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Bilingual speakers cannot suppress activation from their dominant language while naming pictures in a foreign and less dominant language. Previous research has revealed that this cross-langauge activation is manifested through phonological facilitation, semantic interference and between language competition. However, this research is based exclusively on highly proficient bilinguals. The present study investigates cross-linguistic activation in Swedish learners of Spanish, grouped according to their length of Spanish immersion, and one of the groups is in its very inital stages of learning. Participants named pictures in Spanish in two picture-word interference experiments, one with only non-cognates, and one including cognates. This study addresses the following research questions; (1) do the two groups of participants differ significantly from one another in terms of cross-linguistic activation, (2) what does cross-language activation look like in initial stages of L2 acquisition, (3) how does cognate status affect cross-linguistic activation and does this differ between participants depending on length of immersion? The experiments show that cross-linguistic influence is dependent on length of immersion. The more immersed participants performed very similarly to what is usually the case in highly proficient bilinguals while the less immersed participants did not. The results of the less immersed participants are interpreted as manifestations of lexical processing in initial stages of L2 acquisition. Since this type of learner has never been tested before, there are no previous results to compare to. The results are discussed in relation to the large tradition of offline research which has shown that beginning learners predominantly process their L2 phonologically, and that conceptual processing is something requiring more L2 development. Furthermore, the cognate word induced longer naming latencies in all participants and it turned out that the cognate words were highly unfamiliar. Hence all participants are sensitive to word frequency effects, and this sensitive is greater in early stages of learning. Finally this study suggests that more research must be conducted to establish cross-linguistic influence between the many languages of multi-lingual subjects, even when these languages may not be present in the testing situation.

With the growing number of textual resources available, the ability to understand them becomes critical. An essential first step in understanding these sources is the ability to identify the parts-of-speech in each sentence. The goal of this research is to propose, improve, and implement an algorithm capable of finding terms (words in a corpus) that are used in similar ways--a term categorizer. Such a term categorizer can be used to find a particular part-of-speech, i.e. nouns in a corpus, and generate a lexicon. The proposed work is not dependent on any external sources of information, such as dictionaries, and it shows a significant improvement (~30%) over an existing method of categorization. More importantly, the proposed algorithm can be applied as a component of an unsupervised part-of-speech tagger, making it truly unsupervised, requiring only unannotated text. The algorithm is discussed in detail, along with its background, and its performance. Experimentation shows that the proposed algorithm performs within 3% of the baseline, the Penn-TreeBank Lexicon. / Master of Science

It is the objective of this thesis firstly to establish the extent of Gaelic vernacular verse to have survived in Aberdeenshire and, secondly, to determine the nature of that verse and, where possible, its origins, age and authorship. It is also hoped that this study will enable us to investigate the cultural identity of Highland Aberdeenshire and to what extent, if any, it differed from the rest of the Gaidhealtachd. The thesis begins with a social and linguistic history of the area being studied to understand the environment in which the verse was being composed and also to establish the forces which led to the decline of the Gaelic language there. In the three chapters which follow, the verse is then divided according to parish, beginning with the easternmost parish which is the parish of Kildrummy, in the district of Strathdon, and ending with the westernmost parish, i.e. the parish of Crathie and Braemar. In each chapter an attempt is made to establish the origins of the verse which is studied in depth. The verse contained in each chapter is edited and translated. However, when editing, I have tried to remain as close to the original script as possible, to allow the reader to appreciate the type of language used by the bard, and to also give a taste of the original text. Where the verse is accompanied by a tale or tradition I have included this also, since originally all songs would have been accompanied by such tales, and since such tales usually serve some purpose by explaining the background of the song. With regard to sources, I have chosen to refer to Rev. Robert MacGregor's Collection as the Invercauld MS (since it is held at Invercauld House), while referring to the version of the MS formerly owned by his nephew, Joseph MacGregor (as featured in TGSI and the Northern Chronicle) as the MacGregor MS, in order to differentiate between the two. The final chapter examines the evidence contained in the verse of the Gaelic dialect of Aberdeenshire, including lexicon, phonology and morphophonology. Of particular interest here is the collection made by Francis Diack, who recorded much of the verse in his own phonetic spelling, in which he occasionally uses IPA. Also included are two appendices, one of which contains the story of the flight of the Earl of Mar after the battle of Inverlochy, transcribed from Mr. Ronald Campbell, the last native Gaelic speaker in Glen Roy. The other appendix contains information regarding the main sources for Aberdeenshire Gaelic verse.

