Psycholinguistics and Neurolinguistics Commons^™

Quantifying Coherence In A Transdiagnostic Sample: A Methodological Investigation Of Computationally-Derived Coherence Using Ambulatory Assessment, Taylor L. Fedechko

LSU Master's Theses

Schizophrenia is a clinical diagnosis assigned to individuals that experience positive (e.g., hallucinations and delusions), negative (e.g., blunted affect), and disorganized (e.g., incoherent speech) symptoms. One particularly disabling symptom is incoherence, which is defined as the meaning-based relationship between ideas. This symptom can drastically affect an individual’s quality of life by affecting areas such as social and occupational functioning. Currently, the mechanism behind this symptom is unknown and requires further study. One way to examine incoherence is to understand its level of expression in other clinical populations. With the advent of computationally-derived natural language processing (NLP), coherence can be quantified …

The Processing Of Input With Differential Objectmarking By Heritage Spanish Speakers, Jill Jegerski, Irina A. Sekerina

Publications and Research

Heritage Spanish speakers and adult immigrant bilinguals listened to wh-questions with the differential object marker a (quién/a quién ‘who/whoACC’) while their eye movements across four referent pictures were tracked. The heritage speakers were less accurate than the adult immigrants in their verbal responses to the questions, leaving objects unmarked for case at a rate of 18%, but eye movement data suggested that the two groups were similar in their comprehension, with both starting to look at the target picture at the same point in the question and identifying the target sooner with a quién ‘whoACC’ than with quién ‘who’ questions.

Storytelling Study, Samantha Irene Pepe

Honors Theses and Capstones

Expressive prosody (i.e., a manner of communication that is characterized by lively rhythm and tempo) and inexpressive prosody (i.e., monotone speech) present different environments for listening to a story during a read-aloud session. This study aims to assess whether there are visual attention differences for preschoolers in these varied prosodic environments and how this affects comprehension.

The Anonymity Heuristic: How Surnames Stop Identifying People When They Become Trademarks, Russell W. Jacobs

Dickinson Law Review (2017-Present)

This Article explores the following question central to trademark law: if a homograph has both a surname and a trademark interpretation will consumers consider those interpretations as intrinsically overlapping or the surname and trademark as completely separate and unrelated words? While trademark jurisprudence typically has approached this question from a legal perspective or with assumptions about consumer behavior, this Article builds on the Law and Behavioral Science approach to legal scholarship by drawing from the fields of psychology, linguistics, economics, anthropology, sociology, and marketing.

The Article concludes that consumers will regard the two interpretations as separate and unrelated, processing surname …

Bilingualism, Executive Function, And Beyond: Questions And Insights, Irina A. Sekerina, Lauren Spradlin, Virginia V. Valian

Publications and Research

The papers in this volume continue the quest to investigate the moderating factors and understand the mechanisms underlying effects (or lack thereof) of bilingualism on cognition in children, adults, and the elderly. They grew out of a 2015 workshop organized by two of us (Irina Sekerina and Virginia Valian) at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, funded by NSF’s Developmental and Learning Sciences and Linguistics Programs (grant #1451631). The workshop’s goal was to bring together researchers whose fields did not always overlap and who could learn from each other’s insights. In attendance were linguists working on …

Interference In Language Processing Reflects Direct-Access Memory Retrieval: Evidence From Drift-Diffusion Modeling, Daniel Parker, Adam An

Arts & Sciences Articles

Many studies on memory retrieval in language processing have identified similarity-based interference as a key determinant of comprehension. The broad consensus is that similarity-based interference reflects erroneous retrieval of a non-target item that matches some of the retrieval cues. However, the mechanisms responsible for such effects remain debated. Activation-based models of retrieval (e.g., Lewis & Vasishth, 2005) claim that any differences in processing difficulty due to interference in standard RT measures and judgments reflect differences in the speed of retrieval (i.e., the amount of time it takes to retrieve a memory item). But this claim is inconsistent with empirical data …

Cue Combinatorics In Memory Retrieval For Anaphora, Daniel Parker

Arts & Sciences Articles

Many studies have shown that memory retrieval for real-time language processing relies on a cue-based access mechanism, which allows the cues available at the retrieval site to directly access the target representation in memory. An open question is how different types of cues are combined at retrieval to create a single retrieval probe (“cue combinatorics”). This study addresses this question by testing whether retrieval for antecedent-reflexive dependencies combines cues in a linear (i.e., additive) or nonlinear (i.e., multiplicative) fashion. Results from computational simulations and a reading time experiment show that target items that match all the cues of the reflexive …

