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Ionin, Tania. "Article semantics in second language acquisition." Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2003. http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/7963.
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Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, 2003.<br>Includes bibliographical references (p. 311-318).<br>This thesis examines article choice and parameter-setting in second language (L2) acquisition. It argues, on the basis of L2-English elicitation and production data, that L2- learners have access to UG-based semantic distinctions governing article choice, but do not know which distinction is appropriate for English. A Fluctuation Hypothesis (FH) is proposed, according to which L2-learners fluctuate between different parameter settings until the input leads them to set the parameter to the target value. The thesis proposes that articles cross-linguistically may encode definiteness or specificity. The definition of specificity that is adopted is based on Fodor and Sag's (1982) view of specificity as speaker intent to refer. The behavior of referential this, a specificity marker in colloquial English, is examined, and it is proposed that the definition of specificity incorporates the concept of noteworthy property. An Article Choice Parameter is next proposed, which governs whether articles in a given language are distinguished on the basis of definiteness or on the basis of specificity. While English has the Definiteness setting of this parameter, it is suggested, on the basis of data from Mosel and Hovdhaugen (1992), that Samoan has the Specificity setting. It is hypothesized, in accordance with the FH, that L2-learners fluctuate between the two settings of the Article Choice Parameter. This hypothesis leads to the prediction that L2- English errors of article use should come in two types: overuse of the with specific indefinites and overuse of a with non-specific definites. These predictions are examined in a series of studies with adult speakers of Russian and Korean, two languages with no<br>(cont.) articles. The empirical data confirm the predictions, and show that L2-English article choice is not random but reflects access to the two settings of the Article Choice Parameter. The same patterns of results are found for L-Russian and L-Korean speakers, and it is shown that the results are not attributable to LI-transfer. On the basis of these findings, it is concluded that L2-learners have direct UG-access to semantic distinctions underlying article choice. The data also provide evidence for the existence of a specificity distinction which cross-cuts the definiteness distinction.<br>bu Tania Ruth Ionin.<br>Ph.D.
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Dolena, Alexis Lynn. "Uncovering the "slow mapping" process of word learning through word definition and word association tasks." Click here for download, 2006. http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=1212794661&sid=1&Fmt=2&clientId=3260&RQT=309&VName=PQD.
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Thompson, Cynthia Ann. "Semantic lexicon acquisition for learning natural language interfaces /." Digital version accessible at:, 1998. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/utexas/main.
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Pham, Son Bao Computer Science & Engineering Faculty of Engineering UNSW. "Incremental knowledge acquisition for natural language processing." Awarded by:University of New South Wales. School of Computer Science and Engineering, 2006. http://handle.unsw.edu.au/1959.4/26299.
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Linguistic patterns have been used widely in shallow methods to develop numerous NLP applications. Approaches for acquiring linguistic patterns can be broadly categorised into three groups: supervised learning, unsupervised learning and manual methods. In supervised learning approaches, a large annotated training corpus is required for the learning algorithms to achieve decent results. However, annotated corpora are expensive to obtain and usually available only for established tasks. Unsupervised learning approaches usually start with a few seed examples and gather some statistics based on a large unannotated corpus to detect new examples that are similar to the seed ones. Most of these approaches either populate lexicons for predefined patterns or learn new patterns for extracting general factual information; hence they are applicable to only a limited number of tasks. Manually creating linguistic patterns has the advantage of utilising an expert's knowledge to overcome the scarcity of annotated data. In tasks with no annotated data available, the manual way seems to be the only choice. One typical problem that occurs with manual approaches is that the combination of multiple patterns, possibly being used at different stages of processing, often causes unintended side effects. Existing approaches, however, do not focus on the practical problem of acquiring those patterns but rather on how to use linguistic patterns for processing text. A systematic way to support the process of manually acquiring linguistic patterns in an efficient manner is long overdue. This thesis presents KAFTIE, an incremental knowledge acquisition framework that strongly supports experts in creating linguistic patterns manually for various NLP tasks. KAFTIE addresses difficulties in manually constructing knowledge bases of linguistic patterns, or rules in general, often faced in existing approaches by: (1) offering a systematic way to create new patterns while ensuring they are consistent; (2) alleviating the difficulty in choosing the right level of generality when creating a new pattern; (3) suggesting how existing patterns can be modified to improve the knowledge base's performance; (4) making the effort in creating a new pattern, or modifying an existing pattern, independent of the knowledge base's size. KAFTIE, therefore, makes it possible for experts to efficiently build large knowledge bases for complex tasks. This thesis also presents the KAFDIS framework for discourse processing using new representation formalisms: the level-of-detail tree and the discourse structure graph.
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Cremers, Alexandre. "On the semantics of embedded questions." Thesis, Paris Sciences et Lettres (ComUE), 2016. http://www.theses.fr/2016PSLEE006/document.
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Suivant la proposition de Tarski (1936), la sémantique vériconditionnelle associeà une phrase déclarative des conditions de vérité. Ainsi, comprendre le sens dela phrase “Il pleut”, c’est pouvoir dire après avoir regardé par la fenêtre si elle estvraie ou fausse. Toutefois, ceci ne permet de rendre compte que des phrases déclaratives,et pas des questions puisqu’aucune situation ne rendra jamais la question“Qui a appelé ce matin ?” vraie ou fausse. Hamblin (1973) propose la premièrethéorie des questions dans le cadre de la sémantique véri-conditionnelle, et proposede leur associer des conditions de résolutions, c’est-à-dire des ensembles deréponses. Comprendre le sens de la question “Qui a appelé ce matin ?” c’est alorssavoir que “Jean a appelé” est une réponse possible, tandis que “il pleuvait” n’enest pas une.Très rapidement, l’étude de la sémantique des questions s’est tournée versles questions enchâssées dans des phrases déclaratives (questions indirectes). Eneffet, il est beaucoup plus aisé de juger des conditions de vérité d’une phrasesdéclarative que des conditions de résolution d’une question. Or moyennant deshypothèses sur la sémantique des verbes enchâssant des questions (‘savoir’, ‘oublier’.. . ), on peut relier les conditions de vérité d’une phrase déclarative au sensde la question qu’elle enchâsse. Cette approche, proposée par Karttunen (1977), adonné lieu à une littérature théorique très riche<br>Two important questions arise from the recent literature on embedded questions.First, Heim (1994) proposed that embedded questions are ambiguous betweena weakly and strongly exhaustive reading. Spector (2005) recently proposedan intermediate exhaustive reading as well. Second, adverbs of quantity such as’mostly’ can quantify over answers to an embedded questions (Berman, 1991). Ananalysis of this phenomena reveals an analogy between embedded questions andplural determiner phrases, and suggests a fine-grained structures for the denotationof questions (Lahiri, 2002).The first part of the dissertation consist of three psycholinguistic studies on theexhaustive readings of questions under ‘know’ in English, the acquisition of thesereadings under ‘savoir’ by French 5-to-6-ear-olds, and the properties of emotivefactivepredicates such as ‘surprise’. The second part presents a theory of embeddedquestions built on Klinedinst and Rothschild’s (2011) proposal to derive exhaustivereadings as implicatures, although it differs in the fine-grained structureit adopts for questions denotations in order to account for plurality effects as well.The theory solves problem raised by B. R. George (2013) and makes predictions fora larger range of sentences
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Frey, Camille 1991. "Comparing monolingual and bilingual language acquisition : phonemes and lexicon." Doctoral thesis, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, 2020. http://hdl.handle.net/10803/668759.
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In the present dissertation we compared monolingual and bilingual language acquisition by exploring two main topics of the early bilingual language acquisition: the establishment of the phoneme system and the establishment of the lexico-semantic system. The first topic was addressed by assessing the possible influence of word-level information on phonetic learning in both monolinguals and bilinguals (both adults and infants). The development of the bilingual lexico-semantic semantic system has been approached by assessing the emergence of inhibitory semantic links in monolingual and bilingual toddlers.
Our results showed an impact of bilingualism concerning the use of word-level information in adults but not in infants. For this latter group, our results suggested more an impact of bilingualism on the discrimination abilities. Unfortunately our results for the last study did not allow us to conclude on the emergence of inhibitory semantic effects in the bilingual lexicon.<br>En esta tesis doctoral comparamos la adquisición del lenguaje en monolingües y bilingües investigando dos temas centrales de la adquisición bilingüe temprana: el establecimiento del sistema fonético y el establecimiento del sistema léxico-semántico. El primer tema se ha abordado evaluando la posible influencia de información léxica (forma) sobre el aprendizaje fonético, la investigación ha estudiado tanto bebés y adultos monolingües y bilingües. Para el estudio del desarrollo del sistema léxico-semántico bilingüe se ha evaluado la aparición de conexiones semánticas inhibitorias en niños monolingües y bilingües. Los resultados sugieren un impacto del bilingüismo en el uso de información léxica (forma) en adultos, pero no en bebés. El estudio con bebés ha mostrado un impacto del bilingüismo en las capacidades discriminatorias. Los resultados del último estudio no permiten extraer conclusiones sobre la aparición de conexiones semánticas inhibitorias en el léxico bilingüe.
