Psycholinguistics and Neurolinguistics Commons^™

Eeg Studies Of Pre-Stimulus Activity During Turn-Taking In Naturalistic Conversation, Seyedmohamadreza Manzourolajdad

Student Works (2020-2029)

This study integrates conversational analysis principles and neural activity to investigate natural cognition and examine event-related brain changes. A wireless electroencephalography (EEG) device was used in an ecological validity setting to analyse pre-stimulus brain activity preceding conversational turns. This study aims to identify aspects of the conversation that reflect its naturalness in the aspect of listening and the corresponding brain activity by analysing the signals before and after a turn in a conversation. This research contributes to an ecologically valid understanding of natural conversation as a social action that enables seamless communication. Seven Malaysian participants (aged 19–22, M=20.46) engaged in …

Ctrl + Alt + Inner Speech: A Verbal–Cognitive Scaffold (Vcs) Model Of Pathways To Computational Thinking, Daisuke Akiba

Publications and Research

This theoretical paper introduces the Verbal–Cognitive Scaffold (VCS) Model, a cognitively inclusive framework which proposes the cognitive architectures underlying computational thinking (CT). Moving beyond monolithic theories of cognition (e.g., executive-function and metacognitive control models), the VCS Model posits inner speech (InSp) as the predominant cognitive pathway supporting CT operations in neurotypical populations. Synthesizing interdisciplinary scholarship across cognitive science, computational theory, neurodiversity research, and others, this framework articulates distinct mechanisms through which InSp supports CT. The model specifies four primary pathways linking InSp to CT components: verbal working memory supporting decomposition, symbolic representation facilitating pattern recognition and abstraction, sequential processing enabling …

The Emotional Landscape Of Aviation Pilots: Analysis Of Online Professional Forums Using Natural Language Processing, Adrienne S. Renwick, Leo Gonzalez, Charles L. Silber, Alyson Mullen, Cass Dykeman, Adam Stewart, Jennifer C. Ross, James Geisler

Journal of Aviation/Aerospace Education & Research

This study investigated burnout related to emotions in three categories of pilots: commercial passenger, commercial cargo, and military. While pilot burnout has been previously studied, challenges in self-reporting limit understanding. This study extends previous research by analyzing pilots' anonymous online forum posts to gain insight into burnout-related emotions. Natural Language Processing was conducted with the RoBERTa-base-go_emotions model, which analyzed 1,130,530 online forum posts from commercial passengers, commercial cargo, and military pilots for 27 emotion categories and one absence of emotion category (i.e., neutral). An exploratory composite score reflecting burnout-related emotional expression omnibus burnout score was calculated using seven burnout-related emotions …

The Relationship Between Autistic Traits, Autistic Camouflaging, And Adults’ Representations Of Abstract And Social Concepts, Henry Tomiser, Katja Wiemer Dr.

Honors Capstones

Concrete concepts (e.g., BUTTON) can be experienced directly by the senses, whereas abstract concepts (e.g., FRIENDSHIP) cannot. Additionally, the mind may represent abstract concepts using more introspective, social, and emotional information than concrete concepts. Social difficulties are one defining feature of autism, and autistic individuals may use social camouflaging to hide these difficulties, but the precise nature of social processing in autism is not known. This study aims to explore possible links between autistic traits, autistic camouflaging, and mental representations of concepts. Participants gave open-ended definitions for concepts varying in concreteness and social content via an online survey. Responses were …

Gestalt Language Processing In Accredited Communication Sciences And Disorders Programs, William Harris

Master's Theses

The language development and usage of autistic individuals has become a controversial topic in many of the disciplines and professions providing support to these individuals. As a result, two theories of language processing have been proposed. Analytical language processing suggests that children process and develop language from its most simple form, a phoneme, to its most complex form, a word or phrase. However, the theory of gestalt language processing proposes that some children may instead extract larger, more complex language such as whole words and phrases first and break it down to the simpler language. Gestalt language processing is often …

Biomedical Text Readability After Hypernym Substitution With Fine-Tuned Large Language Models, Karl Swanson, Shuhan He, Josh Calvano, David Chen, Talar Telvizian, Lawrence Jiang, Paul Chong, Jacob Schwell, Gin Mak, Jarone Lee

