Psycholinguistics and Neurolinguistics Commons^™

Lcd 322: Disorders Of Speech, Yael Neumann

Open Educational Resources

No abstract provided.

Turkish-German Heritage Speakers’ Predictive Use Of Case: Webcam-Based Vs. In-Lab Eye-Tracking, Onur Özsoy, Büsra Çiçek, Zeynep Özal, Natalia Gagarina, Irina A. Sekerina

Publications and Research

Recently, Özge et al. have argued that Turkish and German monolingual 4-year- old children can interpret case-marking predictively disregarding word order. Heritage speakers (HSs) acquire a heritage language at home and a majority societal language which usually becomes dominant after school enrollment. Our study directly compares two elicitation modes: in-lab and (remote) webcam- based eye-tracking data collection. We test the extent to which in-lab e􀀀ects can be replicated in webcam-based eye-tracking using the exact same design. Previous research indicates that Turkish HSs vary more in the comprehension and production of case-marking compared to monolinguals. Data from 49 participants–22 Turkishmonolinguals and …

Neo-Whorfian Examination Of Cross-Linguistic Temporal Discounting Behavior, Piper Connelly

Scripps Senior Theses

This study examines differences in temporal discounting tendencies in German and French participants (recruited through Amazon Mechanical Turk) through the lens of Neo-Whorfian cognition and the Linguistic Savings Hypothesis (Chen 2013). The LSH proposes that tendencies towards future-oriented economic decisions can be cognitively explained by literal morphosyntactic conventions of one’s native language. Our experiments (sooner-smaller/larger-later choices, endowment-investment task) failed to produce results aligning with the LSH, but uncovered the importance of controlling for risk appetite when specifically investigating intertemporal choice. There are several fruitful improvements to consider for the future, such as stricter sampling, taking richer detail of time preferences, …

The Contribution Of Phonological Overlap To The Cognate Effect: An Event-Related Potential Study Of Persian-English Bilinguals, Zahra Fotovatnia

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

The purpose of this dissertation was to examine the contribution of phonological overlap to visual word recognition. More specifically, this study aimed at testing the phonological account of the cognate effect (i.e., faster and more accurate mental processing of cognates than noncognates) in visual word recognition in Persian and English, which are languages with different scripts. The phonological account attributes the cognate effect to the phonological similarity of cognates (form and semantically related words) in addition to the conceptual similarity that cognates and noncognates (semantically related words) have and to the degree of phonological similarity between cognates in two languages. …

Multilingualism And Memory: Investigating Possible Differences In The Abilities Of Monolingual And Multilingual College Students, Clara E. Barned

Honors Projects

This study investigated whether there is a difference in the memories of monolingual and multilingual undergraduate students using simple memorization tasks. There were 46 participants, 30 of which were monolingual (only knew one language) and 16 of which were multilingual (knew two or more languages). There was found to be no significant difference between the performance of the two groups, with the data generating a p-value of 0.557. This study further suggests related avenues of research and ways in which the study could be improved in the future.

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 …

Towards Explaining Variation In Entrainment, Andreas Weise

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Entrainment refers to the tendency of human speakers to adapt to their interlocutors to become more similar to them. This affects various dimensions and occurs in many contexts, allowing for rich applications in human-computer interaction. However, it is not exhibited by every speaker in every conversation but varies widely across features, speakers, and contexts, hindering broad application. This variation, whose guiding principles are poorly understood even after decades of entrainment research, is the subject of this thesis. We begin with a comprehensive literature review that serves as the foundation of our own work and provides a reference to guide future …

Retrieval Practice Promotes Learning Of Turkish As A Foreign Language: A Computer-Assisted Language Learning Study, Maya C. Rose

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Adults generally find it difficult to learn a new language, yet exhibit remarkable individual differences in outcomes. Variation in second language (L2) learning is associated with input conditions (Morgan-Short et al., 2010) as well as learners’ aptitude (Dörnyei, 2005). Recent work has demonstrated benefits of retrieval practice in promoting L2 learning of grammatical patterns and vocabulary in both artificial and natural languages (Hopman & MacDonald, 2018; Keppenne et al., 2021). With that said, when retrieval practice is based on oral recall as opposed to a recognition test, it confounds potential benefits of repeated testing (Rowland, 2014) with those associated with …

