Psycholinguistics and Neurolinguistics Commons^™

The Influence Of Texting On Perceived Warmth: The Role Of Punctuation And Emoji, Elizabeth Mathews

Senior Honors Theses

Technology Mediated Communication (TMC) has become an essential part of interpersonal communication. Punctuation and emoji are major vessels of nonverbal communication in texting. The impact of punctuation and emoji use on perceptions of warmth was tested with 291 residential undergraduate students at Liberty University who were at least 18 years old. Through an online questionnaire, participants read a series of text messages with a randomly assigned condition of having either punctuation and emoji, punctuation and no emoji, no punctuation and emoji, or no punctuation and no emoji. Results indicated a significant main effect for the presence of emoji on perceived …

Auditory Free Classification Of Gender Diverse Speakers, Brandon Merritt, Tessa Bent, Rowan Kilgore, Cameron Eads

Departmental Papers (Speech)

Auditory attribution of speaker gender has historically been assumed to operate within a binary framework. The prevalence of gender diversity and its associated sociophonetic variability motivates an examination of how listeners perceptually represent these diverse voices. Utterances from 30 transgender (1 agender individual, 15 non-binary individuals, 7 transgender men, and 7 transgender women) and 30 cisgender (15 men and 15 women) speakers were used in an auditory free classification paradigm, in which cisgender listeners classified the speakers on perceived general similarity and gender identity. Multidimensional scaling of listeners’ classifications revealed twodimensional solutions as the best fit for general similarity classifications. …

Exploring Cross-Linguistic Speech Perception In Hindi, English, And Romance-Language Through Temporal Dynamics Of Neural Activity, Yuga Kothari

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study examines the effect of linguistic experience on the neural processing of Voice Onset Time (VOT) in Hindi and Romance language (Spanish and Portuguese) individuals who are bilingual in English and monolingual English speakers using the event-related potential (ERP) Mismatch Negativity (MMN) response. VOT is a linguistic property that measures the time elapsed between the release of a stop consonant and the beginning of voicing, that is, vocal fold vibration of a following vowel. In a double-oddball paradigm, participants’ (n = 41) ERP were recorded while listening to speech sounds differing in VOT. The bilabial short lag stop [p] …

Segmental Error Gravity In L2 Arabic Speech Comprehensibility And Accentedness: L1 Consonant Age Of Acquisition As A Predictor, Mark Papai

Theses and Dissertations

Second language (L2) pronunciation studies have found that the intelligibility (i.e., listeners’ actual understanding) of L2 speech is most closely related to its comprehensibility (i.e., listeners' ease of understanding) rather than to its overall nativelike pronunciation. The segmental errors that are most detrimental to communication are predicted by phoneme Functional Load (FL): mispronouncing high FL segments affects speech comprehensibility more negatively than mispronouncing low FL ones. However, no data are available on the FL hierarchy of Arabic segments. On the other hand, FL correlates highly with consonant age of acquisition (CAoA) in languages that rely heavily on consonants to contrast …

The Influence Of Visual Perspective On The Cognitive Effort Required For Mental Representation, Jeffrey P. Hong

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

Mental representation is the process by which an individual simulates an event in their mind’s eye. This process is the foundation of the ability to remember the past, engage in prospective thinking, or imagine fictitious scenarios. An individual can mentally represent any event through their own eyes—the first-person perspective or from the viewpoint of an external observer—the third-person perspective. The perspective of representation influences outcomes related to memory, visuospatial processing, affect, social cognition, clinical diagnoses, and language processing. In turn, an individual’s tendency to favour either perspective is shaped by related factors.

The current research consists of four experiments, designed …

Characterizing The Relationship Between Accented Speech Intelligibility And Listening Effort, Mel Mallard

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Unfamiliar accents can make speech communication difficult, both by reducing speech intelligibility and by increasing the effort listeners must put forth to understand speech. However, these two constructs, while related, are independent: for example, two 100% intelligible utterances may require different amounts of effort to accurately process. To better characterize the relationship between intelligibility and effort, this study presents speakers of four intelligibility levels (one natively-accented English speaker, and three Mandarin-accented English speakers) within a dual-task paradigm (featuring a vibrotactile secondary task) to measure listening effort. We found a negative nonlinear relationship between intelligibility and effort, with the steepest slope …

The Development And Validation Of An Efl Learner Attitude Scale For Phonetic Symbol Learning In A Chinese University Context, Jie Zeng, Yi Qin, Yu Zong, Tengfei Zhao, Xiping Wang

Journal of English and Applied Linguistics

Research has established that learner attitude significantly impacts the outcomes of learning English as a foreign language (EFL). However, previous studies have rarely considered a validated attitude scale for English phonetic symbol learning (EPSL). This study aims to develop and validate a scale to measure students' attitudes toward EPSL by integrating findings from learning attitude research in education and psychology. The results demonstrate that the attitude scale can predict attitudes towards EPSL in the context of a Chinese university and has good reliability and validity (KMO=0.892, α=0.749). Pedagogical suggestions are made to help students develop a more positive attitude toward …

How Prefixation, Onset Length, And Coda Length Determine Lexical Stress Assignment When Reading Aloud, Kayla Hensley