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Ursini, Francesco-Alessio. "The Language Of Space : The Acquisition And Interpretation of Spatial Adpositions In English." Doctoral thesis, Macquarie University, Faculty of Human Sciences, Macquarie Centre for Cognitive Science, 2011. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:su:diva-85019.
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This thesis by publication presents a study on English adpositions (e.g. to, in, at, from, in frontof, through). It attempts to offer a solution to the following three outstanding problems, whichare presented in each of the three parts making up the thesis, preceded by a general introduction(chapter 1) and followed by the general conclusions (chapter 7). The first part includes chapter2, and discusses the problem of What is the relation between adpositions and the non-linguistic,visual content they represent. The second part includes chapters 3 and 4, and discusses theproblem ofwhat is a proper compositional theory of the Syntax and Semantics of adpositions.The third part includes chapters 5 and 6, and discusses the problem of what is the psychologicalreality of this theory, regarding adults and children’s data.The following three solutions are suggested. First, the relation between adpositions and theircorresponding visual information is an isomorphism: adpositions capture how we “see” possiblespatio-temporal relations between objects, at a flexible level of fine-grainedness. Second, aproper compositional treatment of adpositions treats each syntactic unit (in front, of ) as offeringa distinct semantic contribution, hence spelling out a restricted instance of a spatio-temporalpart-of relation. Third, this compositional treatment of adpositions can also stand as a theory ofon-line interpretation in adults and a theory of their acquisition in children.These three answers are couched within a single theoretical approach, that of Discourse Representation Theory, and offer a unified solution to three apparently distinct problems regardingspatial adpositions and their linguistic properties.
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Sorhagen, Nicole. "Exploring social class differences in the development of elaborated word meanings." Click here for download, 2009. http://proquest.umi.com.ps2.villanova.edu/pqdweb?did=1930212961&sid=1&Fmt=2&clientId=3260&RQT=309&VName=PQD.
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Juffs, Alan. "Learnability and the lexicon in second language acquisition : Chinese learners' acquisition of English argument structure." Thesis, McGill University, 1993. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=41626.
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This thesis investigates the knowledge of semantics-syntax correspondences in second language acquisition (SLA) within the Principles and Parameters framework. A parameter of semantic structure is proposed to account for crosslinguistic syntactic differences between two previously unrelated, and superficially distinct, verb classes: change of state locatives and 'psychological' verbs. Chinese and English contrast in terms of the parameter setting. Experimental evidence indicates that adult Chinese learners of English L2 initially transfer parameter settings, but are able to reset the proposed parameter. However, they only acquire L2 lexical properties and concomitant syntactic privileges with ease when L2 input adds a representation to their grammar. When positive L2 input should pre-empt overgeneralizations based on representation transferred from the L1, it is shown that L1 influence may persist until quite advanced stages of acquisition. The implications of the results are discussed for the parameter setting model of SLA.
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Hara, Yoshiyuki. "The Perceptions of the Japanese Imperfective Aspect Marker –Teiru among Native Speakers and L2 Learners of Japanese." Thesis, University of Oregon, 2016. http://hdl.handle.net/1794/20496.
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The Japanese imperfective aspect marker –teiru is one of the most widely researched tense/aspect markers because of its multiple semantic functions. It has been claimed that the –teiru form can describe two main aspectual meanings, progressive and resultative, depending on the lexical aspect of the attached verb. The present study aims to empirically investigate native speakers’ interpretations of the –teiru meaning with different verb and sentence types through a judgment test. It compares them with the predicted semantic categories from the previous studies, which based their conclusion upon introspective analysis, as well as perceptions of L2 Japanese learners. The results suggest that overall perceptional patterns are consistent with predicted descriptions but also that interpretations of the meaning are flexible to some extent. As for learners’ perceptions, the results indicate that L2 learners develop progressive semantic processing in Japanese faster than resultative semantic processing in Japanese.
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Hjelm, Hans. "Cross-language Ontology Learning : Incorporating and Exploiting Cross-language Data in the Ontology Learning Process." Doctoral thesis, Stockholms universitet, Institutionen för lingvistik, 2009. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:su:diva-8414.
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An ontology is a knowledge-representation structure, where words, terms or concepts are defined by their mutual hierarchical relations. Ontologies are becoming ever more prevalent in the world of natural language processing, where we currently see a tendency towards using semantics for solving a variety of tasks, particularly tasks related to information access. Ontologies, taxonomies and thesauri (all related notions) are also used in various variants by humans, to standardize business transactions or for finding conceptual relations between terms in, e.g., the medical domain. The acquisition of machine-readable, domain-specific semantic knowledge is time consuming and prone to inconsistencies. The field of ontology learning therefore provides tools for automating the construction of domain ontologies (ontologies describing the entities and relations within a particular field of interest), by analyzing large quantities of domain-specific texts. This thesis studies three main topics within the field of ontology learning. First, we examine which sources of information are useful within an ontology learning system and how the information sources can be combined effectively. Secondly, we do this with a special focus on cross-language text collections, to see if we can learn more from studying several languages at once, than we can from a single-language text collection. Finally, we investigate new approaches to formal and automatic evaluation of the quality of a learned ontology. We demonstrate how to combine information sources from different languages and use them to train automatic classifiers to recognize lexico-semantic relations. The cross-language data is shown to have a positive effect on the quality of the learned ontologies. We also give theoretical and experimental results, showing that our ontology evaluation method is a good complement to and in some aspects improves on the evaluation measures in use today.<br>För att köpa boken skicka en beställning till exp@ling.su.se/ To order the book send an e-mail to exp@ling.su.se
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鄭俊洺 and Chun-ming Cheng. "The connectionism approach to syntactic and semantic acquisition of simple Chinese sentences: the role of wordorder information." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 2000. http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B31224118.
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Dickey, Zachary R. L. "The Role of Semantics in Prohibiting The Acquisition of a Native-like Semantic Competence: Understanding Why ` Jason Hit Tommy ’ and Why `Tommy Was Hit by Jason ’." University of Toledo Honors Theses / OhioLINK, 2014. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=uthonors1386932531.
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Paciorek, Albertyna. "Implicit learning of semantic preferences." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2013. https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/244632.
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The research presented in this PhD dissertation examines the phenomenon of semantic implicit learning, using semantic preferences of novel verbs as a test case. Implicit learning refers to the phenomenon of learning without intending to learn or awareness that one is learning at all. Semantic preference (or selectional preference – as preferred in computational linguistics) is the tendency of a word to co-occur with words sharing similar semantic features. For example, ‘drink’ is typically followed by nouns denoting LIQUID, and the verb ‘chase’ is typically followed by ANIMATE nouns. The material presented here spans across disciplines. It examines a well-documented psychological phenomenon - implicit learning – and applies it in the context of language acquisition, thereby providing insights into both fields. The organisation of this dissertation groups its experiments by their methodology. Chapter 1 provides an overview of the current psychological and linguistic literature. Chapter 2 includes a pen-and-paper study carried out in a classroom environment on Polish learners of English, where awareness is assessed by subjective measures taken at each test question as well as a post-experiment questionnaire. Chapter 3 includes a collection of 5 computer-based experiments based on a false-memory paradigm. After exposure to sentential contexts containing novel verbs, participants are shown to endorse more previously unseen verb-noun pairings that follow the correct semantic preference patterns to the pairings that violate it. The result holds even when participants do not reveal any explicit knowledge of the patterns in the final debriefing. Awareness is additionally assessed using indirect measures examining correlations of confidence judgements with performance. Chapter 4 examines whether implicit learning of novel verb semantic preference patterns is automatic. To this end, a reaction time procedure is developed based on two consecutive decisions (“double decision priming”). The method reveals that semantic implicit learning, at least in the described cases, exerts its influence with a delay, in post-processing. Chapter 5 comprises research done in collaboration with Dr Nitin Williams, University of Reading. It documents an attempt at finding neural indices of implicit learning using a novel single-trial analysis of an electroencephalographic (EEG) signal, based on empirical mode decomposition (EMD) denoising. Chapter 6 presents a final discussion and indications for future research. The main contribution of this dissertation to the general field of implicit learning research consists in its challenging the predominant view that implicit learning mainly relies on similarity of forms presented in training and test. The experiments presented here require participants to make generalisations at a higher, semantic level, which is largely independent of perceptual form. The contribution of this work to the field of Second Language Acquisition consists of empirical support for the currently popular but seldom tested assumptions held by advocates of communicative approaches to language teaching, namely that certain aspects of linguistic knowledge can develop without explicit instruction and explanation. At the same time, it challenges any view assuming that vocabulary learning necessarily relies on explicit mediation. The experiments collected here demonstrate that at least word usage in context can be learnt implicitly. A further contribution of this dissertation is its demonstration that the native language may play a key role in determining what is learnt in such situations. A deeper understanding of the phenomenon of semantic implicit learning promises to shed light on the nature of word and grammar learning in general, which is crucial for an account of the processes involved in the development of a second language mental lexicon.
