Psycholinguistics and Neurolinguistics Commons^™

Prosodic Marking Of Focus In Autistic And Neurotypical Adults, Nishtha N. Trivedi

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Purpose: This study investigates how adult autistic speakers compare with neurotypical speakers in the manipulation of prosody to mark narrow and contrastive focus in American English. In particular, it explores whether the two groups differ in terms of pitch accent status, pitch accent type, and overall nuclear contour patterns in focus marking.

Methods: We conducted an experiment eliciting speech from autistic and neurotypical adults in which we compared their use of pitch accent in answers to wh-questions and in corrective statements.

Results: We found neurotypical speakers to primarily use H* to mark narrow focus on subjects and L+H* to mark …

Comparing Executive Control: Bilingualism's Cognitive Advantage, Malcolm Jasmin, Tonya Buchanan Ph.D.

Symposium Of University Research and Creative Expression (SOURCE)

The Stroop Task is a widely used method for studying executive control. It helps to understand cognitive processes like inhibition and attentional regulation to examine how reading text and naming colors can interfere with each other. The study intends to use the Stroop Task to explore the executive control abilities of both bilingual and monolingual individuals. Previous research has shown that bilingual individuals perform better in the Stroop test compared to those who only speak one language (Bialystok et al., 2010). The impact of this advantage is believed to be due to the need to switch between languages and prevent …

The Relationship Between Autistic Traits, Autistic Camouflaging, And Adults’ Representations Of Abstract And Social Concepts, Henry Tomiser, Katja Wiemer Dr.

Honors Capstones

Concrete concepts (e.g., BUTTON) can be experienced directly by the senses, whereas abstract concepts (e.g., FRIENDSHIP) cannot. Additionally, the mind may represent abstract concepts using more introspective, social, and emotional information than concrete concepts. Social difficulties are one defining feature of autism, and autistic individuals may use social camouflaging to hide these difficulties, but the precise nature of social processing in autism is not known. This study aims to explore possible links between autistic traits, autistic camouflaging, and mental representations of concepts. Participants gave open-ended definitions for concepts varying in concreteness and social content via an online survey. Responses were …

Gestalt Language Processing In Accredited Communication Sciences And Disorders Programs, William Harris

Master's Theses

The language development and usage of autistic individuals has become a controversial topic in many of the disciplines and professions providing support to these individuals. As a result, two theories of language processing have been proposed. Analytical language processing suggests that children process and develop language from its most simple form, a phoneme, to its most complex form, a word or phrase. However, the theory of gestalt language processing proposes that some children may instead extract larger, more complex language such as whole words and phrases first and break it down to the simpler language. Gestalt language processing is often …

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 …

Biomedical Text Readability After Hypernym Substitution With Fine-Tuned Large Language Models, Karl Swanson, Shuhan He, Josh Calvano, David Chen, Talar Telvizian, Lawrence Jiang, Paul Chong, Jacob Schwell, Gin Mak, Jarone Lee

SKMC Student Presentations and Publications

The advent of patient access to complex medical information online has highlighted the need for simplification of biomedical text to improve patient understanding and engagement in taking ownership of their health. However, comprehension of biomedical text remains a difficult task due to the need for domain-specific expertise. We aimed to study the simplification of biomedical text via large language models (LLMs) commonly used for general natural language processing tasks involve text comprehension, summarization, generation, and prediction of new text from prompts. Specifically, we finetuned three variants of large language models to perform substitutions of complex words and word phrases in …

Starting Small Or Big: An Artificial Language Paradigm, Rachel Evans

LSU Master's Theses

Previous research on language acquisition has raised two competing hypotheses: Starting Small and Starting Big. Starting Small states that limitations (small working memory capacity, simple structure, short string length, etc.) are beneficial for language learning, which explains why children are able to acquire language more easily than adults. Starting Big proposes the opposite, that input of chunks of language rather than individual units creates a stronger and more fluid understanding of grammatical relations between words. The current study aimed to investigate these theories in the context of an artificial language paradigm using a forced-choice task, a production task, a working …

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 …

Re-Thinking L1-L2 Similarities And Differences In English Proficiency: Insights From The English Reading Online (Enro) Project., Noam Siegelman, Irina A. Sekerina, Victor Kuperman

Publications and Research

This article presents the ENglish Reading Online (ENRO) project that offers data on English reading and listening comprehension from 7,338 university-level advanced learners and native speakers of English representing 19 countries. The database also includes estimates of reading rate and seven component skills of English, including vocabulary, spelling, and grammar, as well as rich demographic and language background data. We first demonstrate high reliability for ENRO tests and their convergent validity with existing meta-analyses. We then provide a bird's-eye view of first (L1) and second (L2) language comparisons and examine the relative role of various predictors of reading and listening …

Prediction In Bilingual Sentence Processing: Is It Linked To Production?, Meir Natalia, Olga Parshina, Irina A. Sekerina

