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Full-Text Articles in Neuroscience and Neurobiology
Lexical Mechanics: Partitions, Mixtures, And Context, Jake Ryland Williams
Lexical Mechanics: Partitions, Mixtures, And Context, Jake Ryland Williams
Graduate College Dissertations and Theses
Highly structured for efficient communication, natural languages are complex systems. Unlike in their computational cousins, functions and meanings in natural languages are relative, frequently prescribed to symbols through unexpected social processes. Despite grammar and definition, the presence of metaphor can leave unwitting language users "in the dark," so to speak. This is not problematic, but rather an important operational feature of languages, since the lifting of meaning onto higher-order structures allows individuals to compress descriptions of regularly-conveyed information. This compressed terminology, often only appropriate when taken locally (in context), is beneficial in an enormous world of novel experience. However, what …
The New Normal: Goodness Judgments Of Non-Invariant Speech, Julia R. Drouin
The New Normal: Goodness Judgments Of Non-Invariant Speech, Julia R. Drouin
Honors Scholar Theses
Previous research has found that perceptual learning, or normalizing the idiosyncratic phonemes of speech, causes a shift in speech sound category boundaries. The present study examined if perceptual learning was limited to the boundary or if also caused a shift in internal category structure. Seventeen individuals participated in three behavioral tasks to explicate this question. In the Lexical Decision task, participants were trained in either /s/-biasing or /ʃ/- biasing context. In the Goodness Judgment task, participants rated a continuum of sounds on perceived /s/ goodness using a designated scale. Finally, in the Phoneme Identification task, participants listened to the same …