Psycholinguistics and Neurolinguistics Commons^™

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. …

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, …

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.

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, …

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 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 …

Misinformation And Disinformation: Detecting Fakes With The Eye And Ai, Victoria Rubin

Data and Test Instruments

How do we detect, deter, and prevent the spread of mis- and disinformationwith the human eye and AI? How does theory inform the practice, and how do theevidence-based research and best practices in lie-catching and truth-seekingprofessions—inform AI? The book looks into well-established human practicessuch as the routines and processes used in detective work, journalism, and scientificinquiry, and how they contribute toward innovative AI solutions. The book explainsthe principles, inner workings, and recent evolution of five types of state-of-the-artAI technologies suitable for curtailing the spread of mis- and disinformation:automated deception detectors, clickbait detectors, satirical fake detectors, rumordebunkers, and computational fact-checking tools.

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. …

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 …

Contextual Inference Reading Comprehension Skill Activities As Determinants Of Reading Comprehension Performance, Joyce Njiiri

Journal of the Language Association of Eastern Africa

Reading comprehension is one of the most important features in the learning process for second language learners because texts are the means through which most concepts are learnt. However, it is one of the least developed linguistic skills as manifested in the Kenya National Examination Council (KNEC 2010; 2011; 2013;2015;2017;2018). KNEC attributes poor performance in reading comprehension of passages to inadequate reading comprehension skill activities of contextual inference, note-making, paraphrasing, and summary writing among others during the reading comprehension lessons. Additionally, there is notable lack of exposure to reading comprehension skill activities to secondary school learners. The purpose of this …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 Articles, Papers, and Other Scholarship

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

Identifying A Culturally Appropriate Stimulus For The Bangla Picture Description Task, Barnali Mazumdar

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The absence of culture- and language-specific aphasia assessment in Bangla underscores a critical problem in Communication Sciences and Disorders. Aphasia occurs in ~41% of stroke survivors. Over 40 years, stroke incidence has doubled in the low- and middle-income countries, such as Bangladesh and India, where there are ~250 million native Bangla speakers.

This study aimed to identify an appropriate picture stimulus for the Bangla Picture Description Task (PDT) intended for inclusion in a Bangla aphasia assessment. Researchers have reported the importance of cultural relevance and three visuographic variables of a picture, i.e., high-context, color, and photograph vs. black and white …

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 …

Predictors Of Lexical Accessibility Of Common And Proper Nouns In Older Age: Evidence From The Tip-Of-The-Tongue State, Amy Victoria Vogel-Eyny

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

One of the notable language difficulties experienced by healthy older adults is word retrieval failure, specifically the tip-of-the-tongue state (TOT). A TOT occurs when one has a strong sense of knowing the word, such that the semantic content is accessed, but the entirety of the word’s phonology is temporarily inaccessible. Such retrieval difficulty is attributable, at least in part, to characteristics of the target word. Psycholinguistic features may uniquely influence the semantic and/or phonological stages of word production. An additional factor known to influence TOT-likelihood is noun type: proper nouns elicit TOTs more often than do common nouns. The discrepancy …

Monolingual And Bilingual Language Networks In Healthy Subjects Using Functional Mri And Graph Theory, Qiongge Li, Luca Pasquini, Gino Del Ferraro, Madeleine Gene, Kyung K. Peck, Hernán A. Makse, Andrei I. Holodny

Publications and Research

Bilingualism requires control of multiple language systems, and may lead to architectural differences in language networks obtained from clinical fMRI tasks. Emerging connectivity metrics such as k-core may capture these differences, highlighting crucial network components based on resiliency. We investigated the influence of bilingualism on clinical fMRI language tasks and characterized bilingual networks using connectivity metrics to provide a patient care benchmark. Sixteen right-handed subjects (mean age 42-years; nine males) without neurological history were included: eight native English-speaking monolinguals and eight native Spanish-speaking (L1) bilinguals with acquired English (L2). All subjects underwent fMRI with gold-standard clinical language tasks. Starting from …

