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English or Spanish Science Language Articles.
Automatic lexeme acquisition for a multilingual medical subword thesaurus.
PURPOSE: We present a method for the automated acquisition of a multilingual medical lexicon (for Spanish, French and Swedish) to be used within the framework of a medical cross-language text retrieval system. METHODS: For the lexical acquisition process, we incorporate seed lexicons and lists of trusted term translations derived from the UMLS Metathesaurus. The seed lexicons for Spanish, French and Swedish are automatically generated from (previously manually constructed) Portuguese, German and English sources by simple string transformations. Lexical and semantic hypotheses are then validated by processing pairs of term translations. In a last step, we use the cleaned list of "approved" translations in order to augment, step by step, the target dictionaries by processing the parallel corpora in terms of co-occurrence patterns of hypothesized translation equivalents which cannot be derived by simple character substitutions. RESULTS: An existing multilingual lexicon for the medical domain with about 60,000 entries for English, German, and Portuguese was automatically augmented by more then 17,000 new lexemes for Spanish, French, and Swedish. CONCLUSIONS: Our approach constitutes a promising method for the automated creation of new lexicon entries and their linkage to semantic identifiers.
Spoonish spanerisms: A lexical bias effect in Spanish.
Lexical bias is the tendency for phonological errors to form existing words at a rate above chance. This effect has been observed in experiments and corpus analyses in Germanic languages, but S. del Viso, J. M. Igoa, and J. E. García-Albea (1991) found no effect in a Spanish corpus study. Because lexical bias plays an important role in the debate on interactivity in language production, the authors reconsidered its absence in Spanish. A corpus analysis, which considered relatively many errors and which used a method of estimating chance rate that is relatively independent of total error number, and a speech-error elicitation experiment provided converging evidence for lexical bias in Spanish. The authors conclude that the processing mechanisms underlying this effect hold cross-linguistically. Copyright 2006 APA, all rights reserved.
Action naming in Spanish and English by sequential bilingual children and adolescents.
PURPOSE: Verb processing in early sequential Spanish-English bilinguals was investigated. Primary study goals were to identify potential patterns of development in relative levels of verb processing efficiency in a 1st (L1) and 2nd (L2) language and to investigate factors influencing cognitive control of the dual-language system in developing bilinguals. METHOD: Four age groups of early sequential Spanish-English bilinguals (5-7 years, 8-10 years, 11-13 years, and 14-16 years of age) named action pictures in single-language (Spanish or English) and mixed-language (alternating Spanish and English) conditions. Dependent variables were accuracy and response time (RT). RESULTS: Action-naming proficiency improved in both L1 and L2 with age, with a shift from L1 to L2 dominance in accuracy. In comparison with the single-language condition, the mixed-language condition engendered slower RT for all age groups and lower accuracy for the 3 younger age groups. The oldest age group did not show accuracy difference between the conditions. CONCLUSIONS: These general patterns of verb processing across age, language, and processing conditions replicated and enriched previous findings of noun processing in similar populations (K. J. Kohnert, E. Bates, & A. E. Hernandez, 1999). However, verb processing was considerably slower and less accurate than noun processing. Theoretical and applied implications of these findings are discussed. J SLHR.
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