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Adams, Aurora Mathews. "LINGUISTIC AND CONCEPTUAL METAPHORS OF ‘HEART’ IN LEARNER CORPORA." UKnowledge, 2017. http://uknowledge.uky.edu/ltt_etds/20.
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This corpus-based study examined English and Spanish learner language for ‘heart’ metaphors. Gutiérrez Pérez (2008) compared ‘heart’ metaphors across five languages and that study served as a reference framework for the work presented here. This work intended to find evidence of metaphor transfer and/or new metaphor learning in second language writing. Conceptual metaphors (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980) and linguistic or lexical metaphors (Falck, 2012) from both languages were considered in the analysis. This work analyzed ‘heart’ metaphors taken from two learner corpora, the Cambridge Learner Corpus and the Corpus de Aprendices de Español. Results were compared to the findings of Gutiérrez Pérez (2008) to see whether these metaphors typically occur only in English, only in Spanish, or are found in both languages. The results showed evidence of language learners using several kinds of metaphors that do not typically occur in their first language. The aim of this study was to add a new facet to this body of research by examining these phenomena in learner corpora rather than monolingual corpora. Furthermore, this study also examined both second language English and second language Spanish corpora, addressing potential bi-directionality of transfer or conversely, the use of new linguistic forms.
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Jarrar, Haneen. "Language acquisition in children with autism in the Arab world : evidence from processes of phonology, semantics, syntax and pragmatics." Thesis, Goldsmiths College (University of London), 2015. http://research.gold.ac.uk/11251/.
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The studies described in this thesis are the first to investigate the use of diagnostic and language tests developed in the western world in an Arab autism clinic. This chapter will provide contextual information and will begin by giving a historical overview of the developments in diagnostic criteria, and clinical and language assessment methods that followed Kanner’s first description of autism in 1943. Research findings that have informed our current understanding of language abilities in autism in the western world are discussed. Finally, prevalence and methods of autism assessment in the Arab world will be considered and the aims of the thesis will be described.
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Sethuraman, Nitya. "The acquisition of verbs and argument structure constructions /." Diss., Connect to a 24 p. preview or request complete full text in PDF format. Access restricted to UC campuses, 2002. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/ucsd/fullcit?p3049671.
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Canizares, Carlos I. "Second Language Learners’ Performance on Non-Isomorphic Cross-Language Cognates in Translation." FIU Digital Commons, 2016. http://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/etd/3061.
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Do adult L2 English bilingual speakers have difficulty with cognate words whose meanings are distinct across their two languages? This study explored the extent to which variations in meaning in cross-language cognates affect translation performance in a translation task by L2 English (L1 Spanish) speakers who learned English as adults. A prep-phase experiment was conducted to test native English-speakers’ predicted completions of the study’s stimuli sentences, in order to choose the optimal stimuli for the primary experiment. The method for the primary experiment of this study consisted of a web-based translation task of 120 sentences from Spanish to English, while controlling for polysemy and frequency. The results showed that adult L2 learners of English did experience difficulty when translating cognates in sentences from their L1 to their L2. The interaction of the Spanish word’s polysemous nature, Spanish word frequency, English target frequency and English cognate frequency played a role in the participants’ performance.
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Yamamoto, Natsuki. "The use of modals in ESL academic writing." CSUSB ScholarWorks, 1999. https://scholarworks.lib.csusb.edu/etd-project/1727.
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Vento-Wilson, Margaret. "The Intersection of Speech-Language Pathologists’ Beliefs, Perceptions, and Practices and the Language Acquisition and Development of Emerging Aided Communicators." Chapman University Digital Commons, 2019. https://digitalcommons.chapman.edu/education_dissertations/4.
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This dissertation discusses the convergence of aided augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) systems, the language acquisition and development of young children who are minimally verbal or nonverbal who acquire their native language while simultaneously learning to use an aided AAC system, and explicit and implicit elements that influence language outcomes. Factors investigated include those related to language acquisition universals, the AAC system, the young aided AAC user, and practices, philosophies, and beliefs of speech-language pathologists (SLPs). Further examined were: (a) language acquisition parallels in atypical populations who do not possess the full range of senses who have been shown to develop language, and (b) analogies between the linguistic structures of pidgins, interlanguages, and the syntax of young aided AAC users. This dissertation employed a survey methodology to capture the practices and beliefs of SLPs as a means of identifying potential contributing factors to the reduced linguistic outcomes of these children. Quantitative findings revealed statistically significant differences in SLPs’ perceptions of confidence and qualification with the two populations of children with language impairments who use an oral modality and young aided AAC users. Descriptive trends across all constructs measured suggested differences in SLPs’ practices, belifes, and perspectives in their work with these two populations. The analysis of the syntactic structures of the language of young aided AAC users revealed definitive parallels with the construct of interlanguages.
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Redmond, Leslie. "Acquisition de la polysémie du verbe "prendre" par des apprenants du français L2." Thesis, Bordeaux 3, 2017. http://www.theses.fr/2017BOR30007/document.
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Cette thèse se consacre aux enjeux de la polysémie verbale pour l’acquisition des langues secondes. Nous nous intéressons plus particulièrement à la polysémie du verbe prendre. Cette thèse poursuit deux objectifs complémentaires. D’une part, notre premier objectif est de décrire la polysémie du verbe prendre au moyen d’une analyse en sémantique lexicale dans une approche cognitive. D’autre part, notre second objectif est d’évaluer l’incidence de la polysémie du verbe prendre sur les connaissances qu’ont les apprenants de ce verbe et d’isoler les différentes acceptions de prendre mises au jour par notre analyse sémantique, qui s’avèrent problématiques pour les apprenants du français L2. Par ailleurs, nous cherchons également à savoir si les problèmes liés à la polysémie chez les anglophones peuvent être liés à l’influence translangagière.L’analyse sémantique du verbe prendre porte sur l’ensemble des acceptions prédicatives du verbe. Notre corpus d’analyse provient de données lexicales issues de plusieurs dictionnaires de référence. Afin de délimiter le corpus d’acceptions soumis à l’analyse sémantique, nous avons effectué une analyse syntaxique permettant de départager les différents emplois du verbe prendre : les constructions à verbe support, les locutions verbales et les acceptions prédicatives. Puis, nous proposons une analyse sémantique monosémique des acceptions prédicatives du verbe prendre qui s’articule autour d’un noyau de sens tripartite qui ne correspond à aucune des acceptions spécifiques du verbe, mais qui est présent dans l’ensemble de ces acceptions. Chacune des parties du noyau de sens peut faire l’objet d’un fenêtrage de l’attention, qui nous permet de mettre au jour les différents sens du verbe. Nous avons également émis des hypothèses sur les différences entre le verbe prendre et ses équivalents en anglais. Pour atteindre le second objectif de notre travail, nous avons mené une expérimentation auprès de 191 apprenants du français langue seconde. Tous les participants ont complété trois tâches expérimentales : un test de closure afin de mesurer leur niveau de compétence langagière en français, une tâche de production écrite et une tâche de jugement d’acceptabilité. Les résultats des analyses de régression logistique et multinomiale montrent non seulement que l’analyse sémantique que nous avons proposée permet de prédire la connaissance des différentes acceptions du verbe par les apprenants du français L2, mais aussi que les apprenants anglophones et allophones ont un comportement différent par rapport aux types d’acceptions du verbe prendre, comportement que nous avons pu expliquer par l’influence translangagière chez les participants anglophones<br>The present dissertation focuses on the acquisition of highly polysemous verbs by French as a second language learners. I am particularly interested in the polysemy of the verb prendre. This dissertation has two complementary objectives. On the one hand, the first objective is to describe the polysemy of prendre through a lexical semantic analysis within a cognitive framework. On the other hand, the second objective is to evaluate the impact of this polysemy on learners' knowledge of the verb’s different senses in order to isolate those which are the most problematic for French L2 learners. Furthermore, I also investigate whether the problems associated with polysemy for Anglophone learners can be explained through cross-linguistic influence. The semantic analysis of the verb prendre describes all the predicative uses of the verb and is based on lexical data from several dictionnaires. Prior to carrying out the semantic analysis, a battery of syntactic tests was used in order to categorize the different uses of the verb prendre into the following categories: support verb constructions, idiomatic expressions and predicative uses. I propose that the verb prendre has an abstract core meaning which can be divided into three parts. While this abstract core meaning does not correspond to any of the specific senses of the verb, it is present in all of them. I use the cognitive semantic concept of the windowing of attention in order to explain how each of the parts of the core meaning can be windowed in order to obtain the different senses of the verb. Moreover, this analysis allowed me to formulated hypotheses about the differences between the verb prendre and its equivalents in English.In order to meet the second objective of this dissertation, I conducted an experiment on 191 learners of French as a second language. All participants completed three tasks: a cloze test to measure their proficiency level in French, a guided written production task and an acceptability judgement task. The results of the logistic and multinomial regression analyses show not only that the semantic analysis proposed can predict participants’ knowledge of the different senses of the verb, but also that participants whose first language is English behave differently from those whose first language is another language, confirming the presence of cross-linguistic influence for the English-speaking participants
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Wojtecka, Magdalena [Verfasser], Petra [Akademischer Betreuer] Schulz, Petra [Gutachter] Schulz, and Angela [Gutachter] Grimm. "Acquisition pace and developmental path of early second language learners of German. A longitudinal study on acquisition of morphosyntax and semantics / Magdalena Wojtecka ; Gutachter: Petra Schulz, Angela Grimm ; Betreuer: Petra Schulz." Frankfurt am Main : Universitätsbibliothek Johann Christian Senckenberg, 2020. http://d-nb.info/1219963259/34.
