Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons™
Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
Articles 1 - 7 of 7
Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
What Did You Expect? An Investigation Of Lexical Preactivation In Sentence Processing, Jon Burnsky
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 …
There And Gone Again: Syntactic Structure In Memory, Caroline Andrews
There And Gone Again: Syntactic Structure In Memory, Caroline Andrews
Doctoral Dissertations
This dissertation addresses the relationship between hierarchical syntactic structure and memory in language processing of individual sentences. Hierarchical syntactic structure is a key part of human languages and language processing but its integration with memory has been uneasy ever since Sachs (1967) demonstrated that the syntactic structure of individual sentences is lost in explicit sentence recall tasks much faster than other linguistic information (lexical, semantic, etc.). Nonetheless, psycholinguists have continued to draw on memory in syntactic processing theories, in part due to (i) the explanatory power that memory can give to sentence processing hypotheses, and (ii) the conflicting results that …
Person-Based Prominence In Ojibwe, Christopher Hammerly
Person-Based Prominence In Ojibwe, Christopher Hammerly
Doctoral Dissertations
This dissertation develops a formal and psycholinguistic theory of person-based prominence effects, the finding that certain categories of person such as "first" and "second" (the "local" persons) are privileged by the grammar. The thesis takes on three questions: (i) What are the possible categories related to person? (ii) What are the possible prominence relationships between these categories? And (iii) how is prominence information used to parse and interpret linguistic input in real time? The empirical through-line is understanding obviation — a “spotlighting” system, found most prominently in the Algonquian family of languages, that splits the (ani- mate) third persons into …
When Errors Aren't: How Comprehenders Selectively Violate Binding Theory, Shayne Sloggett
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 …
The Representation Of Probabilistic Phonological Patterns: Neurological, Behavioral, And Computational Evidence From The English Stress System, Claire Moore-Cantwell
The Representation Of Probabilistic Phonological Patterns: Neurological, Behavioral, And Computational Evidence From The English Stress System, Claire Moore-Cantwell
Doctoral Dissertations
This dissertation investigates the cognitive mechanism underlying language users' ability to generalize probabilistic phonological patterns in their lexicon to novel words. Specifically, do speakers represent probabilistic patterns using abstract grammatical constraints? If so, this system of constraints would, like categorical phonological generalizations (a) be limited in the space of possible generalizations it can represent, and (b) apply to known and novel words alike without reference to specific known words. I examine these two predictions, comparing them to the predictions of alternative models. Analogical models are specifically considered. In chapter 3 I examine speakers' productions of novel words without near lexical …
A Heart Thing To Hear But You'll Earn: Processing And Learning About Foreign Accent Features Generated By Phonological Rule Misapplications, Monica Lee Bennett
A Heart Thing To Hear But You'll Earn: Processing And Learning About Foreign Accent Features Generated By Phonological Rule Misapplications, Monica Lee Bennett
Masters Theses
The present thesis focuses on how native English listeners process phonological rule misapplications in non-native-accented speech. In Experiment 1, we examined whether listeners use information about a speaker’s native language to help them understand that speaker’s accented English. The test case for this scenario was word-final obstruent devoicing in German and German-accented speech. Results showed that participants did not generalize their knowledge cross-linguistically. In Experiment 2, we used a categorization task and an eye-tracking visual world paradigm to investigate listeners’ use of a position-sensitive allophonic alternation, the velarization of /l/, as a word segmentation cue in native English. Participants were …
Comprehending Each Other: Weak Reciprocity And Processing, Helen Majewski
Comprehending Each Other: Weak Reciprocity And Processing, Helen Majewski
Doctoral Dissertations
This dissertation looks at the question of how comprehenders get from an underspecified semantic representation to a particular construal. Its focus is on reciprocal sentences. Reciprocal sentences, like other plural sentences, are open to a range of interpretations. Work on the semantics of plural predication commonly assumes that this range of interpretations is due to cumulativity (Krifka 1992): if predicates are inherently cumulative (Kratzer 2001), the logical representations of plural sentences underspecify the interpretation (rather than being ambiguous between various interpretations). The dissertation argues that the processor makes use of a number of general preferences and principles in getting from …