Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Language Switch Costs In Urdu-English Bilinguals : A Behavioral Study, Ranjeeta Mahraj

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

This study examines language switch costs, as there is a recent body of work showing that there are behavioral "costs" involved when bilinguals switch between their two languages. A particular point of debate concerns symmetry, regarding whether it is more costly (i.e., takes longer) to switch from one of a bilinguals’ languages to the other, or vice versa. In the current study, a partial replication of (Struck & Jiang, 2022), data was collected online from 90 Urdu- English bilinguals living in the US and Pakistan on a language background questionnaire, and a Lexical Decision Task (LDT), designed to measure the …

Linguistic Predictors Of Engagement On Anti-Incel Forums, Daniel Beutler

Student Theses

This thesis examines the determinants of social media engagement with extremist views in general and misogynistic ones in particular. The study, which is a part of an ongoing, large-scale examination of online hate, examined posts from r/IncelTears, a sub-forum in the long-form social media Reddit dedicated to attacks on the Involuntary Celibate (‘Incel’) digital communities. Previous research on engagement – and by extension virality – of online posts has broadly implicated linguistic markers of affect, morality, extremism, and social identity. This exploratory study correlated metrics of online engagement such as the number of Upvotes and Comments that each post garnered …

What Did You Expect? An Investigation Of Lexical Preactivation In Sentence Processing, Jon Burnsky

Doctoral Dissertations

Language users predictively preactivate lexical units that appear to the comprehen- der to be likely to surface. Despite ample language experience and grammatical competence, it appears that language users tend to preactivate verbs in some contexts, called role-reversal contexts, that would create plausibility violations if they were to actually appear; these verbs assign thematic roles to their arguments in such a way that it leads to implausibility. These anomalous predictions provide a window into the mechanisms underlying lexical preactivation and are the case study that this dissertation focuses in on. This dissertation is an exploration of what linguistic information is …

Let’S Talk: The Dual Process Model Of Supportive Communication In Peers, Erica Marie Szkody

Theses and Dissertations

Supportive messages occur within most relationships. Researchers have found strong relationships between social support and various physical and psychological health outcomes, but the specific mechanisms at work have yet to be fully explored. Many factors contribute to whether a supportive interaction is processed as helpful or supportive by the recipient including relational factors, message content, past experiences, etc. For peer dyads, the context and supportive messages individuals provide their peer may inhibit or contribute to their perception of their peer’s supportive behavior. The current study examined the impact of contextual factors (such as family communication patterns and relationship quality) on …

Lexical And Syntactic Priming In Dialogue, Sarah Campbell Wilson

Theses and Dissertations

Speakers engaged in dialogue align with one another across multiple linguistic levels to ensure effective communication. The Interactive Alignment Model (Pickering & Garrod, 2004) suggests speakers align due to automatic priming mechanisms at individual linguistic levels. Syntactic priming is the tendency to repeat a syntactic structure that has been recently comprehended or produced. Although syntactic priming is regarded as an automatic, abstract structural phenomenon, other linguistic factors can influence a syntactic structure’s priming strength. Lexical repetition between structures has been shown to enhance syntactic priming, an effect termed “lexical boost” (Branigan et al., 2000; Healey, Purvery, & Howes., 2014). Another …

Finding The Means : The Bilingual Disparity In Semantic Context Use For Processing, Iyad Ghanim

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

Early and late bilinguals both differ in the speed with which they comprehend language or in their processing of sentences compared to monolinguals. This is possibly a result of crosslanguage interference, differential allocation of cognitive resources, or some other difference in language-dependent processes. This dissertation presents research and review focusing on one such language dependent process — the use of sentential context and lexical-associative semantic information — to process sentences. In a series of studies, 34 bilinguals and 28 monolinguals complete a retroactive masked priming task, which provides an isolated measure of the use of semantic information to backwards recognize …

Predictors Of Lexical Accessibility Of Common And Proper Nouns In Older Age: Evidence From The Tip-Of-The-Tongue State, Amy Victoria Vogel-Eyny