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Gustin, Edward Louis. "A semantic analysis of 'get' and its acquisition by students of English in Macau : a cognitive approach." Thesis, University of Macau, 2012. http://umaclib3.umac.mo/record=b2586626.
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Schwartz, Hansen A. "The acquisition of lexical knowledge from the web for aspects of semantic interpretation." Doctoral diss., University of Central Florida, 2011. http://digital.library.ucf.edu/cdm/ref/collection/ETD/id/5028.
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Applications to word sense disambiguation, an aspect of semantic interpretation, are used to evaluate the contributions. Disambiguation systems which utilize semantically annotated training data are considered supervised. The algorithms of this dissertation are considered minimally-supervised; they do not require training data created by humans, though they may use human-created data sources. In the case of evaluating a database of common sense knowledge, integrating the knowledge into an existing minimally-supervised disambiguation system significantly improved results -- a 20.5\% error reduction. Similarly, the Web selectors disambiguation system, which acquires knowledge directly as part of the algorithm, achieved results comparable with top minimally-supervised systems, an F-score of 80.2\% on a standard noun disambiguation task. This work enables the study of many subsequent related tasks for improving semantic interpretation and its application to real-world technologies. Other aspects of semantic interpretation, such as semantic role labeling could utilize the same methods presented here for word sense disambiguation. As the Web continues to grow, the capabilities of the systems in this dissertation are expected to increase. Although the Web selectors system achieves great results, a study in this dissertation shows likely improvements from acquiring more data. Furthermore, the methods for acquiring a database of common sense knowledge could be applied in a more exhaustive fashion for other types of common sense knowledge. Finally, perhaps the greatest benefits from this work will come from the enabling of real world technologies that utilize semantic interpretation.; This work investigates the effective acquisition of lexical knowledge from the Web to perform semantic interpretation. The Web provides an unprecedented amount of natural language from which to gain knowledge useful for semantic interpretation. The knowledge acquired is described as common sense knowledge, information one uses in his or her daily life to understand language and perception. Novel approaches are presented for both the acquisition of this knowledge and use of the knowledge in semantic interpretation algorithms. The goal is to increase accuracy over other automatic semantic interpretation systems, and in turn enable stronger real world applications such as machine translation, advanced Web search, sentiment analysis, and question answering. The major contributions of this dissertation consist of two methods of acquiring lexical knowledge from the Web, namely a database of common sense knowledge and Web selectors. The first method is a framework for acquiring a database of concept relationships. To acquire this knowledge, relationships between nouns are found on the Web and analyzed over WordNet using information-theory, producing information about concepts rather than ambiguous words. For the second contribution, words called Web selectors are retrieved which take the place of an instance of a target word in its local context. The selectors serve for the system to learn the types of concepts that the sense of a target word should be similar. Web selectors are acquired dynamically as part of a semantic interpretation algorithm, while the relationships in the database are useful to stand-alone programs. A final contribution of this dissertation concerns a novel semantic similarity measure and an evaluation of similarity and relatedness measures on tasks of concept similarity. Such tasks are useful when applying acquired knowledge to semantic interpretation.<br>ID: 029808979; System requirements: World Wide Web browser and PDF reader.; Mode of access: World Wide Web.; Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Central Florida, 2011.; Includes bibliographical references (p. 141-160).<br>Ph.D.<br>Doctorate<br>Electrical Engineering and Computer Science<br>Engineering and Computer Science
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Azaz, Mahmoud. "Acquisition of Form-Meaning Mapping in L2 Arabic and English Noun Phrases: A Bidirectional Framework." Diss., The University of Arizona, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/333120.
Full textAbstract:
Despite the plethora of SLA research conducted on the acquisition of the definite marker in noun phrase configurations in L2 Arabic and English (e.g., Sarko, 2007; Master, 1997; Collier, 1987; Anderson, 1984; Kharma, 1981), there is as yet no definitive description of how noun phrases are acquired and why errors persist after advanced stages in L2 learning. Results, as shown by Butler (2002), are inconclusive, and the primary causes of difficulties in the acquisition of the definite marker in noun phrase configurations remain unclear. Recently, the internal syntax-semantics interface (Cuza & Frank, 2011; Montrul, 2010; Tsimpli & Sorace, 2006; Sorace, 2003, 2004) and the specificity-definiteness distinction (Ionin, 2003; Ionin et al., 2004; Ionin et al., 2008) have been considered as appropriate frameworks for exploring the acquisition of noun phrases and other structural features. The structure of noun phrase configurations in Arabic and English offers a complex interface between form and meaning for L2 learners with multiple cases of matches and mismatches between specificity and definiteness. In this three-article dissertation project, two of which were conducted in a bidirectional methodological framework with L1 Arabic-L2 English and L1 English-L2 Arabic learners, I explored the acquisition of three cases of noun phrase configurations. In the first study, I investigated the acquisition of plural noun phrase configurations that carry generic and specific readings at the initial state of L2 learning. Using three data collection instruments: written translation; error detection and correction; and forced choice elicitation, I tested the predictions made by the Interface Hypothesis (IH) and the Full Transfer (FT) Hypothesis. Results showed that L2 learners in both directions tend to transfer noun phrase configurations from L1 into L2, a result that I took to support the FT hypothesis. In addition, it took L1 English-L2 Arabic learners two years of instruction to recover from this L1 effect. The second study aimed at confirming the result of the first study, but in the acquisition of the definite marker in generic singular noun phrase configurations in the L1 English-L2 Arabic direction. The behavior of generic singular noun phrases in L2 Arabic offers a good testing ground since it has numerous similarities and differences with English. Two conditions were established: a matching condition and a mismatching condition. Both conditions were tested in the L1 English-L2 Arabic direction. Results showed a similar pattern to the one recorded in the first study. Typological proximity and distance were found to be important determiners of language acquisition of the in/definiteness configurations of singular noun phrases. In the third study, I shifted to the exploration of a more complex type of noun phrases; namely the definite Iḍāfah construction in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and its equivalent noun phrase configurations in English in the two directions. I started with a common difference between MSA and English. Whereas in MSA there is a canonical configuration in terms of head-complement ordering and head-complement definiteness, English is tolerant of more than one permissible configuration. I operationalized the acquisition of these noun phrases in terms of head-complement ordering and head-complement definiteness. Results showed a clear effect of L1 transfer in both directions; knowledge of L1 noun phrase configurations acts as the initial step in L2 learning. I concluded that both communities of L2 learners face problems that vary according to the L1 noun phrase configuration at hand. However, in the L1 English-L2 Arabic direction, learners reached a satisfactory level of performance in the Iḍāfah construction after two years of instruction. I approached this finding as a result of intensive Focus-on-Form Episodes (Loewn, 2005) that the Iḍāfah construction receives in MSA instruction. At the conclusion of this research project I highlighted some implications for the second language acquisition and teaching of noun phrases. The overall results were couched in a broader perspective that characterizes the initial state of L2 learning of noun phrases in + article and – article languages, the effects of typological proximity and distance, and the effects of Instructed SLA. For the pedagogical implications, I called for the integration of the semantics of the definite marker while presenting noun phrases in textbooks. I also recommended the use of explicit instruction and structured-input activities (VanPatten, 2004; Marsden & Chen, 2011) as effective pedagogical tools that foster form-meaning mapping in the acquisition of L2 Arabic and English noun phrases.