Investigating Metrical Context Effects On Anticipatory Coarticulation In Connected Speech Development, Jillian Adkins, Christina Gildersleeve-Neumann, Melissa A. Redford

Speech and Hearing Sciences Faculty Publications and Presentations

If rhythm acquisition is influenced by the development of articulatory timing, then metrical structure might be expected to condition this timing. This study tested this hypothesis by investigating anticipatory effects of an upcoming noun on the production of a preceding determiner, under the assumption that anticipatory coarticulation indexes chunking. Simple S-V-O sentences were elicited from 5-year-olds, 8-year-olds, and adults. The V was either monosyllabic packed or disyllabic patted. The O was a determiner phrase where nouns varied either in onset place-of-articulation (POA; tack vs. cat) or in their rhymes (tack vs. toot). Acoustic analyses of determiner schwa F1 and F2 …

Conceptual Representation In Bilinguals: A Feature-Based Approach, Eriko Matsuki

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

A challenge for bilinguals is that translation equivalent words often do not convey exactly the same conceptual information. A bilingual exhibits a “semantic accent” when they comprehend or use a word in one language in a way that is influenced by knowledge of its translation equivalent. Semantic accents are well-captured by feature-based models, such as the Distributed Conceptual Feature model and the Shared (Distributed) Asymmetrical model, however, few empirical studies have used semantic features to provide direct evidence for these models. The goal of this thesis is to use a feature-based approach to identify conceptual differences in translation equivalent words …

A Memory-Based Explanation Of Antecedent-Ellipsis Mismatches New Insights From Computational Modeling, Daniel Parker

Arts & Sciences Articles

An active question in psycholinguistics is whether or not the parser and grammar reflect distinct cognitive systems. Recent evidence for a distinct-systems view comes from cases of ungrammatical but acceptable antecedent-ellipsis mismatches (e.g., *Tom kicked Bill, and Matt was kicked by Tom too.). The finding that these mismatches show varying degrees of acceptability has been presented as evidence for the use of extra-grammatical parsing strategies that restructure a mismatched antecedent to satisfy the syntactic constraints on ellipsis (Arregui et al. 2006; Kim et al. 2011). In this paper, I argue that it is unnecessary to posit a special class of …

The Cognitive Effects Of Late Bilingualism On Executive Functions: Lifelong Benefits, Rachel Casper

Intuition: The BYU Undergraduate Journal of Psychology

Late bilinguals, those who learn a language past the critical period, are often thought to not receive much benefits from their language learning in comparison to their early bilingual counterparts. A large of body of recent research suggests otherwise. Late bilinguals receive the same cognitive benefits as early bilinguals; these benefits are in higher levels of executive functions, specifically in inhibitory control and attentional switching. Higher levels of executive functions assist learners in improving their mental processing and cognitive health over the course of their lifetime. Aging bilinguals have greater cognitive health due to more white and gray matter density. …

De-Centering The Monolingual: A Psychophysiological Study Of Heritage Speaker Language Processing, Christen N. Madsen Ii

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Models of grammar, processing and acquisition are primarily built on evidence from monolinguals and adult learners of a second language. Heritage speakers, who are bilinguals of a societal minority language, acquire and use their heritage language in informal settings; but who live, work, and are educated in the societal majority language. The differences between heritage speakers and both monolinguals and adult second language learners are extensive: heritage speakers are not educated in the heritage language, their input is typically not from a prestige variety of the heritage language, and they are dominant in the majority language, using it more frequently …

Syntactic Processing And Cross-Linguistic Structural Priming In Heritage Spanish Speakers And Late Bilinguals: Effects Of Exposure To L2 English On Processing Illicit Structures In L1 Spanish, Ian Phillips

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study examines real-time heritage language syntactic processing and tests the hypothesis that some commonly observed properties of heritage languages—apparent instability in grammatical knowledge and divergence from monolingual grammatical norms—can be attributed to cross-linguistic influence from the socially dominant language during online processing. To test this hypothesis, a novel cross-linguistic structural priming experiment based on self-paced listening was conducted with a group of heritage Spanish speakers and late Spanish-English bilinguals to test whether exposure to preposition stranding in English—a feature of core syntax that does not exist in Spanish—could facilitate processing of (ungrammatical) preposition stranding in a subsequently encountered Spanish …

