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Full-Text Articles in Cognitive Psychology

What Did You Expect? An Investigation Of Lexical Preactivation In Sentence Processing, Jon Burnsky Oct 2022

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 …


Person-Based Prominence In Ojibwe, Christopher Hammerly Dec 2020

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 …


Computing Agreement In A Mixed System, Sakshi Bhatia Oct 2019

Computing Agreement In A Mixed System, Sakshi Bhatia

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation develops a comprehensive response to the question of how agreement is computed in Hindi-Urdu – a language with a mixed agreement system where the verb can agree with a subject or an object depending on the structural context. This dissertation covers new empirical and theoretical ground in two domains. First, I identify three kinds of atypical agreement patterns which are not accounted for under traditional approaches Hindi-Urdu agreement -- verb agreement with the nominal component of Noun-Verb complex predicates, long distance agreement of embedding Adjective-Verb predicates with embedded infinitive clause objects, and copular agreement in identity copula structures. …


Audible Voice In Context, Airlie S. Rose Nov 2015

Audible Voice In Context, Airlie S. Rose

Doctoral Dissertations

The term audible voice refers to the sound of the text experienced by the reader during silent reading. It was coined by Elbow in his Landmark Essays to help the field of composition wrestle more productively with the concept of voice in writing. In this dissertation, voice is not a metaphor. Drawing on contemporary work in psycholinguistics, cognitive psychology, and consciousness studies, it examines the phenomenon of audible voice as a form of inner speech[1]. The premise of this study is that the experience of audible voice by the reader is a unique intersection of the individual's inner landscape …


Linguistic Cognition And Bimodalism: A Study Of Motion And Location In The Confluence Of Spanish And Spain’S Sign Language, Francisco Meizoso Mar 2015

Linguistic Cognition And Bimodalism: A Study Of Motion And Location In The Confluence Of Spanish And Spain’S Sign Language, Francisco Meizoso

Doctoral Dissertations

The goal of this dissertation is to study the intrapersonal and symbolic function of gesture by a very specific type of population: hearing speakers of Spanish who, having been born to deaf parents, grew up developing a bimodal (Spanish and Spain’s Sign Language) linguistic interface, which borrows elements from the manual and spoken modalities. In the ordering of gestures devised by Kendon (1988) and cited by McNeill (1992), gesticulation and sign languages are placed at opposite ends of a continuum. At one end, gesticulation is formed by idiosyncratic spontaneous gestures lacking any conventional linguistic proprieties, which are produced in combination …