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Kevari, Mary Kathleen. "The role of universal grammar in second language acquisition: An experimental study of Spanish ESL students' interpretation of lexical pronouns." CSUSB ScholarWorks, 2000. https://scholarworks.lib.csusb.edu/etd-project/1710.
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Fonseca, Maria Cristina Micelli. "A semântica e a pragmática na compreensão das oposições present perfect X past simple do inglês e pretérito perfecto X pretérito indefinido do espanhol." Universidade de São Paulo, 2007. http://www.teses.usp.br/teses/disponiveis/8/8139/tde-13082007-151106/.
Full textAbstract:
Nesta tese observa-se o papel que a semântica e a pragmática desempenham, na gramática inicial (early grammar) da interlíngua de falantes de português, na compreensão de textos em inglês e em espanhol nos quais se relatam eventos passados e se empregam as oposições Present Perfect x Past Simple e Pretérito Perfecto x Pretérito Indefinido. Assumimos (MICHAELLIS, 1998) que um dos valores mais fortes das formas compostas dessas duas línguas é o resultativo e que como o português, na maioria das vezes, expressa o resultado de outros modos, o aprendiz vê naquelas apenas uma maneira de expressar ações passadas. Em função disso, ao analisar a estrutura da língua estrangeira, acaba atribuindo aos tempos compostos de ambas os valores aspectuais das perífrases [TER+Particípio] e [ESTAR+Gerúndio] do português, que em muitos casos não coincide com os valores das formas perifrásticas das línguas que estão aprendendo. Enquanto as perífrases da língua estrangeira têm o aspecto perfectivo resultativo, as do português têm valor imperfectivo continuativo. Tal fato, que afeta a compreensão do texto, não é percebido pelos aprendizes. Estes analisam primeiramente a sintaxe da língua-alvo (top-down procedure, Liceras, 2003a) uma vez que não têm acesso aos traços que desencadeiam a fixação de parâmetros para a realização do bottom-up. O padrão de atribuição dos valores das perífrases da L1 para a L2 aparece nas interlínguas do espanhol e do inglês, apontando para um mesmo processo, independente de a língua-alvo ser mais ou menos próxima do português. Testes com análise de variância comprovam que se trata de um mesmo processo para as duas línguas, que começa a partir da reestruturação da L1, sugerindo que a aquisição dessa é regida pelos princípios da GU, mas que a marcação de parâmetros não acontecerá como na L1, mas se dará via reestruturação de porções da L1. Os valores semânticos utilizados na interlíngua, nesse estágio, também são os da L1, o que aponta que, assim como acontece com a fonologia, a criança nasce com sensibilidade para acessar qualquer valor semântico, mas existe um período crítico que faz com que a aquisição da L2 ocorra por reestruturação não apenas sintática mas também semântica dos valores da L1. A pragmática, por sua vez, será acessada, após a semântica, como uma sintonia fina do sentido<br>In this thesis, the roles of Semantics and Pragmatics in text comprehension tasks have been investigated in Portuguese speakers interlanguage early grammar. The texts in both English and Spanish had past events told employing Present Perfect x Past Simple and Pretérito Perfecto x Pretérito Indefinido pairings. We have adopted (Michaellis, 1998) that the English periphrasis has as its most salient meaning the resultative reading and have applied it to the Spanish periphrasis as well. Portuguese, on the other hand, expresses resultative meaning in different ways most of the times leading students to see in the Present Perfect and Pretérito Perfecto structures the past event meaning alone. Consequently, when analyzing the foreign language structures, learners end up assigning them the aspectual values which belong to the Portuguese [TER+Participle] and [ESTAR+Gerund] periphrases, despite their not sharing the same aspectual values most of the time, because the English and Spanish forms express the perfective and resultative aspect, while the Portuguese periphrasis indicates the imperfective and durative aspect. This mismatch affects text comprehension, but is not perceived by the students. Learners first analyze the target language structure (topdown procedure, Liceras, 2003a), once they cannot have access to the features which trigger the parameter setting, precluding a bottom-up procedure. The same pattern of value assignment from the L1 periphrasis to both L2 is noticeable in both English and Spanish interlanguages. Analysis of Variance tests have proven that both interlanguages undergo the same process, which starts from L1 reestructuring. This fact suggests that adult L2 learner will make use of UG principles, but will not set parameters the way children do, L2 will grow by reestructuring portions of L1. The semantic values applied in both English and Spanish interlanguages at this stage, are L1?s as well, allowing a comparison to the phonology acquisition. Children are born sensitive to any semantic value, but due to a critical period for semantics, adult L2 learners will acquire L2 semantic values by reestructing not only the syntax of L1 but also its semantic values. Learners will have access to pragmatics, after semantics, as a fine-tuned meaning
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FONSECA, Maria Cristina Micelli. "A semântica e a pragmática na Compreensão das oposições present perfect x past simple do Inglês e pretérito perfecto x pretérito indefinido do espanhol." Universidade de São Paulo, 2006. http://www.repositorio.ufc.br/handle/riufc/19545.
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FONSECA, Maria Cristina Micelli. A semântica e a pragmática na compreensão das oposições present perfect X past simple do inglês e pretérito perfecto X pretérito indefinido do espanhol. 2006. 229f. Tese (Doutorado) - Universidade de São Paulo, Departamento de Linguística, São Paulo, 2006.<br>Submitted by anizia almeida (aniziaalmeida80@gmail.com) on 2016-09-09T11:22:10Z
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Previous issue date: 2006<br>In this thesis, the roles of Semantics and Pragmatics in text comprehension tasks have been investigated in Portuguese speakers interlanguage early grammar. The texts in both English and Spanish had past events told employing Present Perfect x Past Simple and Pretérito Perfecto x Pretérito Indefinido pairings. We have adopted (Michaellis, 1998) that the English periphrasis has as its most salient meaning the resultative reading and have applied it to the Spanish periphrasis as well. Portuguese, on the other hand, expresses resultative meaning in different ways most of the times leading students to see in the Present Perfect and Pretérito Perfecto structures the past event meaning alone. Consequently, when analyzing the foreign language structures, learners end up assigning them the aspectual values which belong to the Portuguese [TER+Participle] and [ESTAR+Gerund] periphrases, despite their not sharing the same aspectual values most of the time, because the English and Spanish forms express the perfective and resultative aspect, while the Portuguese periphrasis indicates the imperfective and durative aspect. This mismatch affects text comprehension, but is not perceived by the students. Learners first analyze the target language structure (topdown procedure, Liceras, 2003a), once they cannot have access to the features which trigger the parameter setting, precluding a bottom-up procedure. The same pattern of value assignment from the L1 periphrasis to both L2 is noticeable in both English and Spanish interlanguages. Analysis of Variance tests have proven that both interlanguages undergo the same process, which starts from L1 reestructuring. This fact suggests that adult L2 learner will make use of UG principles, but will not set parameters the way children do, L2 will grow by reestructuring portions of L1. The semantic values applied in both English and Spanish interlanguages at this stage, are L1?s as well, allowing a comparison to the phonology acquisition. Children are born sensitive to any semantic value, but due to a critical period for semantics, adult L2 learners will acquire L2 semantic values by reestructing not only the syntax of L1 but also its semantic values. Learners will have access to pragmatics, after semantics, as a fine-tuned meaning.<br>Nesta tese observa-se o papel que a semântica e a pragmática desempenham, na gramática inicial (early grammar) da interlingua de falantes de português, na compreensão de textos em inglês e em espanhol nos quais se relatam eventos passados e se empregam as oposições Present Perfect x Past Simple e Pretérito Perfecto x Pretérito Indefinido. Assumimos (Michaellis, 1998) que um dos valores mais fortes das formas compostas dessas duas línguas é o resultativo e que como o português, na maioria das vezes, expressa o resultado de outros modos, o aprendiz vê naquelas apenas uma maneira de expressar ações passadas. Em função disso, ao analisar a estrutura na língua estrangeira, acaba atribuindo aos tempos compostos de ambas os valores aspectuais das perífrases (TER+Particípio) e (ESTAR+Gerúndio) do português, que em muitos casos não coincide com os valores das formas perifrásticas das línguas que estão aprendendo. Enquanto as perífrases da língua estrangeira têm o aspecto perfectivo resultativo, as do português tem valor imperfectivo continuativo. Tal fato, que afeta a compreensão do texto, não é percebido pelos aprendizes. Estes analisam primeiramente a sintaxe da língua-alvo (top-drow procedure, Liceras, 2003a) uma vez que não tem acesso aos traços que desencadeiam a fixação de parâmetros para a realização do bottom-up. O padrão de atribuição dos valores das perífrases da L1 para a L2 aparece nas interlínguas do espanhol e do inglês, apontando para um mesmo processo, independente de a língua-alvo ser mais ou menos próxima do português. Testes com análise de variância comprovam que se trata de um mesmo processo para as duas línguas, que começa a partir da reestruturação da L1, sugerindo que a aquisição dessa é regida pelos princípios da GU, mas que a marcação de parâmetros não acontecerá como na L1, mas se dará via reestruturação de porções da L1. os valores semânticos utilizados na interlíngua, com a fonologia, a criança nasce com sensibilidade para acessar qualquer valor semântico, mas existe um período crítico que faz com que a aquisição da L2 ocorra por reestruturação não apenas sintática mas também semântica dos valores da L1. A pragmática, por sua vez, será acessada, após a semântica, como uma sintonia fina do sentido.
