Lexical network AdjDeriNet consists of pairs of base adjectives and their derivatives. It contains nearly 18 thousand base adjectives that are base words for more than 26 thousand lexemes of several parts of speech.
Painter Adolf Hoffmeister on Bohumil Veselý's balcony. Hoffmeister in a fragmented segment from Československé filmové noviny (Czechoslovak Film News) 1952, issue no. 26.
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.
Corpus contains recordings of communication between air traffic controllers and pilots. The speech is manually transcribed and labeled with the information about the speaker (pilot/controller, not the full identity of the person). The corpus is currently small (20 hours) but we plan to search for additional data next year. The audio data format is: 8kHz, 16bit PCM, mono. and Technology Agency of the Czech Republic, project No. TA01030476.