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

One of the notable language difficulties experienced by healthy older adults is word retrieval failure, specifically the tip-of-the-tongue state (TOT). A TOT occurs when one has a strong sense of knowing the word, such that the semantic content is accessed, but the entirety of the word’s phonology is temporarily inaccessible. Such retrieval difficulty is attributable, at least in part, to characteristics of the target word. Psycholinguistic features may uniquely influence the semantic and/or phonological stages of word production. An additional factor known to influence TOT-likelihood is noun type: proper nouns elicit TOTs more often than do common nouns. The discrepancy …

Language Co-Activation In Novice And Intermediate L2 Learners, Nicholas Sulier

Linguistics ETDs

One of the most intriguing aspects of bilingual speakers and signers is their ability to access both languages simultaneously. Though much research has been dedicated to understanding how two languages interact, or co-activate, within proficient bilinguals, less is understood about how and when novice and intermediate learners develop similar cross-language interactions. Thus, the current study aimed to uncover at what stages during novice and intermediate L2 development co-activation can be detected. It also investigated possible mechanisms behind co-activation. Specifically, the study attempted to clarify if any detected co-activation amongst L2 learners is dependent on associations between lexical and conceptual representations, …

There And Gone Again: Syntactic Structure In Memory, Caroline Andrews

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation addresses the relationship between hierarchical syntactic structure and memory in language processing of individual sentences. Hierarchical syntactic structure is a key part of human languages and language processing but its integration with memory has been uneasy ever since Sachs (1967) demonstrated that the syntactic structure of individual sentences is lost in explicit sentence recall tasks much faster than other linguistic information (lexical, semantic, etc.). Nonetheless, psycholinguists have continued to draw on memory in syntactic processing theories, in part due to (i) the explanatory power that memory can give to sentence processing hypotheses, and (ii) the conflicting results that …

Speech Peculiarities Of Young Uzbek Mothers, Nodira Umarova

Philology Matters

Phenomena of motherhood is an independent existential value, as far as it satisfies social needs, that is an aspiration of individuals for selfactualization, descendant realization, the desire to leave a fully lived life. A notion of language personality is of concern which is different from the functional viewpoints of speech and communicative personalities. Motherhood changes both a female personality structure touching upon her motivational component, world-view, and her social status in the community, therefore, self-appraisal, her own image defines a woman’s language personality in the social role of a mother. Important features of a child's normal mental development are his/her …

Person-Based Prominence In Ojibwe, Christopher Hammerly

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation develops a formal and psycholinguistic theory of person-based prominence effects, the finding that certain categories of person such as "first" and "second" (the "local" persons) are privileged by the grammar. The thesis takes on three questions: (i) What are the possible categories related to person? (ii) What are the possible prominence relationships between these categories? And (iii) how is prominence information used to parse and interpret linguistic input in real time? The empirical through-line is understanding obviation — a “spotlighting” system, found most prominently in the Algonquian family of languages, that splits the (ani- mate) third persons into …

Processing Coercion In A First, Non-Dominant Language: Mandarin-English Heritage Bilinguals, Christina N. Dadurian

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Recent work in heritage language grammars has shown variability in L1 competence, despite high proficiency in both languages. While sources of variation have been debated, little attention has been given to the role of language dominance. This thesis uses a self-paced listening task to explicitly investigate the roles of language dominance and pragmatic competence in how heritage speakers of Mandarin Chinese process aspectual coercion in their non-dominant home language, as compared to late bilinguals. Specifically, constructions that vary in acceptability and salience in input between Mandarin and English are tested: Iterative coercion, complement event coercion of entity NPs, and perfective …

Speech Behavior Of A Person In Sociolinguistic And Isicholinguistic Interpretations, R Madjidova

Scientific journal of the Fergana State University

Speech behavior of a person in sociolinguistic and isicholinguistic interpretations

About Some Issues Of Contemporary Linguistics, S. Kurbanova

Scientific journal of the Fergana State University

About some issues of contemporary linguistics

Speech Behavior Of A Person In Sociolinguistic And Isicholinguistic Interpretations, R Madjidova

Scientific journal of the Fergana State University

Speech behavior of a person in sociolinguistic and isicholinguistic interpretations

