How infants learn new words is a fundamental puzzle in language acquisition. To guide their word learning, infants exploit systematic word-learning heuristics that allow them to link new words to likely referents. By 17 months, infants... more
How infants learn new words is a fundamental puzzle in language acquisition. To guide their word learning, infants exploit systematic word-learning heuristics that allow them to link new words to likely referents. By 17 months, infants show a tendency to associate a novel noun with a novel object rather than a familiar one, a heuristic known as disambiguation. Yet, the developmental origins of this heuristic remain unknown. We compared disambiguation in 17- to 18-month-old infants from different language backgrounds to determine whether language experience influences its development, or whether disambiguation instead emerges as a result of maturation or social experience. Monolinguals showed strong use of disambiguation, bilinguals showed marginal use, and trilinguals showed no disambiguation. The number of languages being learned, but not vocabulary size, predicted performance. The results point to a key role for language experience in the development of disambiguation, and help to distinguish among theoretical accounts of its emergence.
The social networking website Facebook offers to its users a feature called “status updates” (or just “status”), which allows users to create Microposts directed to all their contacts, or a subset thereof. Readers can respond to... more
The social networking website Facebook offers to its users a feature called “status updates” (or just “status”), which allows users to create Microposts directed to all their contacts, or a subset thereof. Readers can respond to Microposts, or in addition to that also click a “Like” button to show their appreciation for a certain Micropost. Adding semantic meaning in the sense of unambiguous intended ideas to such Microposts. We can make a start towards semantic web by adding semantic annotation to web resources. Ontology are used to specify meaning of annotations. Ontology provide a vocabulary for representing and communicating knowledge about some topic and a set of semantic relationships that hold among the terms in that vocabulary. For increasing the efficiency of ontology based application there is aneed to develop a mechanism that reduces the manual work in developing ontology. Inthis paper, we proposed Microposts’ ontology construction. In this paper we present a method that extracts meaningful knowledge from microposts shared in social platforms. This process involves different steps for the analysis of such microposts (extraction of keywords, named entities and their matching to ontological concepts).
The proposed app would enable multilingual users to see how much time they spend speaking their different languages Users could compare their own language use to that of others. Meanwhile researchers could use the data to gauge levels of... more
The proposed app would enable multilingual users to see how much time they spend speaking their different languages Users could compare their own language use to that of others. Meanwhile researchers could use the data to gauge levels of language use and sociolinguistic vitality.
This study aims to examine language dominance and language switching effects in a series of monolingual and multilingual lexical decisions in which participants have to decide if the presented letter string is aword or not, regardless of... more
This study aims to examine language dominance and language switching effects in a series of monolingual and multilingual lexical decisions in which participants have to decide if the presented letter string is aword or not, regardless of language. Thirty participants (12 FrenchEnglish bilinguals and 18 FrenchEnglishSpanish trilinguals) were recruited for two different experiments. In Experiment 1, 12 bilinguals processed two monolingual lists (L1 and L2) followed by a bilingual list (with L1 and L2 words). The results indicate faster answers and better accuracy for L1 words compared to L2 words in both lists, and a general slowdown of processing in the bilingual list, highlighting language switching effects (switch from L2 to L1 faster than from L1 to L2). In Experiment 2, 18 trilinguals performed successively monolingual (L1, L2 and L3), bilingual (L1L2, L1L3 and L2L3) and trilingual (L1L2L3) lists. The results show a slowdown of word processing as a function of number of languages involved, even for the dominant language (L1). Moreover, a language switching effect was found for all multilingual lists, in larger proportions when the list involves the two weakest languages (L2 and L3). Results are discussed in the light of interactive models of bilingual visual word processing.