SKMC Student Presentations and Publications

The advent of patient access to complex medical information online has highlighted the need for simplification of biomedical text to improve patient understanding and engagement in taking ownership of their health. However, comprehension of biomedical text remains a difficult task due to the need for domain-specific expertise. We aimed to study the simplification of biomedical text via large language models (LLMs) commonly used for general natural language processing tasks involve text comprehension, summarization, generation, and prediction of new text from prompts. Specifically, we finetuned three variants of large language models to perform substitutions of complex words and word phrases in …

Does Heightened Perceptual Encoding In Blind Individuals Extend To Word Learning?, Lindsay N. Harris, Marissa Renee Bamberger

CISLL Publications

Past research reported blind participants tend to encode sensory details of encounters with stimuli they will later recall or recollect, whereas sighted individuals tend to abstract meaning from sensory information when encoding memories. Here we ask whether blind individuals’ use of perceptual in addition to semantic encoding extends to a task—word learning—whose purpose amounts to semantically encoding the word and definition. After studying the definitions of spoken or written words, blind braille readers (n = 23) and sighted print readers (n = 20) re-encountered each word and indicated whether it was previously presented in the same modality. Analyses …

The Impact Of Semantics And Syntax On Lexical Retrieval In Individuals With Aphasia, Marta M. Korytkowska

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Nearly all people with aphasia (PWA) report difficulty with lexical retrieval (i.e., anomia). While there are several tasks used to measure lexical retrieval, each poses different degrees and types of challenges. For example, some studies have found that PWA performance varies depending on the type of lexical retrieval task. The tasks that have been used include lexical retrieval in isolation tasks (such as picture-naming), lexical retrieval in sentence level tasks (such as narration tasks), and lexical retrieval in sentence-completion tasks. Some studies have found no differences between the accuracy of lexical retrieval in isolation and at the sentence level (e.g., …

Single-Case Pilot Study For Longitudinal Analysis Of Referential Failures And Sentiment In Schizophrenic Speech From Client-Centered Psychotherapy Recordings, Travis A. Musich

Dissertations

Though computational linguistic analyses have revealed the presence of distinctly characteristic language features in schizophrenic disordered speech, the relative stability of these language features in longitudinal samples is still unknown. This longitudinal pilot study analyzed schizophrenic disordered speech data from the archival therapy audio recordings of one patient spanning 23 years. End-to-end Neural Coreference Resolution software was used to analyze transcribed speech data from three therapy sessions to identify ambiguous pronouns, referred to as referential failures, which were reviewed and confirmed by multiple raters. Speech samples were analyzed using Google Cloud Natural Language API software for sentiment variables (i.e., score, …

Chatgpt As Metamorphosis Designer For The Future Of Artificial Intelligence (Ai): A Conceptual Investigation, Amarjit Kumar Singh (Library Assistant), Dr. Pankaj Mathur (Deputy Librarian)

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

Abstract

Purpose: The purpose of this research paper is to explore ChatGPT’s potential as an innovative designer tool for the future development of artificial intelligence. Specifically, this conceptual investigation aims to analyze ChatGPT’s capabilities as a tool for designing and developing near about human intelligent systems for futuristic used and developed in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Also with the helps of this paper, researchers are analyzed the strengths and weaknesses of ChatGPT as a tool, and identify possible areas for improvement in its development and implementation. This investigation focused on the various features and functions of ChatGPT that …

Analysis Of Electrophysiological Markers And Correlated Components Of Neural Responses To Discourse Coherence, Kurt M. Masiello

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Constructing meaning from spoken language is invaluable for learning, social interaction, and communication. In clinical populations with developmental disorders of speech comprehension, the severity of disruption can persist and vary from limiting occupational opportunities to lower performance outcomes. Previous research has reported an event-related potential (ERP) neural positivity over right hemisphere lateral anterior sites in response to semantic and discourse processing. Although useful as a marker for clinical populations of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and developmental language disorder (DLD), little is understood about the dynamics and neural sources of this biological marker. In addition to traditional methods of ERP analysis, …

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.

Functional Differentiation In The Language Network Revealed By Lesion-Dymptom Mapping, William Matchin, Alexandra Basilakos, Dirk B. Den Ouden, Brielle C. Stark, Gregory Hickok, Julius Fridriksson

Communication Sciences and Disorders Faculty Articles and Research

Theories of language organization in the brain commonly posit that different regions underlie distinct linguistic mechanisms. However, such theories have been criticized on the grounds that many neuroimaging studies of language processing find similar effects across regions. Moreover, condition by region interaction effects, which provide the strongest evidence of functional differentiation between regions, have rarely been offered in support of these theories. Here we address this by using lesion-symptom mapping in three large, partially-overlapping groups of aphasia patients with left hemisphere brain damage due to stroke (N = 121, N = 92, N = 218). We identified multiple measure by …