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Lexical stress, or which syllable is emphasized in a multisyllabic word, can provide important cues for speech segmentation, lexical class, and reading acquisition. Despite this, much of the literature on reading has focused on single syllable words, neglecting the role that stress can play. In this project, I examine the role of prefixation, onset and coda length in assigning stress in disyllabic words when reading aloud. Study 1 is a corpus analysis of English words with grade level information to replicate the model developed by Treiman et al. 2020 and check for age differences. There were no significant differences on …

The Online Processing Of Even's Likelihood Presupposition, Erika Mayer

Doctoral Dissertations

Even is a focus-sensitive semantic operator that introduces a presupposition about likelihood. Under many semantic accounts, even’s likelihood presupposition requires the sentence with even to be less likely than a set of contextually-relevant alternatives. On one hand, even’s presupposition is complex, and this complexity may cause delays in processing. On the other hand, despite—and indeed because—of this complexity, even has the potential to be highly informative to readers. In this dissertation, I investigate whether and how even interacts with lexical predictability in online processing. If comprehenders are able to rapidly process even, they may be able to …

Association Strength Between Concepts As The Origin Of The "Foreign Language Effect", Emilia Ezrina

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Bilinguals sometimes make decisions in verbal tasks differently in their first (L1) and second (L2) language. This phenomenon is known as the foreign language effect (FLE), and it suggests strong connections between language and cognition. On the one hand, it is possible that L2 “blunts” emotional language. However, the FLE can be observed in non-emotional tasks. Therefore, it is possible that L2 requires more deliberate processing due to increased cognitive load, leading to more rational decisions. The support for each explanation is mixed.

In this thesis we propose looking for a single explanation for all instances of the FLE. After …

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., …

The Effect Of Word Predictability On Proofreading Accuracy And Reading Time, Sam Prasad

Theses and Dissertations

Proofreading, or reading with the purpose of finding and correcting errors, has been used in psycholinguistic research to study the relationship between bottom-up and top-down cognitive processes. The current study examined the effects of word predictability on reading time using a word-by-word self-paced reading (SPR) task. A sample of 102 native English speakers read sentences containing letter transposition errors in predictable and unpredictable contexts. Half of the sentences were followed by a question asking if there was an error in the sentence they had just read. Participants’ accuracy in detecting the errors and the time they spent reading the error-bearing …

Memory For Metaphors: Verbatim Memory Held For Literal Sentences Vs. Metaphors, Taylor Suneson

Psychological Science Undergraduate Honors Theses

Certain literary features of text (metaphor, idiom, etc.) are said to be foregrounded, or stand out from the surrounding text. Prior research (Miall & Kuiken, 1994) demonstrates that foregrounded text slows readers down, which is consistent with attention being grabbed. Do features of literary text, more specifically metaphors, improve memory as a result of being foregrounded? The present study investigated the effect of reading metaphoric phrases on reading time, memory accuracy, and decision times. We predicted that when a textual phrase was read as a metaphor, verbatim memory would be better retained than when that same phrase was read as …

Deictic Pointing And Demonstrative Usage In American Sign Language, Paul Twitchell

Language, Literacy, and Sociocultural Studies ETDs

American Sign Language (ASL), like many different signed languages, has a systematic way of using pointing signs for multiple types of nominal reference. Possibly the most basic function of pointing is to indicate, direct and modulate reference to physical objects located in proximal and distal areas called exophoric demonstratives.

This study aims to investigate ASL exophoric demonstratives and how ASL fits within the different typological systems of demonstratives that have been documented (Diessel & Coventry, 2020). Several research questions focus on how signers direct attention to proximal and distal referents in ASL using an elicitation task. The two studies (adult …

The Influence Of Native Language And Sentence Form On Memory Of Motion Events, Stephanie L. Lopez

LSU Master's Theses

This study utilized four experiments to investigate the extent to which native language influences memory in accordance with linguistic relativity. In Experiment 1, monolingual English speakers and Spanish/English bilinguals were divided into a verbal encoding condition and a verbal suppression encoding condition and watched motion events of low or high physical salience. Participants engaged in a recognition memory task followed by an event memory similarity judgment task. In Experiment 2, native monolingual English speakers were divided into an English-like (or manner-on-verb) description group, a Spanish-like (or path-on-verb) description group, mimicking the language groups of Experiment 1 respectively, and a verbal …

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 …

Linguistic Predictors Of Engagement On Anti-Incel Forums, Daniel Beutler

Student Theses

This thesis examines the determinants of social media engagement with extremist views in general and misogynistic ones in particular. The study, which is a part of an ongoing, large-scale examination of online hate, examined posts from r/IncelTears, a sub-forum in the long-form social media Reddit dedicated to attacks on the Involuntary Celibate (‘Incel’) digital communities. Previous research on engagement – and by extension virality – of online posts has broadly implicated linguistic markers of affect, morality, extremism, and social identity. This exploratory study correlated metrics of online engagement such as the number of Upvotes and Comments that each post garnered …

The Relevance Of Shame Across Time And Location, Miranda Vander Berg, Kari Sandouka

SDSU Data Science Symposium

Twitter is used among various entities professionals, politicians, and the general public as an online social network. Many tweets are informational, but others are reactive based on judgment that leads to public shaming. In response to the book “The Shame Machine” (by Cathy O’Neil), we look at Tweets to determine a linguistical and content analysis of shame. The research focuses on content analysis to define if a tweet contains language that is deduced as public shaming. Other factors relating to the tweet are the time, date, location of the author, and if it’s the initial post or a response to …

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, …