The Relative Cost Of Codeswitching: An Electrophysiological Study Contrasting Language Switching Versus Lexical Predictability, Iris Strangmann

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Neurophysiological sentence processing studies are inconsistent about the additional costs that language switching within sentences (i.e., codeswitching) may bring about (cf. Valdés Kroff et al., 2020; Yacovone et al., 2021). There is discussion about whether there are, in fact, additional costs and, if so, about the origins of those costs, since some findings are consistent with effortful processing when comprehending single-language (not switched) words observed in monolingual studies. Specifically, studies are divided on whether codeswitched words are more difficult to lexically access than single-language equivalents of similar semantic predictability, as indexed by an increased N400 effect. The same studies, however, …

The Biological Influence Of Stories & The Importance Of Reading Fiction, Elise N. Good, Katharine Schaab

The Kennesaw Journal of Undergraduate Research

Fictional narratives and stories have persisted throughout human history. However, perhaps due to a bias that stories offered nothing more than entertainment for the reader or perhaps that they are not useful outside of the realm of academia, the research within science academia has been lacking in literature on why these narratives have endured. Unfortunately, due to the lack of conversation across disciplines, particularly those of science and literature, this subject has not been thoroughly investigated through an interdisciplinary lens. Within this paper, the goal is to analyze the benefits of fictional narratives through biological, evolutionary, and neuropsychological perspectives. Research …

The Role Of Word Knowledge In Error Detection: A Challenge To The Broken-Error-Monitor Account Of Dyslexia, Lindsay N. Harris, Benjamin Creed, Charles A. Perfetti, Benjamin Rickles

Faculty Peer-Reviewed Publications

Dyslexic children often fail to correct errors while reading aloud, and dyslexic adolescents and adults exhibit lower amplitudes of the error-related negativity (ERN)—the neural response to errors—than typical readers during silent reading. Past researchers therefore suggested that dyslexia may arise from a faulty error-detection mechanism that interferes with orthographic learning and text comprehension. An alternative possibility is that comprehension difficulty in dyslexics is primarily a downstream effect of low-quality lexical representations—that is, poor word knowledge. On this view the attenuated ERN in dyslexics is a byproduct, rather than a source, of underdeveloped orthographic knowledge. Because the second view implies a …

Finding The Means : The Bilingual Disparity In Semantic Context Use For Processing, Iyad Ghanim

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

Early and late bilinguals both differ in the speed with which they comprehend language or in their processing of sentences compared to monolinguals. This is possibly a result of crosslanguage interference, differential allocation of cognitive resources, or some other difference in language-dependent processes. This dissertation presents research and review focusing on one such language dependent process — the use of sentential context and lexical-associative semantic information — to process sentences. In a series of studies, 34 bilinguals and 28 monolinguals complete a retroactive masked priming task, which provides an isolated measure of the use of semantic information to backwards recognize …

The Electrophysiological Correlates Of Text Integration And Direct Vs. Indirect Articles: A Centralized And Lateralized Examination, Deanna C. Hall

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

As we read, we develop mental models of the discourse content called situation models. Situation models are integral to how we keep track of information, and to do so in an ongoing event incoming information needs to be integrated into the model or discarded. The type of information being presented, and its relation to prior data, impacts how that new information is processed. The current research examined discourse passages containing concepts that were either previously mentioned (match), mentioned with a general term (general category), unmentioned in lieu of another concept (mismatch), or completely unmentioned previously (indeterminate), and examined how these …

Language-Internal Reanalysis Of Clitic Placement In Heritage Grammars Reduces The Cost Of Computation: Evidence From Bulgarian, Tanya Ivanova-Sullivan, Irina A. Sekerina, Davood Tofighi, Maria Polinsky

Publications and Research

The study offers novel evidence on the grammar and processing of clitic placement in heritage languages. Building on earlier findings of divergent clitic placement in heritage European Portuguese and Serbian, this study extends this line of inquiry to Bulgarian, a language where clitic placement is subject to strong prosodic constraints. We found that, in heritage Bulgarian, clitic placement is processed and rated differently than in the baseline, and we asked whether such clitic misplacement results from the transfer from the dominant language or follows from languageinternal reanalysis. We used a self-paced listening task and an aural acceptability rating task with …