Preliminary Exploration Of Pitch Discrimination, Temporal Sequencing, And Prosodic Awareness Skills Of Children Who Participate In Different School-Based Music Curricula, Ashley G. Flagge, Mary Ellen Neeley, Tara M. Davis, Victoria Henbest

University Faculty and Staff Publications

Musical training has been shown to have a positive influence on a variety of skills, including auditory-based tasks and nonmusical cognitive and executive functioning tasks; however, because previous investigations have yielded mixed results regarding the relationship between musical training and these skills, the purpose of this study was to examine and compare the auditory processing skills of children who receive focused, daily musical training with those with more limited, generalized musical training. Sixteen typically developing children (second–fourth grade) from two different schools receiving different music curricula were assessed on measures of pitch discrimination, temporal sequencing, and prosodic awareness. The results …

Happy ��, Sad ��Or Pizza ��: A Review Of Emoji Effects On Reading Times And Their Relation To Mood, Fetheya Alattar

University Honors Theses

With recent advancements in technology, emoji are continuously changing the way that people communicate and process language. Their use continues to evolve as a mechanism to counter the loss of the rich nonverbal cues of face-to-face communication. Subsequently, the need for research examining how emoji are processed and how they affect language and communication has become more important. This research specifically examines the scholarship on emoji effects on sentence reading times (RT) and how this relates to mood. Results on the effects of emoji on sentence RT are mixed. In some instances, emoji slowed RT and in others, they sped …

Creating A Theoretical Framework To Underpin Discourse Assessment And Intervention In Aphasia, Lucy Dipper, Jane Marshall, Mary Boyle, Deborah Hersh, Nicola Botting, Madeline Cruice

Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Discourse (a unit of language longer than a single sentence) is fundamental to everyday communication. People with aphasia (a language impairment occurring most frequently after stroke, or other brain damage) have communication difficulties which lead to less complete, less coherent, and less complex discourse. Although there are multiple reviews of discourse assessment and an emerging evidence base for discourse intervention, there is no unified theoretical framework to underpin this research. Instead, disparate theories are recruited to explain different aspects of discourse impairment, or symptoms are reported without a hypothesis about the cause. What is needed is a theoretical framework that …

Integrating Affect Perception Tasks From The New York Emotion Battery Into A Comprehensive Measure Of Neuropsychological Change Across The Lifespan, Melinda A. Cornwell

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Background: The ability to perceive others’ emotions is a vital skill for social competency, impacting the success of personal and professional relationships (Brinton & Fujiki, 2011; Cassidy et al., 1992; Côté & Miners, 2006). According to Socioemotional Selectivity Theory (SST; Carstensen, 1991), human motivation develops to become more discerning in choosing milieus that yield the most gratifying return on the investment of personal resources (e.g., time, attention, and effort), perhaps explaining why some research findings indicate that older adults may demonstrate an affect perception (AP) bias described as a positivity effect (Reed et al., 2014). Moreover, AP predicts cognitive and …

Effect Of Consistent Singing On Maintenance Of Speech Intelligibility Following Lsvt®: A Retrospective Longitudinal Case Study, Rachel Ricca Beck

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Parkinson’s Disease is a common neurodegenerative disease affecting one’s ability to hone and refine volitional movement. Many with Parkinson’s report significant effects on voice and communication. Speech-language pathologists have long targeted the achievement of increased vocal volume through intensive voice therapy, with the most common program being Lee Silverman Voice Treatment® (LSVT®) (Ramig et al., 1994). While LSVT® is the most prominent type of voice therapy for individuals with Parkinson’s, other researchers have begun investigating therapeutic singing because of the similar functions it employs (e.g., increased breath support, utilization of entire vocal range).

The current project is a retrospective, longitudinal …

The Anonymity Heuristic: How Surnames Stop Identifying People When They Become Trademarks, Russell W. Jacobs

Dickinson Law Review (2017-Present)

This Article explores the following question central to trademark law: if a homograph has both a surname and a trademark interpretation will consumers consider those interpretations as intrinsically overlapping or the surname and trademark as completely separate and unrelated words? While trademark jurisprudence typically has approached this question from a legal perspective or with assumptions about consumer behavior, this Article builds on the Law and Behavioral Science approach to legal scholarship by drawing from the fields of psychology, linguistics, economics, anthropology, sociology, and marketing.