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Necşulescu, Silvia. "Automatic acquisition of lexical-semantic relations: gathering information in a dense representation." Doctoral thesis, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, 2016. http://hdl.handle.net/10803/374234.
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Lexical-semantic relationships between words are key information for many NLP tasks, which require this knowledge in the form of lexical resources. This thesis addresses the acquisition of lexical-semantic relation instances. State of the art systems rely on word pair representations based on patterns of contexts where two related words co-occur to detect their relation. This approach is hindered by data sparsity: even when mining very large corpora, not every semantically related word pair co-occurs or not frequently enough.
In this work, we investigate novel representations to predict if two words hold a lexical-semantic relation. Our intuition was that these representations should contain information about word co-occurrences combined with information about the meaning of words involved in the relation. These two sources of information have to be the basis of a generalization strategy to be able to provide information even for words that do not co-occur.<br>Les relacions lexicosemàntiques entre paraules són una informació clau per a moltes tasques del PLN, què requereixen aquest coneixement en forma de recursos lingüístics. Aquesta tesi tracta l’adquisició d'instàncies lexicosemàntiques. Els sistemes actuals utilitzen representacions basades en patrons dels contextos en què dues paraules coocorren per detectar la relació que s'hi estableix. Aquest enfocament s'enfronta a problemes de falta d’informació: fins i tot en el cas de treballar amb corpus de grans dimensions, hi haurà parells de paraules relacionades que no coocorreran, o no ho faran amb la freqüència necessària. Per tant, el nostre objectiu principal ha estat proposar noves representacions per predir si dues paraules estableixen una relació lexicosemàntica.
La intuïció era que aquestes representacions noves havien de contenir informació sobre patrons dels contextos, combinada amb informació sobre el significat de les paraules implicades en la relació. Aquestes dues fonts d'informació havien de ser la base d'una estratègia de generalització que oferís informació fins i tot quan les dues paraules no coocorrien.
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Szumlanski, Sean. "Automatically Acquiring a Semantic Network of Related Concepts." Doctoral diss., University of Central Florida, 2013. http://digital.library.ucf.edu/cdm/ref/collection/ETD/id/5712.
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We describe the automatic acquisition of a semantic network in which over 7,500 of the most frequently occurring nouns in the English language are linked to their semantically related concepts in the WordNet noun ontology. Relatedness between nouns is discovered automatically from lexical co-occurrence in Wikipedia texts using a novel adaptation of an information theoretic inspired measure. Our algorithm then capitalizes on salient sense clustering among these semantic associates to automatically disambiguate them to their corresponding WordNet noun senses (i.e., concepts). The resultant concept-to-concept associations, stemming from 7,593 target nouns, with 17,104 distinct senses among them, constitute a large-scale semantic network with 208,832 undirected edges between related concepts. Our work can thus be conceived of as augmenting the WordNet noun ontology with RelatedTo links. The network, which we refer to as the Szumlanski-Gomez Network (SGN), has been subjected to a variety of evaluative measures, including manual inspection by human judges and quantitative comparison to gold standard data for semantic relatedness measurements. We have also evaluated the network's performance in an applied setting on a word sense disambiguation (WSD) task in which the network served as a knowledge source for established graph-based spreading activation algorithms, and have shown: a) the network is competitive with WordNet when used as a stand-alone knowledge source for WSD, b) combining our network with WordNet achieves disambiguation results that exceed the performance of either resource individually, and c) our network outperforms a similar resource, WordNet++ (Ponzetto & Navigli, 2010), that has been automatically derived from annotations in the Wikipedia corpus. Finally, we present a study on human perceptions of relatedness. In our study, we elicited quantitative evaluations of semantic relatedness from human subjects using a variation of the classical methodology that Rubenstein and Goodenough (1965) employed to investigate human perceptions of semantic similarity. Judgments from individual subjects in our study exhibit high average correlation to the elicited relatedness means using leave-one-out sampling (r = 0.77, σ = 0.09, N = 73), although not as high as average human correlation in previous studies of similarity judgments, for which Resnik (1995) established an upper bound of r = 0.90 (σ = 0.07, N = 10). These results suggest that human perceptions of relatedness are less strictly constrained than evaluations of similarity, and establish a clearer expectation for what constitutes human-like performance by a computational measure of semantic relatedness. We also contrast the performance of a variety of similarity and relatedness measures on our dataset to their performance on similarity norms and introduce our own dataset as a supplementary evaluative
standard for relatedness measures.<br>Ph.D.<br>Doctorate<br>Computer Science<br>Engineering and Computer Science<br>Computer Science
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Su, Kim Nam. "Statistical modeling of multiword expressions." Connect to thesis, 2008. http://repository.unimelb.edu.au/10187/3147.
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In natural languages, words can occur in single units called simplex words or in a group of simplex words that function as a single unit, called multiword expressions (MWEs). Although MWEs are similar to simplex words in their syntax and semantics, they pose their own sets of challenges (Sag et al. 2002). MWEs are arguably one of the biggest roadblocks in computational linguistics due to the bewildering range of syntactic, semantic, pragmatic and statistical idiomaticity they are associated with, and their high productivity. In addition, the large numbers in which they occur demand specialized handling. Moreover, dealing with MWEs has a broad range of applications, from syntactic disambiguation to semantic analysis in natural language processing (NLP) (Wacholder and Song 2003; Piao et al. 2003; Baldwin et al. 2004; Venkatapathy and Joshi 2006).<br>Our goals in this research are: to use computational techniques to shed light on the underlying linguistic processes giving rise to MWEs across constructions and languages; to generalize existing techniques by abstracting away from individual MWE types; and finally to exemplify the utility of MWE interpretation within general NLP tasks.<br>In this thesis, we target English MWEs due to resource availability. In particular, we focus on noun compounds (NCs) and verb-particle constructions (VPCs) due to their high productivity and frequency.<br>Challenges in processing noun compounds are: (1) interpreting the semantic relation (SR) that represents the underlying connection between the head noun and modifier(s); (2) resolving syntactic ambiguity in NCs comprising three or more terms; and (3) analyzing the impact of word sense on noun compound interpretation. Our basic approach to interpreting NCs relies on the semantic similarity of the NC components using firstly a nearest-neighbor method (Chapter 5), then verb semantics based on the observation that it is often an underlying verb that relates the nouns in NCs (Chapter 6), and finally semantic variation within NC sense collocations, in combination with bootstrapping (Chapter 7).<br>Challenges in dealing with verb-particle constructions are: (1) identifying VPCs in raw text data (Chapter 8); and (2) modeling the semantic compositionality of VPCs (Chapter 5). We place particular focus on identifying VPCs in context, and measuring the compositionality of unseen VPCs in order to predict their meaning. Our primary approach to the identification task is to adapt localized context information derived from linguistic features of VPCs to distinguish between VPCs and simple verb-PP combinations. To measure the compositionality of VPCs, we use semantic similarity among VPCs by testing the semantic contribution of each component.<br>Finally, we conclude the thesis with a chapter-by-chapter summary and outline of the findings of our work, suggestions of potential NLP applications, and a presentation of further research directions (Chapter 9).