There exist a lot of empirical researches, that examine what factors effect the stock market volatility. The concept of investor sentiment is quite popular and is frequently discussed. However, there does not exist any research which would study the relation between the change in election preferences during the presidential campaigns and stock market volatility. The present thesis explores the effect of political sentiment on United States and French models. Here, we construct the model, which examines the effect of change in election preferences on the volatility. The results suggest, that change in election preferences does not affect the stock market volatility during the presidential campaign. Thus, its inclusion to the model does not increase the prediction power.

Emergence of accuracy is a first step toward acquiring adult-like phonological abilities. Mandarin Chinese is a tone language where speakers employ both tonal and segmental properties to code lexical meanings. Study of this dual-level complexity of tone and segment enables a broader view of how phonology is acquired than the view afforded by study of Indo-European languages. Understanding the interaction between phonatory properties for tone and articulatory adjustments for segments in emergence of early words helps to understand more generally the first steps toward the complex system embodied in phonology. The present study investigated tone acquisition in relation to segmental and lexical development in Mandarin-speaking children in the earliest word stages. Spontaneous speech samples were collected longitudinally from 12 to 24 months from four Mandarin-speaking children. The relationships between tone accuracy, segmental accuracy, and word-level variables were examined quantitatively over time. Results indicated that tone accuracy is not always higher than segmental accuracy. The relationship between these two seems to be influenced by the physiological complexity of tonal shapes and children’s developmental age. Autonomy of control over phonatory adjustments for tone and articulatory adjustments for segments was already apparent. Children were not sensitive to the contrastivity (characterized by Productive Tone Neighborhood Density) involved in tonal categories with a vocabulary of less than 50 words. Associations between production accuracy and word-level variables (articulatory complexity, neighborhood density and word frequency) established based on later developmental periods were not found in younger Mandarin-speaking children. Findings suggest that tonal acquisition at the onset of speech development is not a passive process where innate phonological knowledge is revealed solely through children’s maturation. Rather, phonological knowledge is established on the basis of children’s pre-linguistic motor capacities in concert with cognitive learning occurring via the expansion of their lexicon. Tones and segments may be produced as holistic entities in early words. Tone acquisition at the onset of word learning is more child-centered in that availability of tonal forms to the child’s production system underlies accuracy. Influences from lexical properties of word would only be apparent when phonological knowledge of tonal categories is established with vocabulary expansion. / text

This thesis is the pilot study of an ongoing investigation of the organization of the mental lexicon in children with specific language impairment and children who stutter (CWS). The current study analyzes the performance of 8 CWS, ages 4; 11 – 10; 1 and their typically developing age matches (CWNS) on a list recall task adapted from Roediger and McDermott (1995). Talker groups were matched for maternal education level, male to female ratio, and standardized measures of nonverbal intelligence, expressive vocabulary, digit memory, and narrative comprehension and production. Similar to previous reports, the CWS performed significantly lower on a measure of receptive vocabulary and a measure of phonological memory than the CWNS. For both talker groups, there was a positive correlation between age and percentage of correctly recalled words on the list recall task. Older CWNS produced more semantic intrusions than younger CWNS; however the same trend was not demonstrated in CWS. False recall of semantically-related, phonologically-related, and unrelated words was not significantly different between talker groups. These findings provide preliminary evidence of differences between talker groups on a list recall task. The inclusion of a greater number of participants may provide stronger support for the hypothesis that lexical-semantic organization is less efficient in CWS. / text

