Phonological networks are representations of word forms and their phonological relationships with other words in a given language lexicon. A principle underlying the growth (or evolution) of those networks is preferential attachment, or the ‘rich-gets-richer’ mechanisms, according to which words with many phonological neighbors (or links) are the main beneficiaries of future growth opportunities. Due to their limited number of words, language lexica constitute node-constrained networks where growth cannot keep increasing in a linear way; hence, preferential attachment is likely mitigated by certain factors. The present study investigated aging effects (i.e., a word’s finite time span of being active in terms of growth) in an evolving phonological network of English as a second language. It was found that phonological neighborhoods are constructed by one large initial lexical spurt, followed by sublinear growth spurts that eventually lead to very limited growth in later lexical spurts during network evolution, all the while obeying the law of preferential attachment. An analysis of the strength of phonological relationships between phonological word forms revealed a tendency to attach more distant phonological neighbors in the lower proficiency levels, while phonologically more similar neighbors enter phonological neighborhoods at more advanced levels of English as a second language. Overall, the findings suggest an aging effect in growth that favors younger words. In addition, beginning learners seem to prefer the acquisition of phonological neighbors that are easier to discriminate. Implications for the second language lexicon include leveraged learning mechanisms, learning bouts focussed on a smaller range of phonological segments, and involve questions concerning lexical processing in aging networks.
Phonological neighborhood density is known to influence lexical access, speech production as well as perception processes. Lexical competition is thought to be the central concept from which the neighborhood effect emanates: highly competitive neighborhoods are characterized by large degrees of phonemic co-activation, which can delay speech recognition and facilitate speech production. The present study investigates phonetic learning in English as a foreign language in relation to phonological neighborhood density and onset density to see whether dense or sparse neighborhoods are more conducive to the incorporation of novel phonetic detail. In addition, the effect of voice-contrasted minimal pairs (bat-pat) is explored. Results indicate that sparser neighborhoods with weaker lexical competition provide the most optimal phonological environment for phonetic learning. Moreover, novel phonetic details are incorporated faster in neighborhoods without minimal pairs. Results indicate that lexical competition plays a role in the dissemination of phonetic updates in the lexicon of foreign language learners.
HamleDT (HArmonized Multi-LanguagE Dependency Treebank) is a compilation of existing dependency treebanks (or dependency conversions of other treebanks), transformed so that they all conform to the same annotation style. This version uses Universal Dependencies as the common annotation style.
Update (November 1017): for a current collection of harmonized dependency treebanks, we recommend using the Universal Dependencies (UD). All of the corpora that are distributed in HamleDT in full are also part of the UD project; only some corpora from the Patch group (where HamleDT provides only the harmonizing scripts but not the full corpus data) are available in HamleDT but not in UD.
The original SDP 2014 and 2015 data collections were made available under task-specific ‘evaluation’ licenses to registered SemEval participants. In mid-2016, all original data has been bundled with system submissions, supporting software, an additional SDP-style collection of semantic dependency graphs, and additional background material (from which some of the SDP target representations were derived) for release through the Linguistic Data Consortium (with LDC catalogue number LDC2016 T10).
One of the four English target representations (viz. DM) and the entire Czech data (in the PSD target representation) are not derivative of LDC-licensed annotations and, thus, can be made available for direct download (Open SDP; version 1.1; April 2016) under a more permissive licensing scheme, viz. the Creative Common Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license. This package also includes some ‘richer’ meaning representations from which the English bi-lexical DM graphs derive, viz. scope-underspecified logical forms and more abstract, non-lexicalized ‘semantic networks’. The latter of these are formally (if not linguistically) similar to Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) and are available in a range of serializations, including in AMR-like syntax.
Please use the following bibliographic reference for the SDP 2016 data:
@string{C:LREC = {{I}nternational {C}onference on
{L}anguage {R}esources and {E}valuation}}
@string{LREC:16 = {Proceedings of the 10th } # C:LREC}
@string{L:LREC:16 = {Portoro\v{z}, Slovenia}}
@inproceedings{Oep:Kuh:Miy:16,
author = {Oepen, Stephan and Kuhlmann, Marco and Miyao, Yusuke
and Zeman, Daniel and Cinkov{\'a}, Silvie
and Flickinger, Dan and Haji\v{c}, Jan
and Ivanova, Angelina and Ure\v{s}ov{\'a}, Zde\v{n}ka},
title = {Towards Comparability of Linguistic Graph Banks for Semantic Parsing},
booktitle = LREC:16
year = 2016,
address = L:LREC:16,
pages = {3991--3995}
}
The original SDP 2014 and 2015 data collections were made available under task-specific ‘evaluation’ licenses to registered SemEval participants. In mid-2016, all original data has been bundled with system submissions, supporting software, an additional SDP-style collection of semantic dependency graphs, and additional background material (from which some of the SDP target representations were derived) for release through the Linguistic Data Consortium (with LDC catalogue number LDC2016 T10).
One of the four English target representations (viz. DM) and the entire Czech data (in the PSD target representation) are not derivative of LDC-licensed annotations and, thus, can be made available for direct download (Open SDP; version 1.2; January 2017) under a more permissive licensing scheme, viz. the Creative Common Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license. This package also includes some ‘richer’ meaning representations from which the English bi-lexical DM graphs derive, viz. scope-underspecified logical forms and more abstract, non-lexicalized ‘semantic networks’. The latter of these are formally (if not linguistically) similar to Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) and are available in a range of serializations, including in AMR-like syntax.
Version 1.1 was released April 2016. Version 1.2 adds the 2015 Turku system, which was accidentally left out from version 1.1.
Please use the following bibliographic reference for the SDP 2016 data:
@string{C:LREC = {{I}nternational {C}onference on
{L}anguage {R}esources and {E}valuation}}
@string{LREC:16 = {Proceedings of the 10th } # C:LREC}
@string{L:LREC:16 = {Portoro\v{z}, Slovenia}}
@inproceedings{Oep:Kuh:Miy:16,
author = {Oepen, Stephan and Kuhlmann, Marco and Miyao, Yusuke
and Zeman, Daniel and Cinkov{\'a}, Silvie
and Flickinger, Dan and Haji\v{c}, Jan
and Ivanova, Angelina and Ure\v{s}ov{\'a}, Zde\v{n}ka},
title = {Towards Comparability of Linguistic Graph Banks for Semantic Parsing},
booktitle = LREC:16
year = 2016,
address = L:LREC:16,
pages = {3991--3995}
}
German has various homophonous sibilant fricatives of phonemic or morphemic nature that can appear in word-final position. In English, the functional status of a word-final \s\ influences its durational properties, with phonemic \s\ being longer than morphemic types. The data set presented here is a small selection of laboratory-elicited German sentences containing various words with final sibilant phonemes (e.g., "das Haus") and morphemes (plural, genitive, clitic, inflection). Durations of the \s\ types were measured and compared across the conditions. An ANOVA between the \s\ types and post-hoc Tukey pair-wise comparisons are presented that show various significant differences.
The submission consists of a csv data file, containing a number of variables, and a PDF document detailing the experiment and variables.