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Blumberg, Sarah Lynn. "Semantic Category Effects on Hebrew Language Acquisition." Thesis, The University of Arizona, 2011. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/144236.
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Chiu, Chia-Hui. "Semantic development in ESL vocabulary acquisition." online access from Digital Dissertation Consortium, 2006. http://libweb.cityu.edu.hk/cgi-bin/er/db/ddcdiss.pl?3247996.
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Ealey, Douglas. "Natural language acquisition in large scale neural semantic networks." Thesis, University of Southampton, 1999. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.310843.
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Stevens, Tassos Sion. "Language acquisition in Williams Syndrome : lexical constraints and semantic organisation." Thesis, University College London (University of London), 1998. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.300433.
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Davy, Belinda. "A cognitive-semantic approach to the acquisition of English prepositions /." view abstract or download file of text, 2000. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/uoregon/fullcit?p9998029.
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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2000.<br>Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 281-296). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users. Address: http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/uoregon/fullcit?p9998029.
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Pickerill, Roy Thomas Alan. "A critical evaluation of recent research into semantic development in child language." Master's thesis, University of Cape Town, 1988. http://hdl.handle.net/11427/17107.
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Bibliography: pages 166-172.<br>This study examines critically recent research in the area of child language development, with an emphasis on research into semantic development. Various research articles, in particular, are analysed, with particular attention being given to experimental studies. In addition, research into language development in the naturalistic mode is discussed. The validity of research into language development in experimental contexts is questioned. Specific methods employed in experimental studies of language development are discussed critically. These methods are contrasted with methods used in a number of naturalistic studies. Recent research into semantic development is placed in the perspective of the study of semantics as a whole. The principal finding of this study is that research into language development in artificial experimental settings does not allow for valid conclusions to be drawn. Naturalistic studies are preferred in that they allow for language development, and semantic development in particular, to be placed in the context of overall child development. Language development is not able to be abstracted, for research purposes, from the totality of human development. Semantic development is viewed as a continuous process, lasting well into adulthood. The importance of the study of semantic development as part of semantics is emphasised.
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Kirby, Susannah Becker Misha Karen. "Semantic scaffolding in first language acquisition the acquisition of raising-to-object and object control /." Chapel Hill, N.C. : University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2009. http://dc.lib.unc.edu/u?/etd,2233.
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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2009.<br>Title from electronic title page (viewed Jun. 26, 2009). "... in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Linguistics First Language Acquisition." Discipline: Linguistics; Department/School: Linguistics.
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Padilla-Reyes, Ramon E. D. "CONNECTIONS AMONG SCALES, PLURALITY, AND IINTENSIONALITY INSPANISH." The Ohio State University, 2018. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1523540040987239.
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Shimanskaya, Elena Mikhaylovna. "Feature reassembly of semantic and morphosyntactic pronominal features in L2 acquisition." Diss., University of Iowa, 2015. https://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/1902.
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Previous research in Second Language Acquisition (SLA) has shown that some of the systematic errors of second language (L2) learners can be attributed to the influence of the native language (L1). In fact, many hypotheses in generative SLA have focused on the role of L1 transfer ranging the spectrum from No Transfer to Full Transfer. The goal of this dissertation was to investigate L1 transfer by focusing on L1-L2 differences in terms of linguistic features; specifically, how differences in the featural and morpholexical organization of L1 and L2 pronominal paradigms affect SLA.
In this work I operationalize L1 transfer in terms of the Feature Reassembly Hypothesis (FRH; Lardiere, 2009). The hypothesis pioneers conceptualization of L1 transfer as an initial attempt by L2 learners to establish a direct mapping between L1 and L2 forms. The FRH is particularly suitable to the study of L2 development because it predicts that when a one-to-one initial mapping is unsuccessful, L2 learners will gradually reorganize the L1 grammatical system until they attain (possibly complete) convergence. Empirical testing of the hypothesis is critical since determining when and why transfer occurs opens numerous possibilities to predict transfer errors and to develop pedagogical approaches to tackle negative transfer.
In the current study I focus on the L2 acquisition of four 3rd person singular French object pronouns in the interlanguage of native speakers of English. Difficulties in the acquisition of Romance object pronouns have been amply documented in L2 research. However, most of the previous studies of the topic have focused on L2 acquisition of clitic pronouns and their syntactic properties. The present study takes a novel approach investigating the acquisition of strong as well as clitic pronouns. In my dissertation I test different kinds of knowledge including learners' comprehension of different kinds of pronouns. Going beyond production data, my experimental tasks include a grammaticality judgment task with correction, a picture selection task, and a self-paced reading task. The experimental tasks were administered to a group of native speakers (n=43) and L2 learners of French (n=87). The overall picture that emerges from the current study allows unveiling the initial mapping and subsequent reassembly of the semantic and morphosyntactic features implicated in the acquisition process of the four forms under investigation.
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Quigley, June R. (June Richfield). "A Semantic Field Approach to Passive Vocabulary Acquisition for Advanced Second Language Learners." Thesis, North Texas State University, 1986. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc500401/.
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Current ESL instructors and theorists agree that university students of ESL have a need for a large passive vocabulary. This research was undertaken to determine the effectiveness of a semantic field approach to passive vocabulary acquisition in comparison to a traditional approach. A quantitative analysis of the short-term and long-range results of each approach is presented. Future research and teaching implications are discussed. The outcome of the experimentation lends tentative support to a semantic field approach.
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al-Mansoor, Mansoor. "Semantic mapping of the bilingual lexicon : form-to-meaning mapping through computerized testing." Virtual Press, 2004. http://liblink.bsu.edu/uhtbin/catkey/1302163.
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In this study, form-to-meaning mapping of the bilingual mental lexicon is investigated. Sixty native speakers of Arabic, divided into intermediate and advanced ESL groups, served as the participants of the study. They performed a semantic relatedness rating task of sixty high frequency semantically related English word pairs on a 6point scale. While thirty word pairs had the same translation (ST) word in Arabic, the other thirty had a different translation (DT) word. Fifteen of the word pairs in each of the two word pair categories were abstract, while the other fifteen were concrete nouns. The vast majority of these word pairs were synonyms. The results showed that there was a significant difference in the word pair ratings between the intermediate and advanced ESL groups. The intermediate group rated all word pairs higher than the advanced learners. Both groups, however, rated the ST word pairs higher than the DT word pairs. Nonetheless, the rating mean difference score between the ST and DT was significantly lower in the advanced group than it was in the intermediate group. In addition, both ESL groups rated the abstract word pairs higher than their concrete counterparts. Overall, the results support the claim that beginning ESL learners map their bilingual lexicon to Ll translation, and as they become advanced move toward mapping form-to-meaning directly. This is particularly evident in the higher rating of ST and the lower rating of DT as well as in the higher rating mean difference score between ST and DT in the intermediate group.<br>Department of English
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Cloran, Russell Andrew. "Trust on the semantic web." Thesis, Rhodes University, 2006. http://eprints.ru.ac.za/852/.
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Harrington, Brian. "ASKNet : automatically creating semantic knowledge networks from natural language text." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2009. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:1c7154d3-f7d1-493e-b521-4e5ceb540038.
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This thesis details the creation of ASKNet (Automated Semantic Knowledge Network), a system for creating large scale semantic networks from natural language texts. Using ASKNet as an example, we will show that by using existing natural language processing (NLP) tools, combined with a novel use of spreading activation theory, it is possible to efficiently create high quality semantic networks on a scale never before achievable. The ASKNet system takes naturally occurring English text (e.g., newspaper articles), and processes them using existing NLP tools. It then uses the output of those tools to create semantic network fragments representing the meaning of each sentence in the text. Those fragments are then combined by a spreading activation based algorithm that attempts to decide which portions of the networks refer to the same real-world entity. This allows ASKNet to combine the small fragments together into a single cohesive resource, which has more expressive power than the sum of its parts. Systems aiming to build semantic resources have typically either overlooked information integration completely, or else dismissed it as being AI-complete, and thus unachievable. In this thesis we will show that information integration is both an integral component of any semantic resource, and achievable through a combination of NLP technologies and novel applications of spreading activation theory. While extraction and integration of all knowledge within a text may be AI-complete, we will show that by processing large quantities of text efficiently, we can compensate for minor processing errors and missed relations with volume and creation speed. If relations are too difficult to extract, or we are unsure which nodes should integrate at any given stage, we can simply leave them to be picked up later when we have more information or come across a document which explains the concept more clearly. ASKNet is primarily designed as a proof of concept system. However, this thesis will show that it is capable of creating semantic networks larger than any existing similar resource in a matter of days, and furthermore that the networks it creates of are sufficient quality to be used for real world tasks. We will demonstrate that ASKNet can be used to judge semantic relatedness of words, achieving results comparable to the best state-of-the-art systems.
