Psychology Commons^™

Bilingual Comprehension Of Accented Speech And Spoken Code Switches, Liam John Gleason

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Across three experiments, the current study explored how accented speech and coarticulation impact how bilingual listeners comprehend code-switches in speech. Eye-tracking methodology was used to compare responses to single-language and code-switched sentences. Experiment 1 observed how accented speech influenced the costs involved in comprehending code-switches by comparing responses to speakers that had North American English accents to speakers with Juarez/El Paso Spanish accents when speaking English. Experiment 2 compared responses to English speech produced by speakers with North American English, Flemish, and Bulgarian accented speakers. To examine coarticulation as a cue to an upcoming code-switch, Experiment 3 compared naturally produced …

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 …

The Window To The Bilingual Mind: Eye Movements Reveal Psycholinguistic Grain Unit Sizes Of Bilingual Spoken Word Recognition, Yu-Cheng Lin

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Although there are common phonological units across different languages, previous studies have shown that individual differences of language proficiency affect sound unit preferences in monolingual and bilingual speakers. The cross-language lexical activation of phonological representations in bilingual minds can provide a great opportunity for testing hypotheses about how this key factor modulates the cross-linguistic phonological transfer across languages. In this study, I used the eye-tracking technique and quantitative methods (i.e., growth curve analysis and multilevel regression) to examine how individual differences in language proficiency affect cross-language phonological unit size transfer in Chinese-English bilinguals. Participants heard a spoken word and were …

Virtual Rapport With Extraverted Agents, Jacqueline Brixey

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Studies from psychology conclude that "birds of a feather flock together"- or, in other words, people tend to seek companionship with those who have a similar personality to their own. Researchers in the fields of Linguistics and Psychology have found numerous markers that differentiate the dialogue of extroverts from that of introverts. Recent work in Human Computer Interaction has sought to understand the nature of creating and maintaining rapport between humans and Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs).

Seeking an interdisciplinary approach that combines knowledge from HCI, Linguistics, and Psychology, I sought to establish whether introverted users report the highest level of …

Implicit Attitudes Of Ethnicity And Language: Evaluative And Associative Priming, Eva Margarita De La Riva Lopez

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Most members of minority groups belong to both an ethnic and a linguistic minority. The interplay between these two related yet independent constructs has not been explored. For this reason, this study examined language attitudes following the theoretical model of social categorization by using implicit measures. This study also investigated the implicit association between language and ethnicity. In this manner, the relationship that exists between attitudes towards minority groups and attitudes towards minority languages can be disentangled. A simultaneous study of implicit attitudes of ethnicity and language, and the association between ethnicity and language, may elucidate possible mechanisms involved in …

The Role Of Cross-Language Activation In Syntactic Ambiguity, Li-Hao Yeh

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

There is much evidence demonstrating that bilinguals activate lexical representations from both of their languages in a non-selective manner even in sentence context. Comparatively less research has examined the extent to which bilingual lexical representations interacts with syntactic processing in sentence context. The purpose of this study is to examine whether bilinguals' cross-language lexical activation could influence their resolution of syntactic ambiguity (e.g. relative clause attachment). Proper attachment of relative clauses (RC) to noun phrases is critical for accurate interpretation of syntactically ambiguous sentences. For instance, the sentence The robber shot the secretary of my husband who goes to work …

Developmental Variation In Children's Acquisition Of Metrical Structure: How Early Treatment Of Stressless Syllables Can Inform Phonological Theory, Clifford S. Jones

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

The present study uses 26 color photos to elicit a total of 14 words conforming to a very specific pattern: a stressless syllable word-initially, followed by a stressed syllable, and at most one more stressless syllable. This was found to be a particularly difficult metrical structure for the two- and three-year old participants to produce in an adult-like manner. Based on the findings that a fairly reliable (if language-particular) order of acquisition is observable for contrasts of both place and manner of articulation, the case is made for a system of six emergent features, which may be characterized as combinable …

An Investigation Of The Individual Differences In Cognitive Factors That Contribute To Bilingual Lexical Disambiguation, Ana B. Areas Da Luz Fontes

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

The objective of this study was to investigate the effects of working memory capacity, access to subordinate meanings of L1 homonyms and degree of cross-language activation on the access to subordinate meanings of L2 homonyms. In Experiment 1, Spanish-English bilinguals completed a word recognition task which assessed how quickly and accurately they accessed subordinate meanings of English homonyms that were either noncognates (e.g. fast/rápido) or cognates (e.g. letter/letra) with Spanish. In Experiment 2, another group of Spanish-English bilinguals read sentences while having their eye-movements recorded for measures of lexical access. On the critical trials, sentences contained a homonym that was …

Reanalysis Of Some Effects Of The Mutual Exclusivity Constraint And Their Operation In Bilingual Children, Marina Kalashnikova

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

This study investigates the operation of the Mutual Exclusivity constraint in two groups of three-year-old children: monolingual Spanish speakers and bilingual Spanish-English speakers. Previous research has yielded controversial findings regarding the differences in the intra-lingual level operation of the constraint in monolingual and bilingual children. This investigation sheds light on the conflicting outcomes of previous studies by proposing that non-linguistic cognitive and processing abilities may account for the effects attributed to the constraint and that there may be observable differences in monolingual and bilingual children in the development of some--but not all--of these abilities. Although, this study yielded no significant …