Publications and Research

The Unified Competition Model (MacWhinney, 2012) accounts for cross-linguistic differences in thematic role mapping. We investigated production and predictive use of accusative case morphology in Russian-Hebrew bilingual children. We also investigated the role of production in predictive processing testing the Prediction-by-Production Account (Pickering & Garrod, 2018) vs. the Missing Surface Inflection Hypothesis (Prévost & White, 2000). Three groups of children aged 4–8 participated: Russian-Hebrew-speaking bilinguals, Russian-speaking and Hebrew-speaking monolingual controls. All children participated in the accusative case production and Visual-World eye-tracking comprehension experiments. Bilinguals were tested in both of their languages. The results of the study confirmed the predictions of …

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 Effects Of Verbal Interference On Memory Outcomes: Implications For Understanding How Language Shapes Cognition, Malcolm Jasmin

Undergraduate Honors Theses

With this capstone I examine the impact of verbal interference on attention and memory, particularly in the absence of explicit articulation. Challenging the conventional view that language solely influences explicit communication, I investigate the manner verbal interference affects cognitive processes at an implicit level. The theoretical framework integrates the linguistic-relativity hypothesis, which posits that language shapes cognitive functions, and the universalist hypothesis, which argues for cognitive independence from language. By reviewing relevant literature, I intend to shed light on how verbal interference disrupts attention and memory across varied contexts, including cultural background, emotional state, environmental factors, task complexity, and modality. …

Attention-Language Interface In Multilingual Assessment Instrument For Narratives (Main), Irina A. Sekerina, Olga Parshina, Vladislava Staroverova, Natalia Gagarina

Publications and Research

The current study employed the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN) to test comprehension of narrative macrostructure in Russian in a visual world eye-tracking paradigm. The four MAIN visual narratives are structurally similar and question referents’ goals and internal states (IS). Previous research revealed that children’s MAIN comprehension differed among the four narratives in German, Swedish, Russian, and Turkish, but it is not clear why. We tested whether the difference in comprehension was (a) present, (b) caused by complicated inferences in understanding IS compared with goals, and (c) ameliorated by orienting visual attention to the referents whose IS was critical …

Bulgarian Clitics Are Sensitive To Number Attraction, Tanya Ivanova-Sullivan, Irina A. Sekerina, Sol Lago

Publications and Research

Previous research has shown that the computation of subject-verb number agreement can be derailed by the presence of syntactically illicit nouns, a phenomenon called agreement attraction. By contrast, the incidence of agreement attraction with anaphoric dependencies is less clear: Previous work has mostly focused on reflexives and strong pronouns, which sometimes show attraction and other times do not. Meanwhile, research on clitics – a different class of pronominal anaphora – is scarcer. To expand the empirical record, we examined clitic pronouns in an under-researched language, Bulgarian. The results of a large sample eye-tracking study showed clear agreement attraction effects in …

Attraction Effects In Referential Dependencies, Emily Graham

Linguistics & TESOL Dissertations - Archive

This dissertation explores the differences in the real-time processing of long-distance dependencies and how the processing of these dependencies functions within a cue-based retrieval model. During subject-verb agreement (SVA) comprehension, the processing of the verb is influenced by attractor noun phrases (NPs) that cannot control agreement. Referential dependencies, however, are less susceptible to such attraction effects. Many studies examining ungrammatical sentences in which a reflexive or pronoun mismatches with its antecedent in number/gender have indicated that the processing of these referentially dependent elements is largely uninfluenced by grammatically unavailable attractor NPs. These disparities have been taken to indicate that SVA …

Processing Visual Form Information During L1 And L2 Lexical Access, Xinwen Zhang

Linguistics & TESOL Dissertations - Archive

This study investigates visual word recognition in the first language (L1) and second language (L2). Several studies in this area have reported L1/L2 processing differences at the lexical form level; however, the nature of these differences remains a matter of theoretical debate. The present study examines the extent to which these differences might relate to disparities in orthographic processing in the L1 and L2. Specifically, it uses masked identity priming to investigate whether skilled L2 readers differ from skilled L1 readers in terms of the efficiency with which they access abstract lexical representations during the early stages of visual word …

Re-Globalizing Yorkville: The Languages On Shop Signs In A Non-Migrant Neighborhood, Lisabeth G. Dashman

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

The term “linguistic landscape” is used to describe the usage and placement of language in public places of a specific geographic area, such as on buildings, street names, pedestrian notices, vehicular warnings, and advertising billboards. Studies of a space’s linguistic landscape typically involve an accounting and analysis of the visible signs and/or the presentation of bystanders’ or researchers’ thoughts and observations. This study instead probes the intentions of the sign creators: the owners of the façade sign and the business it advertises. The façade sign, often called the shop sign, is frequently the first image for a business that a …

Does Heightened Perceptual Encoding In Blind Individuals Extend To Word Learning?, Lindsay N. Harris, Marissa Renee Bamberger

CISLL Publications

Past research reported blind participants tend to encode sensory details of encounters with stimuli they will later recall or recollect, whereas sighted individuals tend to abstract meaning from sensory information when encoding memories. Here we ask whether blind individuals’ use of perceptual in addition to semantic encoding extends to a task—word learning—whose purpose amounts to semantically encoding the word and definition. After studying the definitions of spoken or written words, blind braille readers (n = 23) and sighted print readers (n = 20) re-encountered each word and indicated whether it was previously presented in the same modality. Analyses …