas que hoje pertencem à classe média e, além de já terem retornado à Itália pelo menos uma vez, puderam oferecer cursos de nível superior aos filhos. Através da amostragem analisada, pudemos constatar que, apesar do longo período fora da Itália, esses indivíduos falam um italiano compreensível, o que os torna bilíngües, ainda que o vocabulário italiano de que dispõem seja pobre, muitas vezes inadequado e tenha sofrido interferências do portuguêsbrasileiro. As principais interferências foram classificadas em: 1- empréstimos totais, 2- empréstimos parciais, 3- comutações, 4- mudanças de significado e 5- decalques. Também foram assinaladas as principais impropriedades e, em parte, o uso mais ou menos correto das preposições, dos artigos, dos pronomes, dos advérbios e das conjunções. / This work aims at putting together a series of interviews conducted in Italian and to analyze the local influencies suffered in the lexicon in a group of Italian who emigrated to Brazil and currently reside in São Bernardo do Campo São Paulo. They came to Brazil during the second Italian migrating flux between 1948 -1960. These are individuals whose school formation is limited to the primary or the secondary school, affected by the social class to what they belonged to and by the lack of economic conditions of that period. Today, however, they belong to the middle class and have traveled to Italy at least once and were able to provide a college education for their children. Analysing some of the interviews we could verify that despite the long period away from Italy, these people still speak a comprehensible Italian which makes them bilingual even though using a poor amount of Italian vocabulary at their disposal, quite often inadequate and which had been affected by Brazilian Portuguese. The main interferences were classified as follow; 1- complete loan words, 2- partial loan words, 3- commuting, 4- changes in the meaning and 5- calque. Some other main inaccuracies were also detected and, by chance, the use of partially correct prepositions, pronouns, adverbs and conjuctions.

La thèse est consacrée à l'étude de l'héritage littéraire de Sévérien, évêque de Gabala (Ve s.) conservé dans les traductions arménienne et géorgienne. L’Introduction générale esquisse l’histoire de la recherche sur Sévérien etsystématise les critères utilisés pour attribuer une oeuvre à cet auteur ; une étude essaie de retracer les débris de son corpus dispersé dans les manuscrits grecs et caucasiens ; une partie codicologique présente les manuscritscaucasiens utilisés. Quatre textes arméniens (CPG 4248, 4246-1, 4246-2, 4295.17a) et quatre textes géorgiens (CPG 4235, 4236-3, 4236a.4, 4214) sont édités et traduits en français ; chaque pièce est précédée par les notes d'introduction qui contiennent nos observations sur son attribution à Sévérien, aussi bien que sur le rapport de l'original grec avec la version caucasienne ancienne. Deux textes portant le nom de Sévérien en arménien (CPG 4669) et en arabe (CPG 4290) sont étudiés et publiés pour la première fois en Appendice. Deux Annexes contiennent les lexiques gréco-géorgien et géorgien-grec créés sur la base d’une lecture parallèle des textes de Sévérien édités simultanément en grec et en géorgien. / The thesis presents a study of the literary heritage of Severian of Gabala (Ve cent.) conserved in ancient Armenian and Georgian translations. The General Introduction surveys the previous research on Severian and systematizes the criteria used to attribute a text to this author; the separate pieces of Severian's corpus spread throughout the Greek and Caucasian manuscripts are also considered; a codicological part introduces the Caucasian manuscripts used in the work. Four Armenian (CPG 4248, 4246-1, 4246-2, 4295.17a) and four Georgian texts (CPG 4235, 4236-3, 4236a.4, 4214) are edited and translated into French; each piece is preceded by introductory notes which contain our observations on the Severian's authorship and on the relationship between the Greek original and its ancient Caucasian version. Two text bearing Severian's name in Armenian (CPG 4669) and in Arabic (CPG 4290) are studied and published for the first time in an Annex. Two further Annexes are constituted of the Greek-Georgian and the Georgian-Greek lexicons based on the parallel reading of the texts of Severian which are published at once in Greek and in Georgian.

