Psycholinguistics and Neurolinguistics Commons^™

The Power Of Prayer, Victoria Dawn Thompson

Capstone Collection

If words are arbitrary, how does prayer have power?” is the question of inquiry in this paper. An unobtrusive Content Analysis inquiry methodology was used to answer this question. The answer lies in the finding that words and thoughts are not the same thing, and our thoughts expand beyond the audible and visible. The implication for professional practice these findings present is that a deeper awareness of “Self” is needed to understand people’s miraculous way of resolving conflict via prayer.

Revealing Subtle Cognitive-Linguistic Differences In Adults With Mild Traumatic Brain Injury Through Discourse Analysis, Amanda L. Weichselbaum, Sarah E. Key-Delyria

Student Research Symposium

Discourse abilities of individuals with traumatic brain injury presented at the Portland State University Student Research Symposium.

The findings of this study support the idea that discourse analysis may be a useful tool for determining subtle, cognitive-communication deficits in the TBI population that common neuropsychological tests may not detect. Such information may be important clinically for validating persisting cognitive symptoms and guiding effective therapy goals. Linguistic disruptions may reveal cognitive impairments due to diffuse damage of the brain.

Say It Again: A Case Study On Improving Communication In An Autistic Adolescent, Olivia P. Seymour

Linguistics Senior Research Projects

Diagnoses of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have increased significantly in recent years, necessitating a deeper understanding of its symptoms and how to improve on the resulting deficits in communication and social skills. This study examined the possibility of improving the communication of a thirteen-year-old boy with ASD. Within eight sessions, several methods of improving communication were tested, including using a computer to type messages, using pictures to guide conversations, and using simple, open-ended questions. Despite predictions that his communication would improve with the help of focused efforts to communicate and the implementation of these strategies, the participant’s communication skills ...

Loneliness In Pepperdine Students, Brandon Vandyke, Haley St Martin, Ayelen Lee

Seaver College Research And Scholarly Achievement Symposium

No abstract provided.

Words Of Change: How Linguistic Shifts Over The Course Of A Short-Term Exposure Therapy Represent Movement Towards Psychological Health, Zachary A. Kahn

All Graduate Works by Year: Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Exposure therapy is currently considered the “gold standard” in treating posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Though exposure therapy has been increasingly used and studied as an intervention for PTSD in recent years, little is known about the mechanisms of change in this type of treatment. The Trauma and Addiction Project at the City College of New York ran a clinical research trial for individuals with co-morbid PTSD and Substance Use Disorders (SUDs). Participants randomized into the experimental group, Concurrent Treatment with Prolonged Exposure (COPE), participated in a twelve-session therapeutic intervention that combined exposure therapy focused on the participant’s primary trauma ...

Verb Bias And Plausibility In English Sentence Processing, Kendra Buck

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This study tests language processing models previously explored by linguistics in terms of the parsing of temporarily ambiguous English sentences. The two primary models examined in this study are the garden-path model and the constraint-based model. Each of these models provides a possible explanation for sentence processing difficulty. John Trueswell (1996) previously found properties and lexical cues attached to certain verbs in their past participle forms and lexical information in nouns which aid or inhibit readers in accurately predicting the outcome of a temporarily ambiguous sentence. His results support the constraint-based model while providing some evidence for the garden-path model ...

The Reflection And Reification Of Racialized Language In Popular Media, Kelly E. Wright

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

This work highlights specific lexical items that have become racialized in specific contextual applications and tests how these words are cognitively processed. This work presents the results of a visual world (Huettig et al 2011) eye-tracking study designed to determine the perception and application of racialized (Coates 2011) adjectives. To objectively select the racialized adjectives used, I developed a corpus comprised of popular media sources, designed specifically to suit my research question. I collected publications from digital media sources such as Sports Illustrated, USA Today, and Fortune by scraping articles featuring specific search terms from their websites. This experiment seeks ...

War Of The Words: Development Of Inter-Lexical Inhibition In Typical Children, Christina Blomquist, Bob Mcmurray

University of Iowa Honors Theses

Spoken word recognition requires accessing the target word in the mental lexicon. It is now well known that as acoustic information unfolds over time, similar-sounding lexical candidates (e.g., cap and cat) compete until the disambiguating information (i.e., the last sound) is perceived and one word “wins”. As the word is activated it inhibits similar-sounding competitors. While this inter-lexical inhibition between words has been demonstrated in adults (Dahan, Magnuson, Tanenhaus, & Hogan, 2001; Luce & Pisoni, 1998), it is unclear how it develops. The present study used an eye-tracking paradigm to examine this inhibition in school-aged children. Participants heard words and matched them ...

Towards A Computational Model Of Frame Of Reference Alignment In Swedish Dialogue, Simon Dobnik, Christine Howes, Kim Demaret, John Kelleher

Conference papers

In this paper we examine how people negotiate, interpret and repair the frame of reference (FoR) in online text based dialogues discussing spatial scenes in Swedish. We describe work-in-progress in which participants are given different perspectives of the same scene and asked to locate several objects that are only shown on one of their pictures. This task requires participants to coordinate on FoR in order to identify the missing objects. This study has implications for situated dialogue systems.

On The Screen, In The Mind: An Erp Investigation Into The Interaction Between Visuo-Spatial Information And Spatial Language During On-Line Processing, Emily Zane

All Graduate Works by Year: Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project used Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) to explore neurophysiological brain responses to prepositional phrases involving concrete and abstract reference nouns (e.g., "plate" and "moment", respectively) after the presentation of objects with varying spatial features. Prepositional phrases were headed by in or on and were either matching (e.g., "in the plate/moment") or mismatching (e.g., "on the plate/moment"). Conjunction phrase matches and fillers were also presented. Before half of the concrete-phrase items, a photographic depiction of the reference noun was presented. In these photographs, objects were displayed in a way that was either more appropriate for in ...