The Article concludes that consumers will regard the two interpretations as separate and unrelated, processing surname …

Cognitive And Neurobiological Degeneration Of The Mental Lexicon In Primary Progressive Aphasia, Jet M. J. Vonk

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The ease with which we use the thousands of words in our vocabulary stands in stark contrast to our difficulty establishing how they are organized in our mind and brain. The breakdown of language due to cortical atrophy in primary progressive aphasia (PPA) creates conditions to study this organization at a cognitive and neurobiological level in that the three variants of this disease, namely non-fluent, logopenic, and semantic PPA, each bear their own signature of language-specific decline and cortical atrophy. As the impaired regions in each variant are linked to different lexical and semantic attributes of words, lexical decision performance …

Communicative Behaviors Elicited By Leisure Activities In Memory Care Units, Tarynn Clune

Honors Projects

A wide variety of leisure activities used in reminiscence care have been studied for their merits in terms of preventing cognitive decline, and increasing quality of life; however, little is known about what different types have to offer in terms of communicative opportunities. Communication with peers is imperative for quality of life, and is crucial for maintenance of relationships between the person with dementia (PWD) and their loved ones. As a result of this importance, an exploration of communication elicited by different activities facilitated in a unit was conducted. The communication explored in this study was solely vocal, and included …

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

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 …

Central Auditory Processing And The Link To Reading Ability In Adults, Lisa M. Brody

Honors Scholar Theses

What makes someone a good reader? What makes someone a poor reader? The root biological marker of reading ability has yet to be determined. Many scientists agree that phonological awareness, the understanding of speech sounds, and phonological decoding are key components of reading ability (Melby-Lervag, Lyster, & Hulme, 2012). In addition to this, new research suggests that the auditory system, specifically the timing of auditory processing in the brain, provides a crucial platform that supports the development of reading ability (Banai et al., 2009). This thesis provides empirical data to support the link between reading skill …

Acoustic And Perceptual Measurements Of Prosody Production On The Profiling Elements Of Prosodic Systems In Children By Children With Autism Spectrum Disorders, Joshua John Diehl, Rhea Paul

Communication Disorders Faculty Publications

Prosody production atypicalities are a feature of autism spectrum disorders (ASDs), but behavioral measures of performance have failed to provide detail on the properties of these deficits. We used acoustic measures of prosody to compare children with ASDs to age-matched groups with learning disabilities and typically developing peers. Overall, the group with ASD had longer utterance durations on multiple subtests on a test of prosodic abilities, and both the ASD and learning disabilities groups had higher pitch ranges and pitch variance than the typically developing group on one subtest. Acoustic differences were present even when the prosody was used correctly.These …

Neural Underpinnings Of Prosody In Autism, Inge-Marie Eigsti, Jillian Schuh, Einar Mencl, Robert T. Schultz, Rhea Paul

Communication Disorders Faculty Publications

This study examines the processing of prosodic cues to linguistic structure and to affect, drawing on fMRI and behavioral data from 16 high-functioning adolescents with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and 11 typically developing controls. Stimuli were carefully matched on pitch, intensity, and duration, while varying systematically in conditions of affective prosody (angry versus neutral speech) and grammatical prosody (questions versus statement). To avoid conscious attention to prosody, which normalizes responses in young people with ASD, the implicit comprehension task directed attention to semantic aspects of the stimuli. Results showed that when perceiving prosodic cues, both affective and grammatical, activation of …

Contingencies Governing The Production Of Fricatives, Affricates, And Liquids In Babbling, Christina E. Gildersleeve-Neumann, Barbara L. Davis, Peter F. Macneilage

Speech and Hearing Sciences Faculty Publications and Presentations

Studies of early-developing consonants (stops, nasals, and glides) in babbling have shown that most of the variance in consonants and their associated vowels, both within and between syllables, is due to a "frame" produced by mandibular oscillation, with very little active contribution from intrasyllabic or intersyllabic tongue movements. In a study of four babbling infants, the prediction that this apparently basic "frame dominance" would also apply to late-developing consonants (fricatives, affricates, and liquids) was tested. With minor exceptions, confirming evidence for both the predicted intrasyllabic and intersyllabic patterns was obtained. Results provide further evidence for the frame dominance conception, but …

An Intercorrelation Analysis Of The Itpa And Feature Finders, Debra Betts Bork

Masters Theses

No abstract provided by author.

The Influence Of Age And Disease Upon Language, Mary Ellen Kelleher

Masters Theses

No abstract provided by author.