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European Summer School in Logic, Language and Information

European Summer School in Logic, Language and Information

ESSLLI 2013, ESSLLI 2012: Pristine Perspectives on Logic, Language, and Computation pp 26–35Cite as

Using Corpus Statistics to Evaluate Nonce Words

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Part of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science book series (LNTCS,volume 8607)

Abstract

Nonce words are widely used in linguistic research to evaluate areas such as the acquisition of vowel harmony and consonant voicing, naturalness judgment of loanwords, and children’s acquisition of morphemes. Researchers usually create lists of nonce words intuitively by considering the phonotactic features of the target languages. In this study, a corpus of Turkish orthographic representations is used to propose a measure for the nonce word appropriateness for linearly concatenative languages. The conditional probabilities of orthographic co-occurrences and pairwise vowel collocations within the same word boundaries are used to evaluate a list of nonce words in terms of whether they would be rejected, moderately accepted or fully accepted as novel words. A group of 50 Turkish native speakers was asked to judge the same list of nonce words on how native-like the words sound. Both the model and the participants displayed similar results.

Keywords

  • Nonce words
  • Orthographic representations
  • Conditional probabilities

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, Lehigh University, Bethlehem, PA, USA

    Özkan Kılıç

Authors
  1. Özkan Kılıç
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Laboratoire de Linguistique Formelle, Université Paris Diderot-Paris 7, 13 . passage Menténégro, 75019, Paris, France

    Margot Colinet

  2. Passeerdersstraat 28A, 1016XC, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Sophia Katrenko

  3. Department of Philosophy, Lund Unviersity, Kungshuset, Lundagård, 222 22, Lund, Sweden

    Rasmus K. Rendsvig

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Kılıç, Ö. (2014). Using Corpus Statistics to Evaluate Nonce Words. In: Colinet, M., Katrenko, S., Rendsvig, R.K. (eds) Pristine Perspectives on Logic, Language, and Computation. ESSLLI ESSLLI 2013 2012. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 8607. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-44116-9_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-44116-9_3

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

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