Language-Mixing In Discourse In Bilingual Individuals With Non-Fluent Aphasia, Avanthi Paplikar

All Graduate Works by Year: Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Language-mixing (LM) as defined by Chengappa (2009, p. 417) is an “intra-sentential phenomenon referred to as the mixing of various linguistic units (morphemes, words, modifiers, phrases, etc.), primarily from two participating grammatical systems”. LM is influenced by grammatical, environmental, and social constraints (e.g., Milroy & Wei, 1995; Bhat & Chengappa, 2005). Researchers have suggested that LM in patients with aphasia is a communicative strategy used to achieve successful exchanges between speakers; the effectiveness of this mixing, however, had yet to be demonstrated quantitatively.

In the current study we investigated whether LM is present in bilingual speakers with aphasia, and if so, at which linguistic level(s) (morphological, lexical, pragmatic, and phrase) LM is found. Once these questions were addressed, we asked whether the LM patterns ...

Understanding Psychotic Speech: Beyond Freud And Chomsky, Elaine Chaika

Elaine Chaika

No abstract provided.

The Language Of Music And Math: An Investigation Of Cross-Domain Effects Of Structural Priming, Robert Anthony Larose

Undergraduate Honors Theses

There is an ongoing debate as to whether the processing of complex systems (such as language, mathematics, and music) is domain-general or domain-specific. Language, math, and music all involve cognitive systems that organize discrete elements in a hierarchical manner. If processing is domain-general, then the structures of these systems would be processed using shared mental mechanisms. Previous studies suggest that language and math share mental mechanisms for building hierarchically structured representations in real time. This thesis explores the possibility that these mental mechanisms are also shared by the cognitive systems for processing music. An experiment was designed to reveal whether ...

English And Lexigram Comprehension Of Language-Trained Bonobos, Andrea Rabinowitz

Iowa State University Anthropology Symposium

If language and cognition are intrinsically linked, it follows that studying the linguistic processes of great apes will heighten our knowledge of the evolution of human language and thought, a primary focus of anthropological research. The present study expanded upon ongoing research of bonobos (Pan paniscus) raised in a language-enriched environment at the Ape Cognition and Conservation Initiative. While Kanzi’s linguistic and cognitive capabilities have been well documented in early life, this project evaluated a current vocabulary of English and symbolic lexigrams. A series of three computerized match-to-sample tasks tested his ability to match a picture to spoken English ...

Natural Language Processing Of Forum Data: Modeling Social Interaction And Performance In Stem Learning, Marissa Emory, Lucile Pitte

Georgia State Undergraduate Research Conference

No abstract provided.

Language And Cognition: Insight From Exceptional Cases, Anna Snyder

Senior Honors Theses

The understanding of the world in the human mind is accomplished through cognitive processing and articulated through linguistic processing. Undoubtedly, there is a significant connection between language and cognition because of how intricately they work together to create and express meaning. Researchers from a variety of fields have sought to discover the specifics of these domains to determine what kind of relationship exists between them and how the involvement between language and cognition should be best represented. Though they obviously interact, the different characteristics of each domain provide evidence that linguistic processes and cognitive processes may be distinct. Rather than ...

The Impact Of Length Of Stay On Adjudicated Male Youths;' Language Use: Focusing On Linguistic Analysis Of Verbal Samples, Yousun Shin Ph.D., Terry P. Overton Ph.D., Ed.D., Zelica Espinoza M.Ed.

Journal of Human Services: Training, Research, and Practice

The primary purpose of the study was to examine the impact of the length of juvenile offenders’ stay in a residential facility on attitudinal changes, measured by language use of 22 participants’ interviews analyzed by using a computerized text tool called Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) to obtain a measure of language use. A series of one-way ANOVA (SPSS 18.0 version) were used to examine the differences between the groups identified by the length of stay and interview interval. The results indicate that the length of stay significantly impacts language use regarding the language categories of affective process ...

Re-Examining The Bilingual Advantage On Interference-Control And Task-Switching Tasks: A Meta-Analysis, Seamus Donnelly

All Graduate Works by Year: Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

A much-debated topic in psycholinguistics is whether lifelong bilingualism enhances executive functions (EF), the set of higher-order cognitive processes involved in the control of thought and action. Several researchers have predicted bilingual advantages on various EF tasks, especially interference-control and task-switching tasks. Many studies have tested these predictions, but results have proven unreliable. As a complementary approach to recent quantitative syntheses on this topic, the present dissertation tests whether the bilingual advantage is moderated by a number of theoretically significant variables: dependent variable (DV), task, age, age of L2 acquisition and lab.

Two meta-analyses were conducted. Study 1 considered interference-control ...

Understanding Psychotic Speech: Beyond Freud And Chomsky, Elaine Chaika

Faculty Books

No abstract provided.

Linguistic Expression And Gender: A Function Word Analysis Of Jane Austen’S Pride And Prejudice, Erica Corbiere

Linguistics Senior Research Projects

The current study investigates ten dimensions of female and male categories of speech, which focus on function words, as previously identified by Newman et al. (2008). Through the use of the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count tool (using the LIWC2015 dictionary), these ten categories were analyzed in the dialogue of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Results were consistent with previous findings by Newman et al. (2008). Four of five previously identified categories as more often used by male speakers (numbers, words per sentence, prepositions, articles, and words greater than six letters) were used with an even greater difference between ...