Both lack of time and the need to translate texts for numerous reasons brought about an increase in studying machine translation with a history spanning over 65 years. During the last decades, Google Translate, as a statistical machine translation (SMT), was in the center of attention for supporting 90 languages. Although there are many studies on…

Three experiments investigated the acquisition of English epistemic modal verbs (e.g., "may", "have to"). Semantically, these verbs encode possibility or necessity with respect to available evidence. Pragmatically, the use of weak epistemic modals often gives rise to scalar conversational inferences (e.g., "The toy may be…

This research work aimed at making use of Machine Translation to help students avoid some syntactic, semantic and pragmatic common errors in translation from English into Arabic. Participants were a hundred and five freshmen who studied the "Translation Common Errors Remedial Program" prepared by the researchers. A testing kit that…

L2 learners' problems with English articles have been linked to learners' L1 and their access to universal semantic features (e.g., definiteness and specificity). Studies suggest that L2 adults rely on their L1 knowledge, while child L2 learners rely more on their access to semantic universals. The present study investigates whether child L2…

This article presents the results of experimental data on language production and comprehension. These show that adult learners of Dutch as an additional language, with different language backgrounds, and a L2 proficiency below level A2 (Waystage) of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR; Council of Europe, 2001), use…

This article examined the integration of semantic and morphosyntactic information by Korean learners of English as a second language (L2). In Experiment 1, L2 learners listened to English active or passive sentences that were either plausible or implausible and translated them into Korean. A significant number of Korean translations maintained the…

The primary concern of this thesis is how we can achieve rigorous testability when we set the properties of the Computational System (hypothesized to be at the center of the language faculty) as our object of inquiry and informant judgments as a tool to construct and/or evaluate our hypotheses concerning the properties of the Computational System.…

The count/mass disinction is often considered to be a semantic one because it distinguishes those nouns that refer to countable things from those that refer to non-countable things. However, exceptions indicate that semantic properties alone are not sufficient to determine noun sub-categorization. Therefore, such sub-categorization must be defined…

Selected spontaneous errors of word choice made between the ages of two and five by two children whose language development had been followed longitudinally were analyzed for clues to semantic developmnet. (JMB)

Environmentally contaminated speech errors (irrelevant words or phrases derived from the speaker's environment and erroneously incorporated into speech) are hypothesized to occur at a high level of speech processing, but with a relatively late insertion point. The data indicate that speech production processes are not independent of other…

Swedes in four different age groups (9, 12, 15 and 18 years) judged written words which varied in three dimensions: syntactic category, objective frequency, and polysemy (multiple meaning). The subjects judged ease of comprehension of 24 words in a factorial arrangement. The method used was Thurstone's paired comparisons. A predicted complex…

Discusses the production of anomalous sentences by non-native students of the Japanese language and suggests that the primary cause of various errors indicated in such sentences is the confusion with English "when." In addition, it is suggested that error analysis can help clarify the nature of grammatical problems and facilitate learning of…

A common error in children's attempts to solve verbal analogies is to respond with a word strongly associated with the third term in the analogy. This is known as associative response. A study was conducted to investigate the cognitive processes underlying this response. Subjects, 112 fifth grade students, were administered a battery of tests…

This study investigates the onset at periodic intervals in the age range of about two to five years of various kinds of recurrent and systematic errors in word choice and/or syntactic structure. Acquisitional processes and their implications are outlined. Sections address: (1) the kinds of processes that can be inferred to underlie errors…

Examines the performance of normal and disabled readers in recognizing whether orally presented letter strings represent real words. Finds that disabled readers have difficulty in making available the full range of semantic cues when processing stimuli in an acoustic form, supporting a verbal-processing deficit hypothesis of reading disability.…