Psycholinguistics and Neurolinguistics Commons^™

De-Centering The Monolingual: A Psychophysiological Study Of Heritage Speaker Language Processing, Christen N. Madsen Ii

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Models of grammar, processing and acquisition are primarily built on evidence from monolinguals and adult learners of a second language. Heritage speakers, who are bilinguals of a societal minority language, acquire and use their heritage language in informal settings; but who live, work, and are educated in the societal majority language. The differences between heritage speakers and both monolinguals and adult second language learners are extensive: heritage speakers are not educated in the heritage language, their input is typically not from a prestige variety of the heritage language, and they are dominant in the majority language, using it more frequently …

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

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 …

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 …

Contextual Differences In The Effect Of Interference During Language Switching In Korean-English Bilingual Speakers, Jungmee Yoon

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Bilingual speakers are assumed to activate two languages during language comprehension and production even when the input or output is in only one language. The parallel activation of both languages may result in competition between languages (e.g., Costa et al., 2006, Kroll, Bobb, & Wodniecka, 2006, La Heij, 2005). Earlier studies examined how the two languages are processed and controlled by mitigating interference during language selection (e.g., Abutalebi & Green, 2008; Marian & Spivey, 2003; Poulisse, 1999).

One way to study language control processes is to examine language-switching behaviors, a unique marker for these control processes (e.g., Bobb & Wodniecka, …

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

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 with …

Native Language Adaptation To Novel Verb Argument Structures By Spanish-English Bilinguals: An Electrophysiological Investigation, Eve Higby

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Bilinguals have to learn two different grammatical systems. Some aspects of these grammars may be similar across the two languages (for example, the active-passive alternation) while others may exist in only one of the two grammars (for example, the distinction between recent and distant past). This dissertation investigates the degree to which grammar information specific to only one language is available when processing the other language. In particular, the current study focuses on the application of grammatical structures from the bilinguals’ second-learned language to their first-learned language, a direction of language transfer not often investigated. Based on a Shared Syntax …

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

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 or for on. Similarly, before …

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 …

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

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 …

Neurophysiological Correlates Of English Vowels /I/ And /E/ In Monolingual And Bilingual 4 And 5-Year-Old Children, Nancy Vidal

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Second language (L2) input in the infant and toddler years clearly affects speech processing, particularly for L2 vowels (Cheour, Shestakovab, Ceponieneb, Näätänen 2002), Moreno, Rodriguez-Fornells, Matti, 2008); Rinker, Paavo, Brosch, Kiefer 2010). However, few studies have closely examined how amount of L1 versus L2 input impacts automaticity of speech processing in young children. Greater language use of one than the other language promotes improved speech perception and production in the language of greater use (Flege & Munro 1994; Flege & MacKay 2004). Investigations have used a variety of custom-designed questionnaires to quantify amount of language use, but most have not …