Approaches To Narrative Instruction For Second Language Learners, Mathew Peters

MA TESOL Collection

Narratives have reemerged as a dominant form of rhetoric over the last fifty years. This dominant use of narrative discourse has only increased with the rise of social media. Walther Fisher (1987) proposed the narrative paradigm as a unifying theory of human communication. His major claim is that people are inherently storytellers and that people use a narrative rationality and a logic of good reasons to inform their beliefs, values, and actions. This paper utilizes his theories, along with recent findings in neuroscience, to establish an argument for greater inclusion of narratives into second language teaching. Narratives can have a …

The Relations Between Maternal Language Input And Language Development For Children With Williams Syndrome., Katarina L. Mayer

College of Arts & Sciences Senior Theses

For typically developing (TD) children, maternal language input (MLI) is an important contributor to early language development. Until now, possible relations between MLI and language development for children with Williams syndrome (WS), a genetic neurodevelopmental disorder associated with language delay and intellectual disability, have not been addressed. The aim of the present study was two-fold: to examine concurrent relations between MLI and child language abilities at 24 months and to determine if individual differences in MLI and children’s lexical and cognitive abilities at 24 months make significant unique contributions to the variance in child language abilities at 48 months for …

Timing Comparisons Across American Sign Language And English, Jillian Bartlett

Thinking Matters Symposium

American Sign Language (ASL) and spoken English differ in modalities, but prosody can be found in both. Previous studies show that the Closure Positive Shift (CPS) (an established component of an Event-Related Potential [ERP]) occurs in response to acoustic stimuli indicative of prosodic phrasing (Pannekamp et al., 2005; Steinhauer et al., 1999). Prosodic processing in relation to these two modalities was studied using EEG. Sixteen Deaf ASL speakers and 34 hearing English speakers participated in the study by watching video or listening to audio recordings of stimuli while a portable electroencephalogram, or EEG (a device that detects abnormalities in brain …

Posterior Predictive Critique Of A Psychometric Bayesian Model For Assessing Aphasia, Ashlynn Crisp

Mathematics and Statistics Dissertations, Theses, and Final Project Papers

For persons with aphasia, naming tests are useful for assessing the severity of the disease and observing progress toward recovery. The Philadelphia Naming Test (PNT) is a leading naming test composed of 175 items. The items are common nouns which are one to four syllables in length and with low, medium, and high frequency. Since the target word is known to the administrator, the response from the patient can be classified as correct or an error. If the patient commits an error, the PNT provides procedures for classifying the type of error in the response. Item response theory can be …

Automaticity Of Lexical Access In Deaf And Hearing Bilinguals: Cross-Linguistic Evidence From The Color Stroop Task Across Five Languages, Rain G. Bosworth, Sarah C. Tyler, Eli M. Binder, Jill P. Morford

Articles

The well-known Stroop interference effect has been instrumental in revealing the highly automated nature of lexical processing as well as providing new insights to the underlying lexical organization of first and second languages within proficient bilinguals. The present cross-linguistic study had two goals: 1) to examine Stroop interference for dynamic signs and printed words in deaf ASL-English bilinguals who report no reliance on speech or audiological aids; 2) to compare Stroop interference effects in several groups of bilinguals whose two languages range from very distinct to very similar in their shared orthographic patterns: ASL-English bilinguals (very distinct), Chinese-English bilinguals (low …

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 …

Monolingual And Bilingual Reading Processes In Russian: An Exploratory Scanpath Analysis, Olga Parshina, Irina A. Sekerina, Anastasiya Lopukhina, Titus Von Der Malsburg

Publications and Research

In the present study, we used a scanpath approach to investigate reading processes and factors that can shape them in monolingual Russian-speaking adults, 8-year- old children, and bilingual Russian-speaking readers. We found that monolingual adults’ eye movement patterns exhibited a fluent scanpath reading process, representing effortless processing of the written material: They read straight from left to right at a fast pace, skipped words, and regressed rarely. Both high-proficiency heritage-language speakers’ and second graders’ eye movement patterns exhibited an intermediate scanpath reading process, characterized by a slower pace, longer fixations, an absence of word skipping, and short regressive saccades. Second-language …