About Some Issues Of Contemporary Linguistics, S. Kurbanova

Scientific journal of the Fergana State University

About some issues of contemporary linguistics

Reasoning With Pseudowords: How Properties Of Novel Verbal Stimuli Influence Item Difficulty And Linguistic-Group Score Differences On Cognitive Ability Assessments, Paul Agnello

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Pseudowords (words that are not real but resemble real words in a language) have been used increasingly as a technique to reduce contamination due to construct-irrelevant variance in assessments of verbal fluid reasoning (Gf). However, despite pseudowords being researched heavily in other psychology sub-disciplines, they have received little attention in cognitive ability testing contexts. Thus, there has been an assumption that all pseudowords work equally and work equally well for all test-takers. The current research examined three objectives with the first being whether changes to the pseudoword properties of length and wordlikeness (how much a pseudoword resembles a typical or …

Auditory Distraction On Visual Translation: Language Interference In Spanish-English Bilinguals, Violet A. Young

Digital Repository: Showcase of Undergraduate Research Excellence

No abstract provided.

The Impact Of Animacy And Positioning On The Production Of Second Language Referring Expressions, Adonis De Carvalho Borges

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Researches have investigated how referring expressions are produced based upon second language acquisition and psycholinguistics theories. A study of monolingual English speakers demonstrated that referent's salience and discourse factors might impact referring expression choice between noun phrases and pronouns. Participants demonstrated a higher production of pronouns when the referent expression was animate rather than inanimate and a preference for noun phrases when the referent was the second noun phrase of the referent's context sentence (Fukumura & Van Gompel, 2011). In addition, an investigation with Hispanic bilinguals, whose L2 is English, demonstrated, in general, a greater preference for pronouns rather than …

Cross-Modal Distraction On Simultaneous Translation: Language Interference In Spanish-English Bilinguals, Violet A. Young

Honors Undergraduate Theses

Bilingualism has been studied extensively in multiple disciplines, yet we are still trying to figure out how exactly bilinguals think. A bilingual advantage has been observed in various experimental studies, but also has not been observed in many other studies. A bilingual advantage has been shown in tasks using selective attention. These tasks study the effects of language interference, where two types of interference are observed: interlingual (between-languages) and intralingual (within one language). This study examined language interference in Spanish-English bilinguals, using an auditory-visual simultaneous translation experimental setup. 16 college English monolinguals and 17 college Spanish-English bilinguals were tested. The …

When Errors Aren't: How Comprehenders Selectively Violate Binding Theory, Shayne Sloggett

Doctoral Dissertations

It has been claimed that comprehenders use the Binding Theory (Chomsky, 1986) to restrict the search for a reflexive’s antecedent in early stages of comprehension (Dillon, Mishler, Sloggett, & Phillips, 2013; Sturt, 2003; Nicol & Swinney, 1989) However, recent findings challenge this view, demonstrating that comprehenders occasionally access antecedents on the basis of their match with a reflexive’s morphosyntactic features (Chen, Jäger, & Vasishth, 2012; Patil, Lewis, & Vasishth, 2016, Parker, & Phillips, 2017). In this dissertation, I investigate the source of this ’grammatical fallibility’ in the real-time application of Principle A of the Binding Theory. Specifically, I ask whether …

Learning To Read English, Charles A. Perfetti, Lindsay N. Harris

Faculty Books & Book Chapters

No abstract provided.

Slavic Psycholinguistics In The 21st Century, Irina A. Sekerina

Publications and Research

This article provides an update on research in Slavic psycholinguistics since 2000 following my first review (Sekerina 2006), published as a position paper for the workshop The Future of Slavic Linguistics in America (SLING2K). The focus remains on formal experimental psycholinguistics understood in the narrow sense, i.e., experimental studies conducted with monolingual healthy adults. I review five dimensions characteristic of Slavic psycholinguistics—populations, methods, domains, theoretical approaches, and specific languages—and summarize the experimental data from Slavic languages published in general non-Slavic psycholinguistic journals and proceedings from the leading two conferences on Slavic linguistics, FASL and FDSL, since 2000. I argue that …

Probes And Their Horizons, Stefan Keine

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation develops a comprehensive theory of 'selective opacity', syntactic configurations in which one and the same syntactic domain is transparent to some operations, but opaque to others. The prime example of selective opacity are finite clauses in English, which are transparent to A'-movement, but opaque to A-movement. Following and extending the previous literature, I argue that selective opacity extends beyond the A/A'-distinction and even to syntactic dependencies that do not involve movement. Empirically, I argue that selective opacity exhibits intriguing meta-generalizations, which become evident once selective opacity across constructions and languages is treated as a uniform phenomenon. These two …

Lexical Variation, Lexical Innovation, And Speaker Motivations: A Historical Psycholinguistic Approach, Jason Timm Dr.

