Psycholinguistics and Neurolinguistics Commons^™

Reasoning With Pseudowords: How Properties Of Novel Verbal Stimuli Influence Item Difficulty And Linguistic-Group Score Differences On Cognitive Ability Assessments, Paul Agnello

All Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Pseudowords (words that are not real but resemble real words in a language) have been used increasingly as a technique to reduce contamination due to construct-irrelevant variance in assessments of verbal fluid reasoning (Gf). However, despite pseudowords being researched heavily in other psychology sub-disciplines, they have received little attention in cognitive ability testing contexts. Thus, there has been an assumption that all pseudowords work equally and work equally well for all test-takers. The current research examined three objectives with the first being whether changes to the pseudoword properties of length and wordlikeness (how much a pseudoword resembles a typical or ...

Detecting Language Impairments In Autism: A Computational Analysis Of Semi-Structured Conversations With Vector Semantics, Adam Goodkind, Michelle Lee, Gary E. Martin, Molly Losh, Klinton Bicknell

Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics

Many of the most significant impairments faced by individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) relate to pragmatic (i.e. social) language. There is also evidence that pragmatic language differences may map to ASD-related genes. Therefore, quantifying the social-linguistic features of ASD has the potential to both improve clinical treatment and help identify gene-behavior relationships in ASD. Here, we apply vector semantics to transcripts of semi-structured interactions with children with both idiopathic and syndromic ASD. We find that children with ASD are less semantically similar to a gold standard derived from typically developing participants, and are more semantically variable. We show ...

Differentiating Phrase Structure Parsing And Memory Retrieval In The Brain, Shohini Bhattasali, John Hale, Christophe Pallier, Jonathan Brennan, Wen-Ming Luh, R. Nathan Spreng

Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics

On some level, human sentence comprehension must involve both memory retrieval and structural composition. This study differentiates these two processes using neuroimaging data collected during naturalistic listening. Retrieval is formalized in terms of "multiword expressions" while structure-building is formalized in terms of bottom-up parsing. The results most strongly implicate Anterior Temporal regions for structure-building and Precuneus Cortex for memory retrieval.

Explicit Discourse Connectives / Implicit Discourse Relations, Bonnie Webber, Hannah Rohde, Anna Dickinson, Annie Louis, Nathan Schneider

Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics

While explicit discourse connectives can signal coherence relations, a common assumption is that only their absence or ambiguity necessitates relation inference. Using a crowdsourced conjunction completion task to collect 40K+ judgments on 50 discourse adverbials, we find this common assumption to be false. Instead, naive subjects systematically infer an implicit connective alongside an explicit discourse adverbial. But sometimes different subsets of subjects may each endorse different connectives. The size of these subsets means that such differences cannot be written off as error. Rather, they demonstrate how the coherence associated with explicit adverbials relates to coherence inferred between the clauses themselves.

Listener's Perceptions Of Stuttering, Katie Lauren Smith

Linguistics Senior Research Projects

Stuttering is a neurodevelopmental disorder that causes disruptions in the normal flow of speech. Often, the disorder is accompanied by anxiety, stress, and discomfort in communication. Due to prominence of the disorder, stuttering can cause discomfort for both the listener and speaker. While some factors, such as level of fluency, familiarity with the disorder, and openness about the disorder can influence listener perceptions, the risk of negative stereotyping is high. In the following study, listener perceptions of stuttering are measured in a Christian, college-aged environment. 31 participants were asked to fill out a questionnaire about stuttering. Of the 31, 6 ...

Linguistic Self-Awareness And Poetry Preference, Brice J. Montgomery

Channels: Where Disciplines Meet

This paper examines the relationship between linguistic self-awareness and poetry preference in college students who don’t regularly read poetry. It addresses whether or not there are consistent phonological and semantic features that influence preference, and it observes whether or not students recognize linguistic factors as part of their preference. It also touches on syntactic play and the degree to which amateur readers understand that professional poets deliberately subvert linguistic tendencies.

Language Experience With A Native-Language Phoneme Sequence Modulates The Effects Of Attention On Cortical Sensory Processing, Valerie L. Shafer, Monica Wagner, Jungmee Lee, Francesca Mingino, Colleen O'Brien, Adam Constantine, Mitchell Steinschneider

Publications and Research

Auditory evoked potentials (AEP) reflect spectro-temporal feature changes within the spoken word and are sufficiently reliable to probe deficits in auditory processing. The current research assessed whether attentional modulation would alter the morphology of these AEPs and whether native-language experience with phoneme sequences would influence the effects of attention. Native-English and native-Polish adults listened to nonsense word pairs that contained the phoneme sequence onsets /st/, /sət/, /pət/ that occur in both the Polish and English languages and the phoneme sequence onset /pt/ that occurs in the Polish language, but not the English language. Participants listened to word pairs within two ...