Machine Translation (MT) for language pairs with long distance dependencies and word reordering, such as German-English, is prone to producing output that is lexically or syntactically incoherent. Statistical MT (SMT) models used explicit or latent syntax to improve reordering, however failed at capturing other long distance dependencies. This thesis explores how explicit sentence-level syntactic information can improve translation for such complex linguistic phenomena. In particular, we work at the level of the syntactic-semantic interface with representations conveying the predicate-argument structures. These are essential to preserving semantics in translation and SMT systems have long struggled to model them. String-to-tree SMT systems use explicit target syntax to handle long-distance reordering, but make strong independence assumptions which lead to inconsistent lexical choices. To address this, we propose a Selectional Preferences feature which models the semantic affinities between target predicates and their argument fillers using the target dependency relations available in the decoder. We found that our feature is not effective in a string-to-tree system for German-English and that often the conditioning context is wrong because of mistranslated verbs. To improve verb translation, we proposed a Neural Verb Lexicon Model (NVLM) incorporating sentence-level syntactic context from the source which carries relevant semantic information for verb disambiguation. When used as an extra feature for re-ranking the output of a German-English string-to-tree system, the NVLM improved verb translation precision by up to 2.7% and recall by up to 7.4%. While the NVLM improved some aspects of translation, other syntactic and lexical inconsistencies are not being addressed by a linear combination of independent models. In contrast to SMT, neural machine translation (NMT) avoids strong independence assumptions thus generating more fluent translations and capturing some long-distance dependencies. Still, incorporating additional linguistic information can improve translation quality. We proposed a method for tightly coupling target words and syntax in the NMT decoder. To represent syntax explicitly, we used CCG supertags, which encode subcategorization information, capturing long distance dependencies and attachments. Our method improved translation quality on several difficult linguistic constructs, including prepositional phrases which are the most frequent type of predicate arguments. These improvements over a strong baseline NMT system were consistent across two language pairs: 0.9 BLEU for German-English and 1.2 BLEU for Romanian-English.

A presente dissertação objetiva analisar o fenômeno conhecido como empréstimo linguístico. Para tanto, adotei como referencial teórico a Teoria da Variação em Terminologia, proposta por Faulstich (1999). Foi analisado um léxico especializado, mais precisamente o do Comércio Exterior. O corpus, composto de 37 termos descritores e 195 ocorrências, foi formado por termos extraídos de um site governamental (http://www.receita.fazenda.gov.br/Legislacao/LegisAssunto/ComExt.htm). Os resultados da análise mostraram que o tipo de empréstimo mais produtivo encontrado no corpus é o híbrido, seguido do empréstimo que, depois de adaptado, se recompõe e gera uma Unidade Terminológica Complexa (UTC), híbrida ou vernacular, e do empréstimo que mantém a forma tal qual no inglês. Também tiveram recorrência importante no corpus empréstimos que geram um decalque no Português do Brasil (PB) e, a título de reforço, mantêm o termo em inglês, como um aposto explicativo. Em menor número, estão: a) os empréstimos que mantêm a forma de origem, mas apresentam evidências de registro de que ainda são estrangeiros; b) os empréstimos que mantêm a forma do inglês e geram uma forma adaptada às convenções ortográficas do PB; c) os empréstimos que mantêm a forma tal qual no inglês e geram uma forma adaptada às regras morfofonêmicas do PB; e d) empréstimos que abandonam a forma de origem em favor de um decalque no PB. De forma geral, esta pesquisa visou a contribuir para o desenvolvimento dos estudos socioterminológicos e fornecer auxílio prático aos operadores do léxico do Comércio Exterior com base na análise dos empréstimos linguísticos oriundos da língua inglesa e de seu estatuto variante. / This thesis presents an analysis of linguistic borrowing. Applying the theory of variation in terminology proposed by Faulstich (1999), it focuses on a specialized lexicon in foreign trade. The corpus consisted of 37 lexical items, with 195 occurrences, sourced from a Brazilian governmental site (http://www.receita.fazenda.gov.br/Legislacao/LegisAssunto/ComExt.htm). The analytical results showed that the most common form of loanword in the corpus was hybrid, followed by loanwords that undergo adaptation and then are restructured to form a hybrid or vernacular Complex Terminological Unit. An important number of occurrences also involved calques into Brazilian Portuguese (BP) with the original English following in parentheses as way of explanation. Other, less frequent variations included: a) loanwords consisting of the original English along with an indication that they are still foreign words; b) loanwords that maintain the original English while producing a form adapted to the conventions of BP orthography; c) loanwords that maintain the original English while producing a form adapted to the morphophonemic rules of BP; and d) loanwords that wholly replace the original English with a BP calque. Based on an analysis of linguistic borrowings from English and their variations, this research is intended both as a contribution towards the development of socioterminological studies and as a practical aid for users of the foreign trade lexicon.

