Psycholinguistics and Neurolinguistics Commons^™

Developing 240 Spanish Word Pair Stimuli For A Psycholinguistic Experiment, Francisco Villa

Student Research Symposium

Metaphors are linguistically interesting because they involve going beyond literal interpretation. For example, “night owl” can refer to an animal or a person who is active at night. Psycholinguistic researchers investigating metaphor comprehension must develop sets of stimuli (linguistic items used in experiments) that include metaphors and literal items as a baseline. One approach is to use metaphorical word pairs, because it lets researchers control several important variables, including how frequent words are within the language. For the first time, we have created a set of word pair stimuli in Spanish, which is particularly challenging because most metaphors consist of …

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.