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Cheng, Chun-ming. "The connectionism approach to syntactic and semantic acquisition of simple Chinese sentences the role of word order information /." Hong Kong : University of Hong Kong, 2000. http://sunzi.lib.hku.hk/hkuto/record.jsp?B23272934.
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Wartenburger, Isabell. "Einfluss von Spracherwerbsalter und Sprachleistungsniveau auf die kortikale Repräsentation von Grammatik und Semantik in der Erst- und Zweitsprache." Doctoral thesis, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Medizinische Fakultät - Universitätsklinikum Charité, 2004. http://dx.doi.org/10.18452/15006.
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Ob es eine 'kritische Periode' beim Spracherwerb gibt oder nicht, wird kontrovers diskutiert. Die Untersuchung zweisprachiger Probanden mit unterschiedlichem Spracherwerbsalter und Sprachleistungsniveau in der Zweitsprache stellt eine gute Möglichkeit dar, diese Frage näher zu beleuchten. In der vorliegenden Studie nutzten wir die funktionelle Magnetresonanztomographie, um den Einfluss der Faktoren Spracherwerbsalter und Sprachleistungsniveau auf die neuronalen Korrelate grammatikalischer und semantischer Verarbeitungsprozesse bei italienisch-deutschsprachigen Probanden mit unterschiedlichem Spracherwerbsalter und Sprachleistungsniveau zu untersuchen. Während das zerebrale Aktivierungsmuster beim semantischen Urteilen größtenteils vom erreichten Sprachleistungsniveau abhängig war, beeinflusste das Spracherwerbsalter hauptsächlich die zerebrale Repräsentation grammatikalischer Verarbeitungsprozesse. Diese Ergebnisse weisen darauf hin, dass beide, das Spracherwerbsalter und das Sprachleistungsniveau, die neuronalen Substrate der Verarbeitung der Zweitsprache beeinflussen, jedoch mit einem unterschiedlichen Effekt auf grammatikalische und semantische Verarbeitungsprozesse.<br>The existence of a 'critical period' for language acquisition is still controversial. Bilingual subjects with variable age of acquisition and proficiency level constitute a suitable model to study this issue. In the present study, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to investigate the effects of age of acquisition and proficiency level on neural correlates of grammatical and semantic judgments in Italian-German bilinguals who learned the second language at different ages and had different proficiency levels. While the pattern of brain activity for semantic judgment was largely dependent on the proficiency level, the age of acquisition mainly affected the cortical representation of grammatical processes. These findings support the view that both age of acquisition and proficiency level affect the neural substrates of second language processing, with a differential effect on grammar and semantics.
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Hout, Angeliek van. "Event semantics of verb frame alternations : a case study of Dutch and its acquisition /." New York ; London : Garland, 1998. http://catalogue.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb391806510.
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Jin, Gongye. "High-quality Knowledge Acquisition of Predicate-argument Structures for Syntactic and Semantic Analysis." 京都大学 (Kyoto University), 2016. http://hdl.handle.net/2433/215677.
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If the author of the published paper digitizes such paper and releases it to third parties using digital media such as computer networks or CD-ROMs, the volume, number, and pages of the Journal of Natural Language Processing of the publication must be indicated in a clear manner for all viewers.<br>Kyoto University (京都大学)<br>0048<br>新制・課程博士<br>博士(情報学)<br>甲第19850号<br>情博第601号<br>新制||情||105(附属図書館)<br>32886<br>京都大学大学院情報学研究科知能情報学専攻<br>(主査)准教授 河原 大輔, 教授 黒橋 禎夫, 教授 河原 達也<br>学位規則第4条第1項該当
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Atay, Zeynep. "Second Language Acquisition Of The English Article System By Turkish Learners: The Role Of Semantic Notions." Master's thesis, METU, 2010. http://etd.lib.metu.edu.tr/upload/12611970/index.pdf.
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This thesis investigates the second language acquisition of the English article system by Turkish learners in order to find out the role of certain semantic universals of the Universal
Grammar during the acquisition process. More specifically, the purpose is to see whether or not L1 Turkish learners of English fluctuate between two semantic notions namely<br>specificity
and definiteness, and the effect of this fluctuation on acquisition.
120 students from three groups of learners at different proficiency levels (40 elementary, 40 intermediate and 40 upper &ndash<br>intermediate students) were tested. Data collection instrument, a forced-choice elicitation task is used. The task consists of 40 short and contextualized dialogues. The target sentence in each dialogue is missing an article and learners were asked to fill the gap with an appropriate article<br>a/an, the or Ø<br>on the bases of their understanding of the proceeding context. Dialogues in the task belong to four different contexts<br>i.e. definite/specific, definite/non-specific, indefinite/specific and indefinite/non-specific. Each context has 10 dialogues with four different contexts that are randomized. Data were analyzed using SPSS 17 packet program (descriptive analysis and one-way ANOVA).
The results showed that intermediate level learners exhibited fluctuation between definiteness and specificity to a great extent in (+definite/-specific) and (-definite/+specific)
contexts. Elementary level learners were more accurate in these contexts exhibiting article omission errors in definite contexts. Overall, despite certain unexpected results, upper
intermediate level students were quite successful in article assignment in defined contexts.
This revealed that there is a positive correlation between article system acquisition and proficiency.
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Saturno, Jacopo. "Utterance structure in the initial stages of Polish L2 acquisition : from semantics to case morphology." Thesis, Paris 8, 2017. http://www.theses.fr/2017PA080141.
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Cette thèse est dédiée au traitement de la morphosyntaxe lors des premières étapes de l’acquisition du polonais en L2, avec une attention spécifique portée au rôle de l’input et des techniques de sollicitation. La structure cible considérée ici est l’opposition morphosyntaxique entre le nominatif et l’accusatifs, qui correspondent respectivement aux fonctions sujet et objet.90 apprenant(e)s adultes répartis équitablement entre cinq groupes de L1 ont pris part à un cours d’initiation au polonais d’une durée de quatorze heures. Les participants n’ayant jamais été exposés au polonais ou à une autre langue slave, l’expérience porte sur le tout premier contact avec une langue cible totalement nouvelle. L’expérience a été menée sous des conditions d’input rigoureusement contrôlées : l’apport a été planifié, enregistré et transcrit afin de pouvoir le mettre en corrélation rigoureuse avec l’output de l’apprenant.Cette étude conclut que tandis que plusieurs apprenant(e)s ont été capable de traiter la morphologie flexionnelle dans un exercice structuré quelques heures seulement après la première exposition à l’input, beaucoup moins ont su en faire autant dans un contexte d’interaction spontanée. Pour ce dernier exercice, ils se sont appuyés sur des principes sémantiques et liés au contexte de la phrase. Ce travail a ainsi permis de souligner des points méthodologiques sensibles quant au rôle de la sémantique dans la détermination de la morphosyntaxe d’une part, et quant aux effets des techniques de sollicitation sur les stratégies observables du traitement morphosyntaxique, d’autre part<br>This thesis is devoted to the processing of morphosyntax in the earliest stages of the acquisition of Polish L2, with special attention to the role of input and to elicitation techniques. The target structure taken into consideration is the morphosyntactic opposition between the nominative and accusative case, respectively corresponding to the subject and object function. 90 adult learners evenly distributed among five L1 groups took part in a first-exposure 14-hour Polish course taught by a specially trained native speaker. As participants had never been exposed to Polish or other Slavic languages, the experiment portrays the very first contact with a completely new target language. The experiment was carried out under strictly controlled input conditions: specifically, input was planned, recorded and transcribed, in order to thoroughly correlate it to learner output.The study concludes that while several learners proved able to process inflectional morphology in a structured test after only a few hours of exposure to the input, much fewer could do the same in the context of spontaneous interaction, in which they relied on semantic and phrasal principles. Although this conclusion may be seen in itself as a significant contribution to the debate regarding the initial stages of L2 acquisition, we believe that this work highlighted sensitive methodological points regarding the role of semantics in determining morphosyntax, on the one hand, and the effect of elicitation technique on the observable strategies of morphosyntactic processing, on the other hand