Lexical Categories (lexical + category)

Distribution by Scientific Domains


Selected Abstracts


Autobiographical memory and language use: linguistic analyses of critical life event narratives in a non-clinical population

APPLIED COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY, Issue 2 2009
Nina Rullkoetter
Previous research indicates a strong association between post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), psychopathology, and linguistic indices, but most studies have only compared one traumatic and one neutral life event. Referring to the Dual Representation Theory for PTSD we investigated the narrative representation of two negative life events, with and without current emotional impact in a non-clinical population. Twenty-five subjects wrote detailed narratives of the two types of life events. Lexical categories were coded and compared between the different scripts. Life events with current emotional impact were characterised by a greater use of emotional words, especially secondary emotionally words. Proprioceptive words were more often used and there were more errors when present tense was employed. Additionally, a greater number of sentences were found in these scripts. Our data suggest that in healthy subjects a relationship exists between narrative peculiarities and the current emotional impact of autobiographical memory shaped by negative life events. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source]


How children know the relevant properties for generalizing object names

DEVELOPMENTAL SCIENCE, Issue 2 2002
Susan S. Jones
Young children's novel word extensions indicate that their animal categories, like those of adults, are characterized by multiple similarities among instances; whereas their artifact categories, again like those of adults, are characterized more simply by commonalities among instances in shape. Three experiments shed light on the nature and development of a mechanism that enables children to organize novel lexical categories differently for different kinds of objects. Experiment 1 shows that, by adult judgments, animals and artifacts present different category organizations. Experiment 2 shows relations between both age and the number of nouns young children have acquired, and children's kind-specific generalizations of newly learned nouns. Experiment 3 is a training study in which even younger children show an ability to learn and then generalize highly abstract relations between different contextual cues and different category structures; and importantly, to learn more than one set of such relations at a time. Together, these three findings indicate one way in which children are able to rapidly and accurately form lexical categories that parallel those of adults in their language community. [source]


Self-references among children's first fifty words: Indications for an emerging sense of self in Dutch-speaking children

INFANT AND CHILD DEVELOPMENT, Issue 4 2001
Matty van der Meulen
Abstract The present study investigated at what age self-references would turn up for the first time in young children's language and what kind of words these were. This was studied for a corpus of the first 50 words, produced by ten children, five boys and five girls, collected through parental reports. Self-references were defined as all words that referred in one way or another to the speakers themselves. They were not restricted to utterances containing pronominals of the first person singular or the child's first name. The appearance of self-references varied with the onset of speech. Children who started to speak early also produced self-referent words at an early age (between 12 and 16 months). Self-references could be satisfactorily classified into three lexical categories: nominals, action words and modifiers, containing words (a) labelling body parts, (b) verbalizing action plans and ongoing actions, and (c) expressing characteristics of outer appearance and actions, and physical sensations, respectively. This indicates that young children's sense of self is not restricted to an awareness of their own actions, but that a variety of experiences contribute to this. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source]