Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Word Recognition In The Parafovea: An Eye Movement Investigation Of Chinese Reading, Jinmian Yang

Doctoral Dissertations 1896 - February 2014

Chinese is a logographic writing system that drastically differs from alphabetic scripts in many important aspects. Thus, the nature of parafoveal processing in reading Chinese may be different from that in reading alphabetic languages. Here, four eye-tracking experiments using the boundary display change paradigm (Rayner, 1975) were conducted to explore the role of high level information, like semantic and plausibility information, in the parafovea for Chinese readers.

Experiments 1 and 2 used two-character words that can have the order of their component characters reversed, and still be lexical units as target words. Readers received a parafoveal preview of a target …

Phonological Trends In The Lexicon: The Role Of Constraints, Michael Becker

Doctoral Dissertations 1896 - February 2014

This dissertation shows that the generalizations that speakers project from the lexical exceptions of their language are biased to be natural and output-oriented, and it offers a model of the grammar that derives these biases by encoding lexical exceptions in terms of lexically-specific rankings of universal constraints in Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolensky 1993/2004). In this model, lexical trends, i.e. the trends created by the phonological patterning of lexical exceptions, are incorporated into a grammar that applies deterministically to known items, and the same grammar applies stochastically to novel items. The model is based on the Recursive Constraint Demotion algorithm …

Word, Phrase, And Clitic Prosody In Bosnian, Serbian, And Croatian, Adam Werle

Doctoral Dissertations 1896 - February 2014

I investigate the phonology of prosodic clitics--independent syntactic words not parsed as independent prosodic words--in Bosnian, Serbian, and Croatian. I ask, first, how clitics are organized into prosodic structures, and second, how this is determined by the grammar. Following Zec (1997, 2005), I look at several clitic categories, including negation, prepositions, complementizers, conjunctions, and second-position clitics.

Based on a reanalysis of word accent (Browne and McCawley 1965, Inkelas and Zec 1988, Zec 1999), I argue that in some cases where a preposition, complementizer, or conjunction fails to realize accent determined by a following word, it is not a proclitic-- that …

The Role Of Lexical Contrast In The Perception Of Intonational Prominence In Japanese, Takahito Shinya

Doctoral Dissertations 1896 - February 2014

In this dissertation, I examine the effects of lexical accent on the perception of intonational prominence in Japanese. I look at how an F0 accent peak is perceived relative to another flanking F0 peak in the same utterance with respect to perceived intonational prominence. Through four experiments, I show that the lexical prosodic structure plays a significant role in the perception of intonational prominence.

I first show that two distinct perceptual processes are at play in the perception of relative perceived prominence in Japanese: accentual boost normalization and downstep normalization . Accentual boost normalization normalizes the accentual boost of an …