Second-Language Acquisition And Motivation: A Literature Review, Pat Goodridge

Pursuit - The Journal of Undergraduate Research at the University of Tennessee

This literature review traces the development of motivation in second-language acquisition, a field that has evolved from basic associations between affective factors and second-language performance to nuanced approaches of how motivation is shaped by a learner’s subjective cognition. With this review, we see that motivation’s role has always been central to language learning, and the development of our understanding of this role has mirrored the development of our understanding of second-language acquisition’s psychological and cognitive aspects. Such understanding contributes to many areas of second-language pedagogy, developmental psychology, and applied linguistics, all of which are relevant to our ...

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.

Faculty Response To Deselection In Academic Libraries: A Psycholinguistic Analysis, Ann Agee

Faculty and Staff Publications

Deselection is a necessary but politically sensitive part of an academic librarian's responsibilities. To provide an overview of the emotional dynamics involved in weeding an academic collection, this article analyzes editorials, articles, and book chapters chronicling faculty response to weeding from a psycholinguistic viewpoint. Using computer-based text analysis, these accounts are examined for the amount and type of emotional content they contain. These findings provide a template for what librarians can expect when beginning a deselection process and point to best practices for working effectively with faculty to create a robust and healthy collection.

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.

Literacy Revolution: How The New Tools Of Communication Change The Stories We Tell, Molly Gamble

Master's Theses and Capstone Projects

The transmission of culture depends upon every generation reconsidering what it means to be literate. The way we consider ourselves to be a literate species is changing, which puts us at a unique turning point in human history. Verbal literacy, or the ability to read and write, is slowly being replaced by visual literacy as a primary tool for human communication. As a culture, we tend to underestimate the creative ferment of our increasingly visual world. The linear, structured pathways of traditional literacy are shifting towards a creative and participatory pursuit of unstructured information that emphasize dimensional thinking. The acceleration ...

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 ...

The Paradox Of Imprecision In Language, Henry R. Bauer

Critical Reflections

The Paradox of Imprecision in Language

Abstract

This paper investigates philosophical questions bearing on the relationship between language and mind, through an analysis of the phenomenon of “efficient imprecision” in language. It is argued that language users’ ability to intuitively connect allegedly imprecise linguistic expressions with definite conceptual information presents a paradox that might lead philosophers, linguists and cognitive scientists alike to reconsider the relationship between the computational machinery of human language and its function as the vehicle of conscious thought.

Like the puzzle about the identity relation which Gottlob Frege presents in the seminal Sense and Reference (1892), which ...

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 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 ...

Vanilla Sequence-To-Sequence Neural Nets Cannot Model Reduplication, Brandon Prickett

OWP Linguistics

This paper presents results from a series of simulations that attempted to teach a vanilla sequence-to-sequence neural network a reduplication process. These attempts did not succeed, suggesting that added machinery is necessary for connectionist models to perform such a task.

The Form And Acquisition Of Free Relatives, Michael Clauss

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines the syntax of Free Relatives (FRs) in English at different stages of first language acquisition. The goal is to provide a theory of Free Relatives that explains phenomena in adult and child FRs, is feasibly learnable by a child, and reflects principles expressed in theories of Universal Grammar based on the Minimalist Program (Chomsky 1993, 1995, 2005).

The central empirical concern is the difference between the distribution of Wh expressions in FRs vs. Wh questions in English, the difference in grammaticality between Charles wondered dish what Sebastian made and *Charles ate what dish Sebastian made (*Wh-NP). To ...

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 this pattern of behavior is the direct consequence of an error-prone retrieval mechanism, or if it is instead the result of a discourse-oriented, logophoric interpretation of reflexive forms. This work presents four experiments demonstrating that ...

Preferential Early Attribution In Segmental Parsing, Amanda Rysling

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation investigates parsing in segmental perception, or the process by which listeners map the continuous acoustic signal that reaches their ears to the linguistic representations over which phonology operates. It addresses questions of when listeners decide that they have heard acoustic evidence about the identity of one speech sound, versus evidence about the identity of a following sound, and when this linguistic knowledge is applied relative to when it is received during the course of on-line perception and processing. The central argument advanced here is that the beginnings of answers to these questions require the recognition of a domain-general ...