Psycholinguistics and Neurolinguistics Commons^™

Complementizers, Markedness, And Readjustment In Children's Comprehension Of Relatives And Clefts, Helen Goodluck

University of Massachusetts Occasional Papers in Linguistics

No abstract provided.

Thematic Relations In Parsing, Lyn Frazier, Charles Clifton Jr

University of Massachusetts Occasional Papers in Linguistics

No abstract provided.

The Role Of Context In Resolving Syntactic Ambiguity, Fernanda Ferreira

University of Massachusetts Occasional Papers in Linguistics

No abstract provided.

Identifying Phonemes And Syllables: Evidence From People Who Rapidly Reorder Speech, Nelson Cowan, Martin D. S. Braine, Lewis A. Leavitt

University of Massachusetts Occasional Papers in Linguistics

No abstract provided.

Front Matter, T. Daniel Seely

University of Massachusetts Occasional Papers in Linguistics

No abstract provided.

On Polysemy: A Philosophical, Psycholinguistic, And Computational Study, Jiangtian Li

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Most words in natural languages are polysemous, that is they have related but different meanings in different contexts. These polysemous meanings (senses) are marked by their structuredness, flexibility, productivity, and regularity. Previous theories have focused on some of these features but not all of them together. Thus, I propose a new theory of polysemy, which has two components. First, word meaning is actively modulated by broad contexts in a continuous fashion. Second, clustering arises from contextual modulations of a word and is then entrenched in our long term memory to facilitate future production and processing. Hence, polysemous senses are entrenched …

Violent Language On Indonesian Comedy Shows And Its Effects On Children Language Development, Iqbal Nurul Azhar

English Language Institute

No abstract provided.

Identification Of Key Factors In Texture Aversion And Acceptance, Robert Pellegrino Jr

Doctoral Dissertations

All five senses contribute to the experience of eating, giving feedback on whether to continue or stop the process of consumption. Sensory feedback loops help the consumer modulate food ingestion by determining nutritional value and possible hazards. Texture is one sense integral to the eating process that may lead to a food being accepted or rejected. However, which specific oral textural features contribute to overall acceptance and rejection of a food is not well understood. In our first study, we used three different cultures, Poland, U.S.A., and Singapore, to explore common texture features in food. Our results show that all …

Cross-Modal Distraction On Simultaneous Translation: Language Interference In Spanish-English Bilinguals, Violet Young

The Pegasus Review: UCF Undergraduate Research Journal

Bilingualism has been studied extensively in multiple disciplines, yet we are still unsure how exactly bilinguals think. Though the existence of a bilingual advantage is debated, this effect has been shown in tasks using selective attention. These tasks study the effects of language interference, where two types of interference are observed: interlingual (between-languages) and intralingual (within one language). This study examines language interference in Spanish-English bilinguals using an auditory-visual simultaneous translation experimental setup. Sixteen college English monolinguals and 17 college Spanish-English bilinguals were tested. Participants translated or repeated words displayed on a screen while ignoring distractor words played through headphones. …

Cross-Language Morphological Activation: The Case Of Arabic-English Bilinguals, Anas Alkhofi

Language, Literacy, and Sociocultural Studies ETDs

The role of morphology in bilingual lexical access is an under-investigated topic. Due to the overrepresentation of concatenative-based languages which inherently cannot adequately isolate effects of morphology from those of orthography and semantics, morphological processing had been relegated to a secondary role in lexical access. The present research utilized Arabic, a non-concatenative Semitic language, to investigate the role of morphology in bilingual language processing. Two experiments using translation recognition and masked lexical decision were conducted with Arabic-English bilinguals to answer two research questions: 1) Does (Arabic) morphology mediate cross-language activation? and 2) Is Arabic-English cross-language morphological activation task-dependent? Mixed effects …

Comparing Behavioral And Parent-Report Measures Of Executive Functioning In Deaf And Typically Hearing Children, Abeer Mohamed

Honors Scholar Theses

Executive functioning (EF) is a multidimensional aspect of development that encompasses various mental skills. Children’s utilization of inhibition, in particular, has proven to be one of the most important determinants of academic success. How deafness in children impacts their EF abilities is a question that remains divisive within deaf studies. Some suggest that auditory deprivation is a direct cause of poor EF, while others posit reduced or insufficient language experience that deaf children live with harms their EF development. We sought to explore this question further with a participant sample from our larger SLaM (Study of Language and Math) project. …

The Impact Of Text Orientation On Form Effects With Chinese, Japanese And English Readers, Huilan Yang

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Does visuospatial orientation influence form priming effects in parallel ways in Chinese and English? Given the differences in how orthographic symbols are presented in Chinese versus English, one might expect to find some differences in early word recognition processes and, hence, in the nature of form priming effects. According to perceptual learning accounts, form priming effects (i.e., “form” priming effects) should be influenced by text orientation (Dehaene, Cohen, Sigman, & Vinckier, 2005; Grainger & Holcomb, 2009). In contrast, Witzel, Qiao, and Forster’s (2011) abstract letter unit account proposes that the mechanism responsible for such effect acts at a totally abstract …

Eye-Movement Benchmarks In Heritage Language Reading, Olga Parshina, Anna K. Laurinavivhyute, Irina A. Sekerina

