The brain's neural responses to words of different frequencies provide information on lexical organization and the cognitive processes involved in word identification and retrieval of meaning. Monolingual research has shown that exposure to high frequency words yields less cognitive difficulty than low frequency words as demonstrated by smaller N400 waves within even-related potential (ERP) methodology. The purpose of the present study was to compare frequency effects in adult native (L1) and non-native (L2) speakers of English during a sentence reading task embedded with high and low frequency word-pairs. Both L1 and L2 groups produced N400 waves of larger amplitudes for high frequency words compared to low frequency words that peaked around the 400 ms time mark. Group comparison found no significant difference in N400 wave amplitude and peak latency between both groups. The results are discussed with respect to theories of L2 word learning and lexical organization.

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The process of generating a phonological code from print is widely described as automatic. This claim is tested in Chapter 1 by assessing whether phonological recoding uses central attention in the context of the Psychological Refractory Period (PRP) paradigm. Task 1 was a tone discrimination task and Task 2 was reading aloud. Nonword letter length and grapheme-phoneme complexity yielded additive effects with SOA in Experiments 1 and 2 suggesting that <em>assembled phonology</em> uses central attention. Neighborhood density (N) yielded additive effects with SOA in Experiments 3 and 4, suggesting that one form of lexical contribution to phonological recoding also uses central attention. Taken together, the results of these experiments are <em>inconsistent</em> with the widespread claim that phonological codes are computed automatically. Chapter 2 begins by reconsidering the utility of ?automaticity? as an explanatory framework. It is argued that automaticity should be replaced by accounts that make more specific claims about how processing unfolds. Experiment 5 yielded underadditivity of long-lag word repetition priming with decreasing SOA, suggesting that an early component of the lexical contribution to phonology does not use central attention. There was no evidence of Task 1 slowing with decreasing SOA in Experiments 6 and 7, suggesting that phonological recoding processes are postponed until central attention becomes available. Theoretical development in this field (and others) will be facilitated by abandoning the idea that skilled performance inevitably means that all the underlying processes are automatic.

Natural languages display a great variety of different word orders, and one of the major challenges facing statistical machine translation is in modelling these differences. This thesis is motivated by a survey of 110 different language pairs drawn from the Europarl project, which shows that word order differences account for more variation in translation performance than any other factor. This wide ranging analysis provides compelling evidence for the importance of research into reordering. There has already been a great deal of research into improving the quality of the word order in machine translation output. However, there has been very little analysis of how best to evaluate this research. Current machine translation metrics are largely focused on evaluating the words used in translations, and their ability to measure the quality of word order has not been demonstrated. In this thesis we introduce novel metrics for quantitatively evaluating reordering. Our approach isolates the word order in translations by using word alignments. We reduce alignment information to permutations and apply standard distance metrics to compare the word order in the reference to that of the translation. We show that our metrics correlate more strongly with human judgements of word order quality than current machine translation metrics. We also show that a combined lexical and reordering metric, the LRscore, is useful for training translation model parameters. Humans prefer the output of models trained using the LRscore as the objective function, over those trained with the de facto standard translation metric, the BLEU score. The LRscore thus provides researchers with a reliable metric for evaluating the impact of their research on the quality of word order.

It is widely accepted that Old English personal pronouns often turn up in ‘special’ positions, i.e. positions in which functionally equivalent nominals rarely, if ever, appear. Leading theories of Old English syntax (e.g. van Kemenade 1987, Pintzuk 1991, 1996, Hulk & van Kemenade 1997, Kroch & Taylor 1997) account for the syntax of specially placed pronouns in different ways, but all treat special placement as a freely available option. Focusing on pronominal objects of prepositions in particular, this thesis shows, firstly, that current theories fail to account for the variety of special positions in which these pronouns appear and argues that at least three special positions must be recognised. The central concern of this thesis, however, is whether special placement is the freely available option that leading theories assume. Drawing on evidence from a number of descriptive studies of the syntax of pronominal objects of prepositions (e.g. Wende 1915, Taylor 2008, Alcorn 2009), statistical evidence is presented to show that, in a number of contexts, the probability of special placement is either too high or else too low to be plausibly ascribed to free variation. The thesis explores the linguistic basis of each of the statistically significant parameters identified, finding answers in some cases and intriguing puzzles in others.