Ce travail contient une première caractérisation générale du discours de la communauté cubaine à Montréal, avec une attention particulière sur deux aspects: le comportement de certains traits qui caractérisent l'espagnol de Cuba chez les locuteurs migrants, et les possibles variations produites par le contact linguistique. Pour ce faire, nous utilisons les données d'un corpus élaboré par la chercheuse à partir de conversations semi-dirigées enregistrées (registre colloquial) avec 19 Cubains: dix hommes et neuf femmes vivant à Montréal. L'analyse des données nous permet de vérifier que les traits caractéristiques étudiés se sont conservés dans le discours des Cubains résidants dans la ville, mais quelques variations se sont produites, provoquées par le contact avec les langues dominantes (français-espagnol, et moins en anglais-espagnol) et d'autres variétés de l'espagnol, ainsi qu’avec une réalité socio-économique, politique et culturelle très différente de celle d’origine. Les variations morphosyntaxiques ont été détectées principalement dans les mots invariables (prépositions). Au niveau lexico-sémantique, nous avons trouvé essentiellement des emprunts lexicaux. Il existe également des prêts sémantiques, des calques et des changements de fréquence de certains mots. Concernant le niveau pragmatique, nous avons remarqué un ralentissement du rythme dans les conversations de l'échantillon qui pourrait être dû à la situation du bilinguisme fonctionnel. En résumé, le discours des Cubains participants dans cette étude montre quelques-uns des traits caractéristiques à toute situation de contact de langues, mais aussi des particularités relatives aux caractéristiques de la communauté étudiée (les attitudes linguistiques, par exemple), à la distance typologique entre les langues impliquées (espagnol et français) et au contraste entre les sociétés d’origine et d’accueil, entre autres. / This paper presents a first general characterization of the speech of the Cuban community in Montreal, with special attention to two aspects: the behavior of some of the characterizing features of Cuban Spanish in migrant speakers, and the possible contact-induced variations. To do this, we use data from a corpus collected by the researcher through recorded conversations (colloquial speech) with 19 Cubans: ten men and nine women currently living in Montreal. After analyzing the data, we have found that the characterizing features are preserved in the speech of Cuban residents in the city. The data also show some variations induced by the contact with the dominant languages (French-Spanish and, to a lesser extent, English-Spanish) band other varieties of Spanish, as well as with a new reality that is socio-economically, politically and culturally very different from the Cuban one. The detected variations at the morphosyntactic level are mainly in invariable words (prepositions).At the lexical-semantic level, we have found predominantly loanwords. There are also semantic loans, calques and frequency changes of some words. Concerning the pragmatic level, a slower rhythm of speech, possibly due to the condition of functional bilingualism, has been observed. In sum, the speech of the Cuban participants in this study shows some of the characteristic features of any language contact situation, but also has peculiarities relating to the characteristics of the community under study (language attitudes, for example), the typological distance between the languages involved (Spanish-French) and the contrast between the societies, among other factors. / El presente trabajo contiene una primera caracterización general del habla de la comunidad cubana en Montreal, atendiendo especialmente a dos aspectos fundamentales: el comportamiento de algunos de los rasgos tipificantes del español de Cuba en hablantes migrantes, y las posibles variaciones sufridas producto del contacto lingüístico (francés-español, y en menor medida inglés-español). Para ello, empleamos los datos de un corpus confeccionado por la propia investigadora gracias a las conversaciones semidirigidas grabadas (habla coloquial) con 19 cubanos: diez hombres y nueve mujeres residentes en Montreal. El análisis de los datos nos permite comprobar que los rasgos tipificantes objeto de estudio se conservan en el habla de los cubanos residentes en la ciudad, pero esta ha sufrido algunos cambios provocados por el contacto con las lenguas dominantes y con otras variedades del español, así como con una realidad muy diferente a la de origen desde el punto de vista socioeconómico, político y cultural. Las variaciones se han detectado tanto en el nivel morfosintáctico, principalmente en las palabras invariables (preposiciones), como en el nivel léxico-semántico. En este último, predominan los préstamos léxicos. También se observan préstamos semánticos, calcos y cambios de frecuencia de algunas palabras. Desde el punto de vista pragmático, es posible observar una mayor lentitud en el ritmo de habla de los informantes, que podría deberse a la condición de bilingüismo funcional. Con todo, el habla de los cubanos participantes en este estudio presenta algunos de los rasgos característicos de cualquier situación de contacto lingüístico, pero posee también peculiaridades debidas a las características propias de la comunidad objeto de estudio (actitudes lingüísticas, por ejemplo), a la distancia tipológica de las lenguas implicadas (español-francés) y al contraste entre las sociedades de origen y de acogida, entre otros factores.

