An investigation on the influence of frequency on the lexical organization of verbs

  • Authors:

  • Daniel Cerato Germann;Aline Villavicencio;Maity Siqueira

  • Affiliations:

  • Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (Brazil);Bath University (UK);Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (Brazil)

  • Venue:
  • TextGraphs-5 Proceedings of the 2010 Workshop on Graph-based Methods for Natural Language Processing
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

This work extends the study of Germann et al. (2010) in investigating the lexical organization of verbs. Particularly, we look at the influence of frequency on the process of lexical acquisition and use. We examine data obtained from psycholinguistic action naming tasks performed by children and adults (speakers of Brazilian Portuguese), and analyze some characteristics of the verbs used by each group in terms of similarity of content, using Jaccard's coefficient, and of topology, using graph theory. The experiments suggest that younger children tend to use more frequent verbs than adults to describe events in the world.