This dissertation investigates the cognitive relevance of Arabic morphology and diglossia in spoken word recognition. The current study asks four main questions: (1) Does Arabic morphology influence word recognition? (2) Which view of Arabic morphology (i.e., the root-based or the stem-based) has an online role in spoken word recognition? (3) Does Arabic diglossia (i.e., using colloquial Arabic (CA) and Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) as the dominant language of speaking and literacy, respectively) affect spoken word processing? (4) How can Arabic diglossia affect spoken word recognition? Three different lexical decision experiments and one phoneme-monitoring task were designed and conducted on a group of 140 literate native speakers of Jordanian colloquial Arabic (JCA). In the first experiment, the participant responded to MSA words varied in their surface, root, and stem frequencies. Results revealed that the token frequencies of the three tested units affected the speed of word recognition to the same extent. This suggests that both roots and stems, along with the surface words, are valid units of Arabic mental lexicon. The next two experiments compared the processing of JCA and MSA words when embedded in sentences of the same or the other variety of Arabic and when primed by intra-variety vs. cross-variety words. Results showed a lexical switching cost only when the target word is processed in the sentential context. Moreover, while the sentence experiment reported a processing advantage for MSA words relative to JCA words, the priming experiment found a processing advantage for JCA words. The priming effects were larger when the related primes were presented in JCA relative to the priming effects of the MSA primes. The fourth experiment compared phoneme monitoring of consonants and short vowels in JCA and MSA words. Results showed a detection advantage for consonants relative to short vowels and no difference between the carrier words of the two varieties of Arabic. On the whole, the last three experiments suggest that both spoken language (i.e., CA) experience and literary language (i.e., MSA) experience can affect auditory word recognition. This work emphasizes the relevance of (alphabetic) literacy and experimental task in speech processing. / February 2017

The purpose of this paper was to do an investigation of adverbials in fiction and non-fiction texts translated into Swedish and English. Adverbials are more flexible regarding position in sentences than other constituents. It has been of interest to find out if there are any remarkable differences in mean-ing due to repositioned adverbials in translation, and the focus has been on adverbials in initial, medial and final position. The results showed that most adverbials retained their position, and also their meaning in translation. There were no noteworthy differences in how adverbials were translated in fiction compared to non-fiction. The preferred position of adverbials was the end position for most types of adverbials in English and Swedish.

Under the framework of dual-route theory of speech comprehension, two neurological routes are simultaneously active during speech decoding, the dorsal stream and the ventral stream. The dorsal stream is argued to be a sound processor whereas the ventral stream is a meaning processor, hence in cognitive terms, they are called the sound component and the meaning component respectively. Hypotheses concerning the processing speed and response accuracy of these two cognitive components were tested on compound words in Modern Mandarin Chinese. Four experiments were run contrasting, the sound-based task and the meaning-based task, corresponding to each of the two cognitive components. In Experiment 1 and 2, the Task effect was tested on one set of words in which the word-level and word-initial-syllable frequencies were controlled. In Experiment 3 and 4, the Task effect was tested on a different set of words in which semantic transparency was controlled. Multiple regression analyses integrating the data collected in Experiment 1-4 were conducted to test which language theory was preferred, the probability-based theory, the rule-based theory or the integrative theory. The probability-based theory suggests that speech comprehension of compound words relies only on the probability distribution of linguistic units. The rule-based theory suggests that speech comprehension of compound words relies only on phrase-structural rules. The integrative theory suggests that speech comprehension of compound words relies on both the probabilities of linguistic units and phrase-structural rules. It was suggested that the integrative theory explains the data best, but further data testing is needed to confirm this hypothesis. The results of the present study provide evidence for functional trade-off of the sound and meaning components, garden path effects during parsing opaque words and the possibility of the role of a mirror system in human speech comprehension.