Bilingual Lexical Ambiguity Resolution

Sets out state-of-the-art methodological and theoretical advancements to shed light on how bilingual speakers comprehend ambiguous information.

This book provides students and researchers of bilingualism with the most recent methodological and theoretical advances on how bilinguals resolve ambiguous information across languages. With reports on the latest findings from the behavioral and neuropsychological fields, the authors survey the latest research into bilingual language-system modelling and bilingual lexical ambiguity processing. Each chapter looks at bilingual ambiguity resolution both at the word and sentence levels, explaining how bilinguals ultimately comprehend ambiguous information arising from languages they already know. This volume not only explores enduring theoretical questions in bilingual research, such as bilingual representation and language processing, but also evaluates the extent to which the existing bilingual models can satisfactorily account for the most recent research findings.

This book provides students and researchers of bilingualism with the most recent methodological and theoretical advances on how bilinguals resolve ambiguous information across languages. With reports on the latest findings from the behavioral and neuropsychological fields, the authors survey the latest research into bilingual language-system modelling and bilingual lexical ambiguity processing. Each chapter looks at bilingual ambiguity resolution both at the word and sentence levels, explaining how bilinguals ultimately comprehend ambiguous information arising from languages they already know. This volume not only explores enduring theoretical questions in bilingual research, such as bilingual representation and language processing, but also evaluates the extent to which the existing bilingual models can satisfactorily account for the most recent research findings.

The most frequently used words in English are highly ambiguous; for example, Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary lists 94 meanings for the word "run" as a verb alone. Yet people rarely notice this ambiguity. Solving this puzzle has commanded the efforts of cognitive scientists for many years. The solution most often identified is "context": we use the context of utterance to determine the proper meanings of words and sentences. The problem then becomes specifying the nature of context and how it interacts with the rest of an understanding system. The difficulty becomes especially apparent in the attempt to write a computer program to understand natural language. Lexical ambiguity resolution (LAR), then, is one of the central problems in natural language and computational semantics research. A collection of the best research on LAR available, this volume offers eighteen original papers by leading scientists. Part I, Computer Models, describes nine attempts to discover the processes necessary for disambiguation by implementing programs to do the job. Part II, Empirical Studies, goes into the laboratory setting to examine the nature of the human disambiguation mechanism and the structure of ambiguity itself. A primary goal of this volume is to propose a cognitive science perspective arising out of the conjunction of work and approaches from neuropsychology, psycholinguistics, and artificial intelligence--thereby encouraging a closer cooperation and collaboration among these fields. Lexical Ambiguity Resolution is a valuable and accessible source book for students and cognitive scientists in AI, psycholinguistics, neuropsychology, or theoretical linguistics.

Bilingual Sentence Processing

**Honored as a 2013 Choice Outstanding Academic Title** Comprising state-of-the-art research, this substantially expanded and revised Handbook discusses the latest global and interdisciplinary issues across bilingualism and multilingualism. Includes the addition of ten new authors to the contributor team, and coverage of seven new topics ranging from global media to heritage language learning Provides extensively revised coverage of bilingual and multilingual communities, polyglot aphasia, creolization, indigenization, linguistic ecology and endangered languages, multilingualism, and forensic linguistics Brings together a global team of internationally-renowned researchers from different disciplines Covers a wide variety of topics, ranging from neuro- and psycho-linguistic research to studies of media and psychological counseling Assesses the latest issues in worldwide linguistics, including the phenomena and the conceptualization of 'hyperglobalization', and emphasizes geographical centers of global conflict and commerce

The innovative element of this volume is its overview of the fundamental psycholinguistic topics involved in sentence processing. While most psycholinguistic studies focus on a single language and induce a general model of universal sentence processing, this volume proposes a cross-linguistic approach. It contains two distinct features first embraced in the 18th century by brothers Freiherr Wilhelm von Humboldt and Alexander von Humboldt. First, it offers a linguistic theory that characterizes universal cognitive features of the human language processor (or the mind and its biological source), independent of a single language structure. Second, it contains a language theory which considers the diversity of linguistic structures and provides a powerful theory of language processing. Contributors cover a wide range of topics, including word recognition, fixed expressions, grammatical constraints, empty categories, and parsing. Their research involves analyses of 12 languages. This book provides an overview of central psycholinguistic topics in sentence processing; and combines deductive and inductive methods in fashioning an innovative approach. The contributors address word recognition, fixed expressions, grammatical constraints, empty categories, and parsing. Its original papers form a coherent presentation.

Bilingual Figurative Language Processing is the first book of its kind to address how bilinguals learn, store, and comprehend figurative language.

In the world today, bilingualism is more common than monolingualism. Thus, the default mental lexicon may in fact be the bilingual lexicon. More than ever, social and technological innovation have created a situation in which lexical knowledge may change dramatically throughout an individual’s lifetime. This book offers a new perspective for the understanding of these phenomena and their consequences for the representation of words in the mind and brain. Contributing authors are leaders in the field who provide a re-analysis of key assumptions and a re-focusing of research. They bring new insights and new findings that advance the understanding of both bilingualism and the mental lexicon. This volume serves to generate new directions and advances in bilingualism research.

How is language acquired when infants are exposed to multiple language input from birth and when adults are required to learn a second language after early childhood? How do adult bilinguals comprehend and produce words and sentences when their two languages are potentially always active and in competition with one another? What are the neural mechanisms that underlie proficient bilingualism? What are the general consequences of bilingualism for cognition and for language and thought? This handbook will be essential reading for cognitive psychologists, linguists, applied linguists, and educators who wish to better understand the cognitive basis of bilingualism and the logic of experimental and formal approaches to language science.