Publications and Research

This eye-tracking study establishes basic benchmarks of eye movements during reading in heritage language (HL) by Russian-speaking adults and adolescents of high (n = 21) and low proficiency (n = 27). Heritage speakers (HSs) read sentences in Cyrillic, and their eye movements were compared to those of Russian monolingual skilled adult readers, 8-yearold children and L2 learners. Reading patterns of HSs revealed longer mean fixation durations, lower skipping probabilities, and higher regressive saccade rates than in monolingual adults. High-proficient HSs were more similar to monolingual children, while low-proficient HSs performed on par with L2 learners. Low-proficient HSs differed from high-proficient …

Computational Approaches To The Syntax–Prosody Interface: Using Prosody To Improve Parsing, Hussein M. Ghaly

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Prosody has strong ties with syntax, since prosody can be used to resolve some syntactic ambiguities. Syntactic ambiguities have been shown to negatively impact automatic syntactic parsing, hence there is reason to believe that prosodic information can help improve parsing. This dissertation considers a number of approaches that aim to computationally examine the relationship between prosody and syntax of natural languages, while also addressing the role of syntactic phrase length, with the ultimate goal of using prosody to improve parsing.

Chapter 2 examines the effect of syntactic phrase length on prosody in double center embedded sentences in French. Data collected …

Beyond Exposure: Markers Of English Proficiency In School-Aged French–English Bilinguals, Erin Quirk

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Bilingual children show more variation in their language development than monolingual children, a fact that has been linked to their experience with their languages. Bilingual language experience also varies more than monolingual children's, both in terms of how much they hear the language spoken around them (exposure) and how much they speak the language themselves (production). This dissertation investigates the following aspects of the relationship between bilinguals’ language experience and development which are not well-understood: how children’s language production relates to their proficiency in that language, how children’s language exposure relates to receptive versus expressive and lexical versus grammatical skill, …

Testing The Perceptual Magnet Effect In Monolinguals And Bilinguals, Michael C. Stern

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Previous research has demonstrated an apparent warping of the perceptual space whereby the best exemplars or ‘prototypes’ of speech sound categories minimize the perceptual distance between themselves and neighboring stimuli in the same category. This phenomenon has been termed the ‘perceptual magnet effect’ (PME). The present study extends work on the PME to a speech sound category previously unstudied in this paradigm (American English /æ/), and to bilingual speech sound representation and perception. American English monolinguals and Turkish-English bilinguals completed identification tasks, category goodness rating tasks, and same-different discrimination tasks with synthesized vowel sounds from the American English /æ/ category—not …

The Interplay Between Interference Control And L2 Proficiency In L2 Auditory Sentence Comprehension In The Presence Of Verbal And Non-Verbal Masking, Jungna Kim

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Speech perception and comprehension in the presence of interfering auditory stimuli is a challenge for bilingual listeners (e.g., Ezzatian, Avivi-Reich, & Schneider, 2010; Krizman, Bradlow, Lam, & Kraus, 2017). How efficiently and skillfully listeners manage auditory interference may also be closely related to their ability to pay attention to a target and suppress irrelevant information. Based on Friedman and Miyake’s (2004) framework of interference control, this dissertation investigated the underlying mechanisms of late Korean-English bilingual individuals’ auditory interference control in the presence of auditory verbal and nonverbal masking and evaluated the potential interaction between L2 proficiency and interference control.

Two …

Relevant Angry Affect Slows Response Time To Commands, Aleah Combs

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

Previous research has found that emotional prosody can interact with speech perception and listeners’ processing of the meaning of particular word/emotion pairings(Kim and Sumner, 2017). What remains unclear is how this interactive processing can affect behavioral responses such as responses to imperatives. To answer this question,71 participants were presented with a series of commands given in a relevant affect.Commands were read either with angry prosody, happy prosody, or neutral prosody (control) and the participants were instructed to press the requested button on a response box as quickly and accurately as possible. All emotional states were simulated and normed for perceived …

Altered Speech: A Case-Study Of Identity-Driven Speech In A Dissociative Identity Disorder System, Sarah Domin

Scripps Senior Theses

The field of sociolinguistics has long been interested in how speech differs across groups. These studies have been focused on how demographic factors like class, race, and geographical region alter speech patterns. However, more recently, the agency of individuals to use language as a tool to construct a certain identity or persona has been highlighted (e.g., Podesva 2007; Eckert 1989; Eckert 2008). These studies are limited due to the nature of their methods, relying on either one individual with a limited scope of characteristics or on a larger group of people with many different variables at play other than identity. …

Events And Processes In Language And Mind, Alexis Wellwood, Angela Xiaoxue He, Haley Farkas

Baltic International Yearbook of Cognition, Logic and Communication

Semantic theories predict that the dimension for comparison given a sentence like A gleebed more than B depends on what the verb gleeb means: if gleeb expresses a property of events, the evaluation should proceed by number; if it expresses a property of processes, any of distance, duration, or number should be available. An adequate test of theories like this requires first determining, independently of language, the conditions under which people will understand a novel verb to be true of a series of events or a single ongoing process. We investigate this prior question by studying people’s representation of two …