Linguistics ETDs

Speakers commonly re-purpose existing forms in the mental lexicon to create novel form-meaning. Contemporary evidence that such innovation processes have occurred historically is attested in varying degrees of polysemy in the mental lexicon. This dissertation considers speaker motivations underlying these innnovation processes historically. Strong synchronic relationships between frequency and degree of polysemy, on one hand, and frequency and lexical access, on the other hand, have traditionally been interpreted as evidence for the primacy of economic motivations in processes of lexical innovation. In contrast, the cognitive processes that most commonly facilitate innovation, metaphor and metonymy, have largely been described as processes …

The Representation Of Probabilistic Phonological Patterns: Neurological, Behavioral, And Computational Evidence From The English Stress System, Claire Moore-Cantwell

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation investigates the cognitive mechanism underlying language users' ability to generalize probabilistic phonological patterns in their lexicon to novel words. Specifically, do speakers represent probabilistic patterns using abstract grammatical constraints? If so, this system of constraints would, like categorical phonological generalizations (a) be limited in the space of possible generalizations it can represent, and (b) apply to known and novel words alike without reference to specific known words. I examine these two predictions, comparing them to the predictions of alternative models. Analogical models are specifically considered. In chapter 3 I examine speakers' productions of novel words without near lexical …

Report On Doctoral Seminars In Psycholinguistics, Kerwin A. Livingstone

Kerwin A. Livingstone

The field of Psycholinguistics is receiving a considerable amount of attention due to its applicability in Applied Linguistics, as it is relates to the language learning process. In order to be able to able to determine how language is acquired and produced, it is necessary to understand the origins of language and those factors that play an important part in its development. Bearing in mind the above, this present work seeks to report on issues addressed in the curricular unit DCL 006 - Psycholinguistics I, one of the courses offered in the PhD Programme in Language Sciences/Language Didactics of the …

Perception Training Of Thai Learners: American English Consonants And Vowels, Siriporn Lerdpaisalwong

Theses and Dissertations

ABTRACT

PERCEPTION TRAINING OF THAI LEARNERS:

AMERICAN ENGLISH CONSONANTS AND VOWELS

by

Siriporn Lerdpaisalwong

The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 2015

Under the Supervision of Professor Hanyong Park

Many studies have revealed that ESL and EFL Thai leaners have difficulty producing and perceiving certain English consonants and vowels. The difficult consonants are /b d g v θ ð z tʃ ɹ l/ (Burkardt, 2005; Francis & McDavid, 1958; Jotikasathira, 1999; Lerdpaisalwong & Park, 2012, 2013; Richards, 1968; Wei & Zhou, 2002). The difficult vowels are /ɪ i ʊ u/ (Richards, 1968; Tsukada, 2009; Varasarin, 2007). Previous studies have showed that laboratory perceptual …

A Heart Thing To Hear But You'll Earn: Processing And Learning About Foreign Accent Features Generated By Phonological Rule Misapplications, Monica Lee Bennett

Masters Theses

The present thesis focuses on how native English listeners process phonological rule misapplications in non-native-accented speech. In Experiment 1, we examined whether listeners use information about a speaker’s native language to help them understand that speaker’s accented English. The test case for this scenario was word-final obstruent devoicing in German and German-accented speech. Results showed that participants did not generalize their knowledge cross-linguistically. In Experiment 2, we used a categorization task and an eye-tracking visual world paradigm to investigate listeners’ use of a position-sensitive allophonic alternation, the velarization of /l/, as a word segmentation cue in native English. Participants were …

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 …