more thoughts on MLU

[Margaret Fleck]

> But there are numerous papers on adult processing that suggest that at
> least some regularly inflected forms are stored in the lexicon. Alegre &
> Gordon suggest that any regular past tense form with a frequency over 6
> tokens per million words of speech is stored. Ullman argues that forms
> like BLINKED, with bases that rime with families of irregular forms, are
> stored in the lexicon. Other researchers go even further.
>
> Are these regular forms stored in such a way that they are processed
> like single units, or is processing complex enough that they still count
> as "separate pieces of language"?
> I don't think that we know the answer to that question FOR ADULTS, much
> less for children.

If you think about the optimizations used in computer systems, there's
a good chance that the answer has evil complexities.  For example, common
compositional items could be stored temporarily in memory (cached) and later
flushed out of memory when they cease being common. There could be several
distinct caching mechanisms operating in parallel, storing data and
paying attention to frequencies over different timespans (e.g. minutes, days,
long-term).   Even when each individual caching mechanism is brutally simple,
the behavior of several operating together may appear complex.  And so forth.

Margaret









=====
Margaret M. Fleck
    510-378-3075
    margaretmfleck at yahoo.com