Este trabalho apresenta as línguas e as linguagens utilizadas nos Candomblés de Nação Angola, por meio do estudo de textos orais registrados em duas comunidades particulares e específicas: o Inzó Inquice Mameto Dandaluna Quissimbi Quiamaze (Inzó Dandaluna) e o Centro Religioso e Cultural das Tradições Bantu Ilê Azongá Oni Xangô (Terreiro Loabá). O estudo visa a estabelecer ligações entre a linguagem e a vivência das práticas rituais. Nesse sentido, os textos coletados são situados no contexto de sua enunciação e analisados em sua expressão e conteúdo. Nesses textos foi possível identificar apenas um léxico de origem negro-africana. / This work presents languages used in the Candomblés of Angola nation by a study of oral texts recorded in two particular and specified communities: Inzó Inquice Mameto Dandaluna Quissimbi Quiamaze and Centro Religioso e Cultural das Tradições Bantu Ilê Azongá Oni Xangô. This study aims to establish a link between the language and the factual experience in the practice of these rituals. The collected texts are situated in the context of their statement and are analysed in their expression and their content. Finally, it was possible to identify only a vocabulary of Negro-African origin.

Este trabalho apresenta as línguas e as linguagens utilizadas nos Candomblés de Nação Angola, por meio do estudo de textos orais registrados em duas comunidades particulares e específicas: o Inzó Inquice Mameto Dandaluna Quissimbi Quiamaze (Inzó Dandaluna) e o Centro Religioso e Cultural das Tradições Bantu Ilê Azongá Oni Xangô (Terreiro Loabá). O estudo visa a estabelecer ligações entre a linguagem e a vivência das práticas rituais. Nesse sentido, os textos coletados são situados no contexto de sua enunciação e analisados em sua expressão e conteúdo. Nesses textos foi possível identificar apenas um léxico de origem negro-africana. / This work presents languages used in the Candomblés of Angola nation by a study of oral texts recorded in two particular and specified communities: Inzó Inquice Mameto Dandaluna Quissimbi Quiamaze and Centro Religioso e Cultural das Tradições Bantu Ilê Azongá Oni Xangô. This study aims to establish a link between the language and the factual experience in the practice of these rituals. The collected texts are situated in the context of their statement and are analysed in their expression and their content. Finally, it was possible to identify only a vocabulary of Negro-African origin.

O número de estrangeiros interessados em aprender o português tem aumentado na última década, em consequência do crescimento da economia brasileira e do aumento da presença de multinacionais no Brasil. Esse fato se mostra pelo aumento do número de inscritos no exame de proficiência de português CELPE-Bras e de estudantes estrangeiros que ingressam nas universidades brasileiras. A maioria destes estudantes são de língua espanhola e precisam escrever seus textos acadêmicos em português. A proximidade das línguas portuguesa e espanhola apresenta-se tanto como um elemento positivo quanto como um obstáculo, pois oculta as diferenças e impede o domínio da língua portuguesa, mantendo, na fala e na escrita em português, interferências do espanhol. O maior número destas interferências acontece no nível lexical. Uma das alternativas para tratar os problemas em textos de aprendizes de uma língua é o emprego de ferramentas computacionais de pós-processamento e de suporte ao processo de escrita. No entanto, o número de recursos e ferramentas disponíveis para auxiliar a escrita de português como língua estrangeira é muito reduzido, diferentemente do cenário para a língua inglesa. Esta pesquisa propôs a criação de recursos e ferramentas de suporte à escrita no nível lexical como primeiro passo para a melhoria da qualidade linguística dos textos em português produzidos pelos nativos do espanhol. A Linguística de Córpus foi utilizada como metodologia para viabilizar a análise de erros de aprendizes. As ferramentas de auxílio utilizam léxicos bilíngues compilados por meio de técnicas de tradução, baseadas em alinhamento de córpus paralelos. Dado o número insuficiente de erros previamente anotados para suportar a detecção automática de erros, esta pesquisa propôs métodos baseados em modelo língua e na geração artificial de erros. A geração de erros artificiais se apresentou como um método eficiente para predizer erros lexicais dos aprendizes. As contribuições obtidas com a metodologia baseada em tradução automática para gerar auxílios à escrita entre línguas próximas, considerando a análise de erros lexicais extraídos de córpus de aprendizes, foco desta pesquisa, são: (i) do ponto de vista teórico, o levantamento e quantificação dos principais problemas causados pelas marcas do espanhol, deixadas nos textos acadêmicos em português escritos por nativos do espanhol; (ii) do ponto de vista de geração automática de recursos linguísticos, léxicos bilíngues de cognatos e falsos cognatos; léxico bilíngue de marcadores discursivos; léxico de expressões formulaicas que aparecem nos textos científicos e léxico bilíngue de verbos relacionados com pesquisa científica em português e, (iii) do ponto de vista da criação de subsídios para a área de auxílio à escrita científica, o projeto e avaliação de auxílios para suportar a escrita científica em português por nativos do espanhol. / In the last decade, as a result of Brazilian economic growth and the increased presence of multinationals in the country, the interest of foreigners in learning Portuguese rose. This fact is also noted by the number of students enrolled in the Portuguese proficiency exam, CELPE-Bras and the number of foreigner students entering at the Brazilian Universities. Most of these students are Spanish