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Psychology

University of Massachusetts Amherst

Masters Theses

Theses/Dissertations

Psycholinguistics

Publication Year

Articles 1 - 2 of 2

Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

The Effects Of Predictability And Stimulus Quality On Lexical Processing: Evidence From The Coregistration Of Eye Movements And Eeg, Jon Burnsky Apr 2021

The Effects Of Predictability And Stimulus Quality On Lexical Processing: Evidence From The Coregistration Of Eye Movements And Eeg, Jon Burnsky

Masters Theses

A word’s predictability has been shown to influence its processing. Two methodologies have demonstrated this time and again: eye tracking while reading and Event Related Potentials (ERPs). In eye tracking while reading, words that are made predictable by their contexts (as operationalized by the cloze task; Taylor, 1953) receive shorter first fixation times (Staub, 2015, for a review) as well as shorter gaze duration and increased skipping rate. In ERPs, the N400 component’s amplitude has also been shown to inversely correlate with a word’s predictability (Kutas and Federmeier, 2011, for a review). Despite the similarities, there is much reason to …


A Heart Thing To Hear But You'll Earn: Processing And Learning About Foreign Accent Features Generated By Phonological Rule Misapplications, Monica Lee Bennett Mar 2015

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 …