<p>This essay investigates how certain word-final Swedish rimes are integrated phonologically into Turkish by means of suffixation. Specific Swedish rimes have been selected for their unusual characteristics from the perspective of Turkish phonology such as vowel and consonant quantity as well as coda phonotactics. The data have been collected in an experiment, which involved the oral translation of a Swedish text including potential borrowings such as proper names and place names. The participants were advanced bilingual speakers of the standard varieties of Turkish and Swedish living in Stockholm. Two phonological properties of Turkish are relevant for this essay. Firstly, every word-final rime must have a vocalic, palatal and labial classification in order to be licensed for suffixation. Secondly, Turkish has a large and diverse periphery in its phonological lexicon due to faithful or partially faithful adaptation of a plethora of historical loanwords. The focus of the investigation is if the new borrowings are integrated into the core or into the periphery of the Turkish phonological lexicon or alternatively how faithful their integration is to the Swedish originals. In terms of resolving j-final coda cluster problems, the popular strategies are found to be palatalization, deletion and metathesis. The main body of data displays low faithfulness to the Swedish originals as well as an underutilization of the Turkish periphery. The participants are found to use the periphery of their phonological lexicon to a high degree for established words in Turkish but only to a limited extent when adapting new borrowings from Swedish into Turkish. This finding is explained by the fact that the structural and sociolinguistic conditions are not conducive to periphery maintenance in the present context in contrast to the historical context during the inflow of Arabic and Persian loanwords.  </p>

<p>This essay investigates how certain word-final Swedish rimes are integrated phonologically into Turkish by means of suffixation. Specific Swedish rimes have been selected for their unusual characteristics from the perspective of Turkish phonology such as vowel and consonant quantity as well as coda phonotactics. The data have been collected in an experiment, which involved the oral translation of a Swedish text including potential borrowings such as proper names and place names. The participants were advanced bilingual speakers of the standard varieties of Turkish and Swedish living in Stockholm. Two phonological properties of Turkish are relevant for this essay. Firstly, every word-final rime must have a vocalic, palatal and labial classification in order to be licensed for suffixation. Secondly, Turkish has a large and diverse periphery in its phonological lexicon due to faithful or partially faithful adaptation of a plethora of historical loanwords. The focus of the investigation is if the new borrowings are integrated into the core or into the periphery of the Turkish phonological lexicon or alternatively how faithful their integration is to the Swedish originals. In terms of resolving j-final coda cluster problems, the popular strategies are found to be palatalization, deletion and metathesis. The main body of data displays low faithfulness to the Swedish originals as well as an underutilization of the Turkish periphery. The participants are found to use the periphery of their phonological lexicon to a high degree for established words in Turkish but only to a limited extent when adapting new borrowings from Swedish into Turkish. This finding is explained by the fact that the structural and sociolinguistic conditions are not conducive to periphery maintenance in the present context in contrast to the historical context during the inflow of Arabic and Persian loanwords.</p>

A growing number of applications require dictionaries of words belonging to semantic classes present in specialized domains. Manually constructed knowledge bases often do not provide sufficient coverage of specialized vocabulary and require substantial effort to build and keep up-to-date. In this thesis, we propose a semi-supervised approach to the construction of domain-specific semantic lexicons based on the distributional similarity hypothesis. Our method starts with a small set of seed words representing the target class and an unannotated text corpus. It locates instances of seed words in the text and generates lexical patterns from their contexts; these patterns in turn extract more words/phrases that belong to the semantic category in an iterative manner. This bootstrapping process can be continued until the output lexicon reaches the desired size. We explore employing techniques such as learning lexicons for multiple semantic classes at the same time and using feedback from competing lexicons to increase the learning precision. Evaluated for extraction of dish names and subjective adjectives from a corpus of restaurant reviews, our approach demonstrates great flexibility in learning various word classes, and also performance improvements over state of the art bootstrapping and distributional similarity techniques for the extraction of semantically similar words. Its shallow lexical patterns also prove to perform superior to syntactic patterns in capturing the semantic class of words.