speakers and need to write the dissertation or thesis in Portuguese. The similarity between Portuguese and Spanish is considered as a positive element that often becomes an obstacle, because similarity and closeness frequently conceal differences and hinder learners from mastering the Portuguese, keeping interferences from their native Spanish both when speaking and writing in Portuguese. The largest number of this interference occurs at the lexical level. One alternative to deal with errors of second language learners is the use of computational post-edit tools and tools to support the writing process. However, the number of resources and tools available to help improve Portuguese writing as a foreign language is very small, unlike the scenario into English. This research proposed the creation of resources and writing support tools at the lexical level as a first step to improving the linguistic quality of the texts produced by Portuguese native Spanish. Corpus linguistics was used as a methodology to enable the learners error analysis. The writing support tools use bilingual lexicons compiled through translation techniques based on alignment parallel corpus. Given the insufficient number of errors previously annotated to support automatic error detection, this research proposed methods based on language model and artificial generation of errors. The generation of artificial errors introduced himself as an efficient method for predicting lexical errors of learners. The contributions obtained with the methodology based on automatic translation to generate written supports between similar languages, considering lexical error, extracted by the analysis of learners corpus, focus of this research are: (i) the theoretical point of view, the survey and quantification of the main problems caused by the Spanish marks, left in the academic texts written in Portuguese by native Spanish; (ii) the automatic generation of language resources point of view, bilingual lexicons of cognates and false cognates; bilingual lexicon of discourse markers; bilingual lexicon of formulaic expressions that appear in scientific texts and bilingual lexicon of verbs related to scientific research in Portuguese and, (iii) the point of view of creating subsidies for the area of support scientific writing, design and evaluation of aid to support scientific writing in Portuguese by native Spanish speakers.

Cette thèse s’inscrit dans le cadre du projet Région Aquitaine - INRIA : ITIPY. Ce projet vise à terme l’extraction automatique d’itinéraires à partir de récits de voyage du XIX ème et du début du XX ème siècle. Notre premier travail fut de caractériser le corpus comme échantillon du français, par une étude contrastive d’une part de données quantitatives et d’autre part de la structure des récits de voyage. Nous nous sommes ensuite consacrée à l’étude du temps, et plus particulièrement à l’analyse automatique de la sémantique des temps verbaux du français. Disposant d’un analyseur syntaxique et sémantique à large échelle du français, basé sur les grammaires catégorielles et la sémantique compositionnelle (λ-DRT), notre tâche a été de prendre en compte les temps des verbes pour reconstituer la temporalité des événements et des états, notions regroupées sous le termes d’éventualité. Cette thèse se concentre sur la construction d’un lexique sémantique traitant des temps verbaux du français. Nous proposons une extension et une adaptation d’un système d’opérateurs compositionnels conçu pour les temps du verbe anglais, aux temps et à l’aspect du verbe français du XIX ème siècle à nos jours. Cette formalisation est de facto opérationnelle, car elle est définie en terme d’opérateurs du λ-calcul dont la composition et la réduction, déjà programmées, calculent automatiquement les représentations sémantiques souhaitées, des formules multisortes de la logique d’ordre supérieur. Le passage de l’énoncé comportant une éventualité seule au discours, dont le maillage référentiel est complexe, est discuté et nous concluons par les perspectives qu’ouvre nos travaux pour l’analyse du discours. / This work has been lead in the frame of the ITIPY project which goal was to automatically extract itineraries from travel novels from the XIX th century and from the beginning of the XX th. Our thesis work is close to the text understanding task in the information retrieval field and we aim at building a representation of meaning of linguistic utterances, leaning on the compositionnality principle. More precisely, the itinerary extraction supposes to temporally represent displacement and localization events or states (that we actually call eventualities) of a traveler as far as we understand it through discourse. Working on an automatic parser for syntax (in categorial grammars) and semantics (in λ-DRT), we focused on the building of an semantic lexicon for tense in French. We actually characterized our corpora as a sample of French language, by the means of a quantitative and qualitative analysis as well as a study of the internal structure of this genre. The main contribution of this work deals with tense and aspect semantic processing of the event expressed by tensed verbs, and with its modelling. In this respect, we propose an adaptation and an extension for French from XIX th century to nowadays of a lexicon originally produced to deal with English verbs. This formalisation is operational, for it is defined in λ-calculus which composition and réduction, already implemented, calculate automatically semantics représentations, high order logic formulas. Transition from a single event uterrance to a whole discourse which contains a complex referential network is discussed and allows us to define the limits of this hereby work.