Can Heritage Speakers Predict Lexical And Morphosyntactic Information In Reading?, Olga Parshina, Anastasiya Lopukhina, Irina A. Sekerina

Publications and Research

Ample evidence suggests that monolingual adults can successfully generate lexical and morphosyntactic predictions in reading and that correct predictions facilitate sentence comprehension. In this eye-tracking corpus reading study, we investigate whether the same is true for reading in heritage language. Specifically, we ask whether heritage speakers (HSs) of Russian are able to anticipate lexical and/or morphosyntactic information of the upcoming words in the sentence and whether they differ in the predictions from monolingual children and L2 learners. We are also interested in whether the literacy level (i.e., Russian literacy experience or reading fluency in English) influences lexical and morphosyntactic prediction. …

A Corpus Study Of The Development Of The Adjective Phrase In French Children, Avery Elizabeth Baggett

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

In this thesis I attempt to answer three questions:

H1) Do children use proportionally more prenominal or post-nominal placement of adjectives than adults?

H2) Are children more conservative or more creative in their behavior in alternating prenominal and post-nominal placement of adjectives?

H3) If colored terms are more frequent in child speech will they pattern more like prenominal adjectives or more like post nominal adjectives, as in adult speech?

To do this, I examine two general semantic viewpoints, opting to use Scontras & Goodman (2017) subjectivity hypothesis. Next, I provide a general overview of First Language Acquisition research and then …

Reading Comprehension Constrains Word Reading: A Tongue Twister Study By Moderating Attentional Control, Xueying Wang

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

Numerous research studies show word reading performance influences reading comprehension. Few studies investigate how reading comprehension influences word reading. The current study explores whether alleviating the attention required for reading comprehension correlates with a better word reading performance. Three types of tongue twister reading tasks that involve recall (RR), semantic priming (PP), and instructional focus on the phonological information (PF) all have a high demand for attention on word reading. Differently, the attention demanded by PP tasks on reading comprehension is smaller than RR and RF tasks. Numbers of speech errors are used to manifest the variability of these three …

Linguistic Variation From Cognitive Variability: The Case Of English 'Have', Muye Zhang

Linguistics Graduate Dissertations

In this dissertation, I seek to construct a model of meaning variation built upon variability in linguistic structure, conceptual structure, and cognitive makeup, and in doing so, exemplify an approach to studying meaning that is both linguistically principled and neuropsychologically grounded. As my test case, I make use of the English lexical item ‘have' by proposing a novel analysis of its meaning based on its well-described variability in English and its embed- ding into crosslinguistically consistent patterns of variation and change.

I support this analysis by investigating its real-time comprehension patterns through behavioral, electropsychophysiological, and hemodynamic brain data, thereby incorporating …

What Is The Relationship Between Language And Thought?: Linguistic Relativity And Its Implications For Copyright, Christopher S. Yoo

All Faculty Scholarship

To date, copyright scholarship has almost completely overlooked the linguistics and cognitive psychology literature exploring the connection between language and thought. An exploration of the two major strains of this literature, known as universal grammar (associated with Noam Chomsky) and linguistic relativity (centered around the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis), offers insights into the copyrightability of constructed languages and of the type of software packages at issue in Google v. Oracle recently decided by the Supreme Court. It turns to modularity theory as the key idea unifying the analysis of both languages and software in ways that suggest that the information filtering associated …

Simultaneous Bilinguals’ Comprehension Of Accented Speech, Sita Carraturo

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

L2-accented speech recognition has typically been studied with monolingual listeners or late L2-learners, but simultaneous bilinguals may have a different experience: their two phonologies offer flexibility in phonological-lexical mapping (Samuel and Larraza, 2015), which may be advantageous. On the other hand, the two languages cause greater lexical competition (Marian & Spivey, 2003), which may impede successful L2-accented speech recognition. The competition between a bilinguals’ two languages is the oft-cited explanation, for example, as to why bilinguals underperform monolinguals in native-accented speech-in-noise tasks (Rogers et al., 2006).

To investigate the effect of bilingualism on L2-accented speech recognition, the current studies compare …