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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Examining Variability In Spanish Monolingual And Bilingual Phonotactics: A Look At Sc-Clusters, Katerina A. Tetzloff Oct 2022

Examining Variability In Spanish Monolingual And Bilingual Phonotactics: A Look At Sc-Clusters, Katerina A. Tetzloff

Doctoral Dissertations

Current models of generative phonology have failed to address the variability that is observed in bilingual language patterns patterns. This dissertation addresses exactly that issue by examining the perception of Spanish sC-clusters in Spanish monolinguals and English-Spanish bilinguals. Surface sC-clusters in onset position are prohibited in Spanish and are repaired by inserting a prothetic /e/ (sC $\rightarrow$ esC). English differs in that it allows sC-cluster onsets, and the structure of the sC-cluster has been shown to differ based on the sonority profile (i.e., s+stop clusters are bisyllabic, s+liquid clusters are tautosyllabic). A batch version of a Harmonic Grammar Gradual Learning …


What Did You Expect? An Investigation Of Lexical Preactivation In Sentence Processing, Jon Burnsky Oct 2022

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 …


Emergent Typological Effects Of Agent-Based Learning Models In Maximum Entropy Grammar, Coral Hughto Dec 2020

Emergent Typological Effects Of Agent-Based Learning Models In Maximum Entropy Grammar, Coral Hughto

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation shows how a theory of grammatical representations and a theory of learning can be combined to generate gradient typological predictions in phonology, predicting not only which patterns are expected to exist, but also their relative frequencies: patterns which are learned more easily are predicted to be more typologically frequent than those which are more difficult. In Chapter 1 I motivate and describe the specific implementation of this methodology in this dissertation. Maximum Entropy grammar (Goldwater & Johnson 2003) is combined with two agent-based learning models, the iterated and the interactive learning model, each of which mimics a type …


When Errors Aren't: How Comprehenders Selectively Violate Binding Theory, Shayne Sloggett Nov 2017

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 …


Extending Hidden Structure Learning: Features, Opacity, And Exceptions, Aleksei I. Nazarov Nov 2016

Extending Hidden Structure Learning: Features, Opacity, And Exceptions, Aleksei I. Nazarov

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation explores new perspectives in phonological hidden structure learning (inferring structure not present in the speech signal that is necessary for phonological analysis; Tesar 1998, Jarosz 2013a, Boersma and Pater 2016), and extends this type of learning towards the domain of phonological features, towards derivations in Stratal OT (Bermúdez-Otero 1999), and towards exceptionality indices in probabilistic OT. Two more specific themes also come out: the possibility of inducing instead of pre-specifying the space of possible hidden structures, and the importance of cues in the data for triggering the use of hidden structure. In chapters 2 and 4, phonological features …


Interpreting, Stephanie Jo Kent Aug 2014

Interpreting, Stephanie Jo Kent

Doctoral Dissertations

What do community interpreting for the Deaf in western societies, conference interpreting for the European Parliament, and language brokering in international management have in common? Academic research and professional training have historically emphasized the linguistic and cognitive challenges of interpreting, neglecting or ignoring the social aspects that structure communication. All forms of interpreting are inherently social; they involve relationships among at least three people and two languages. The contexts explored here, American Sign Language/English interpreting and spoken language interpreting within the European Parliament, show that simultaneous interpreting involves attitudes, norms and values about intercultural communication that overemphasize information and discount …