Not All Phrases Are Equally Attractive: New Evidence For Selective Agreement Attraction Effects In Comprehension, Daniel Parker, Adam An

Arts & Sciences Articles

Research on memory retrieval during sentence comprehension suggests that similarity-based interference is mediated by the grammatical function of the distractor. For instance, Van Dyke and McElree (2011) observed interference during retrieval for subject-verb thematic binding when the distractor occurred as an oblique argument inside a prepositional phrase (PP), but not when it occurred as a core argument in direct object position. This contrast motivated the proposal that constituent encodings vary in the distinctiveness of their memory representations based on an argument hierarchy, which makes them differentially susceptible to interference. However, this hypothesis has not been explicitly tested. The present …

Dual Route Model Of Idiom Processing In The Bilingual Context, Tianshu Zhu

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The dual route model predicts that idiomatic phrases show a processing advantage over matched novel phrases. This model postulates that familiar phrases are processed by a faster direct route, and novel phrases are processed by an indirect route. This thesis investigated the role of familiar form and concept in direct route activation. Study 1 provided norming evidence for experimental stimuli selection. Study 2 examined whether direct route can be activated for translated Chinese idioms in Chinese-English bilinguals. Bilinguals listened to the idiom up until the last word (e.g., draw a snake and add), then saw either the idiom ending (e.g., …

Russian Sentence Corpus: Benchmark Measures Of Eye Movements In Reading In Russian, Anna K. Laurinavichyute, Irina A. Sekerina, Svetlana Alexeeva, Kristina Bagdasaryan, Reinhold Kliegl

Publications and Research

This article introduces a new corpus of eye movements in silent reading—the Russian Sentence Corpus (RSC). Russian uses the Cyrillic script, which has not yet been investigated in cross-linguistic eye movement research. As in every language studied so far, we confirmed the expected effects of low-level parameters, such as word length, frequency, and predictability, on the eye movements of skilled Russian readers. These findings allow us to add Slavic languages using Cyrillic script (exemplified by Russian) to the growing number of languages with different orthographies, ranging from the Roman-based European languages to logographic Asian ones, whose basic eye movement benchmarks …

The Effect Of Idiomatic Language On Event Processing, Katrina Turick

Honors Scholar Theses

Mental representations of object states are necessary to keep track of changing objects in the world. When the object undergoes change and there are two representations, it creates competition between the object states. This is seen in sentences during which an object changes and is then subsequently referred to again (e.g. “The chef will chop the onion. And then, he will sniff the onion.”). When there is a larger degree of change between the states of the object, there is more competition, which is indicated by an increase in reading time when the object is referred to for the second …

Fresa Style In Mexico: Sociolinguistic Stereotypes And The Variability Of Social Meanings, Rebeca Martinez Gomez

Linguistics ETDs

This dissertation examines the flexibility in the social meanings of sociolinguistic stereotypes and how linguistic and non-linguistic information affect these meanings. The investigation consists of four empirical studies surrounding the case of fresas in Mexico –members of the upper class that are perceived as using a unique linguistic style.

Study 1 investigates the linguistic and non-linguistic characteristics associated with the fresa stereotype. Through a qualitative analysis of 64 webpages and 3 performances of the style, it is shown that fresasare perceived as the counterpart of another construct, nacos,and that their linguistic style is linked to English due to …

Reasoning With Pseudowords: How Properties Of Novel Verbal Stimuli Influence Item Difficulty And Linguistic-Group Score Differences On Cognitive Ability Assessments, Paul Agnello

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Pseudowords (words that are not real but resemble real words in a language) have been used increasingly as a technique to reduce contamination due to construct-irrelevant variance in assessments of verbal fluid reasoning (Gf). However, despite pseudowords being researched heavily in other psychology sub-disciplines, they have received little attention in cognitive ability testing contexts. Thus, there has been an assumption that all pseudowords work equally and work equally well for all test-takers. The current research examined three objectives with the first being whether changes to the pseudoword properties of length and wordlikeness (how much a pseudoword resembles a typical or …

Auditory Distraction On Visual Translation: Language Interference In Spanish-English Bilinguals, Violet A. Young

Digital Repository: Showcase of Undergraduate Research Excellence

No abstract provided.