本篇研究的目的是要去比較中文跟英文小孩的誘發過度泛化現象的不同之處。誘發過度泛化現象指的是小孩子因為受到之前誘發過的字的影響進而造成對物品過度泛化現象的情況而稱之。Gershkoff-Stowe et al. (2006) 認為Dell (1986) 提出的擴散激活機制 (spreading activation mechanisms) 可用來解釋小孩的三種泛化錯誤類型: 類別錯誤 (category errors) 、語用錯誤 (pragmatic errors) 跟提取錯誤 (retrieval errors)，此三種泛化錯誤的基底機制應該都是同樣的。另外，他們也認為最近激活跟形狀的類似對小孩的命名應該都扮演了很重要的角色。年紀較大的小孩也應該會擁有比較成熟的心理詞彙所以會比起年紀較小的小孩比較不容易受到之前提取過的字的影響。因為中文跟英文心理詞彙的不同，我們想去檢視是否一樣的理論也可套用在中文小孩身上。實驗方法沿用了Gershkoff-Stowe et al. (2006)的相同實驗法，做了與他相同的兩個實驗。第一個實驗是熟悉物與不熟悉物的命名，兩歲小孩要做六次的試驗，然後我們是用三張圖片做為誘發圖片，然後請小孩去命名一個真實的物品。第二個實驗是虛構物品命名，我們在這個實驗裡比較兩歲小孩跟四歲小孩的不同表現。實驗過程跟實驗一是一樣的，只是實驗二是看虛構物品不是真實物品，且有八個試驗機會而不是六個。結果顯示有一個跟英文大致上類似的結果。然而我們仍有發現一些不同之處。第一，我們發現熟悉物在中文裡比起英文似乎有更強的力量。第二個則是兩個語言不同的構詞法可能會對於比較成熟的心理詞彙造成不一樣的誘發方式。 / This purpose of this study is to compare the difference of priming overextension phenomena between Mandarin Chinese children and English children. Priming overextension means that children overextend some words due to the effects of the previously primed words. Gershkoff-Stowe et al. (2006) found that spreading activation mechanisms (Dell, 1986) should be the underlying mechanisms of three types of children’s overextension errors, i.e., category errors, pragmatic errors, and retrieval errors. Moreover, they thought that recent activation and perceptual similarity both play an important role on children’s object naming. Besides, older children should have a more mature mental lexicon and thus less susceptible to previously retrieved words than younger children. Due to the difference of the lexicon networks between Mandarin Chinese and English, we want to examine whether the same theory also could apply to Mandarin children. Two experiments which followed Gershkoff-Stowe et al. (2006) were conducted. The first one was familiar or unfamiliar object naming. 2-year-old Children underwent six trials and were primed by three pictures and then were asked to name a real object. The second experiment was novel object naming. We compared the performances of children aged 2 and aged 4 together. The procedure was the same as the experiment 1 despite the fact that children in experiment 2 named novel objects rather than real ones and they underwent 8 trials rather than six. And results showed a generally similar finding with English. However, there are still something different between these two languages. First, we found that familiar objects should have stronger strengths in Mandarin than in English. Second, different morphology in two languages may result in different priming way for more mature mental lexicons.