This thesis brings together three studies, beginning with a preliminary qualitative study to survey the scene, and expanding by means of corroboration by an actual survey with a questionnaire, in order to investigate the mechanisms of foreign language anxiety (FLA). Surveying the scene by collecting exploratory qualitative and quantitative data from anxious learners, for gaining new insights from these individuals' perspectives, provided first the insight and then the necessary evidence that reframing anxiety as the "anxious self" - anxious about what to do in L2 classes or L2 spoken environments, about how others will respond and about the likelihood of taking successful action in L2 when necessary - might offer a useful approach to link anxiety research to other areas of second language acquisition (SLA), where the importance of the self-concept has been recognised, as well as to clinical psychology, which has long employed relaxation, guided-imagery and systematic de-sensitization in shaping the self-concept of the individual. A five-week intervention programme, based on this new approach, was designed with the purpose of reducing learners' anxiety levels. Using a combination of quantitative and qualitative measures, the impact of the programme on Turkish learners of English was documented, and results indicated that participants showed significantly lower levels of language anxiety, neuroticism, L2 (second language) stage fright, safety-seeking behaviours and quitting tendencies at the end of the programme. The findings also confirmed that visualisation training helped learners to improve their anxious self images, which resulted in increased levels of self-confidence and resilience to anxiety. The employment of relaxation techniques was shown to effectively relieve the somatic symptoms of language anxiety. The use of systematic de-sensitization activities showed positive results over the course of the study, supporting participants' ability to remain relaxed in anxiety-provoking situations. Co-operation and rapport in the classroom had also improved by the end of the programme and findings confirmed that conceptualising anxiety as a dimension of self could be a productive and effective approach, offering rich pedagogical implications.

High variability phonetic training (HVPT) has been shown to improve non-native speakers’ perceptual performance in discriminating difficult second language phonemic contrasts (Bradlow, Akahane-Yamada, Pisoni, & Tohkura, 1999; Bradlow, Pisoni, Akahane-Yamada, & Tohkura, 1997; Lively, Logan, & Pisoni, 1993; Lively, Pisoni, Yamada, Tohkura, & Yamada, 1994; Logan, Lively, & Pisoni, 1991). The perceptual learning can be generalized to novel words (Wang & Munro, 2004), novel speakers (Nishi & Kewley-Port, 2007; Richie & Kewley-Port, 2008) and even to speech production (Bradlow et al., 1997). However, the rigidity of the laboratory training settings has limited applications to real life situations. The current thesis examined the effectiveness of a new phonetic training program - the Spoken English Discrimination (SED) training. SED training is a computerized individual training program designed to improve non-native speakers’ bottom-up perceptual sensitivity to discriminate difficult second language (L2) phonemic contrasts. It combines a number of key training features including 1) natural spoken stimuli, 2) highly variable stimuli spoken by multiple speakers, 3) multi-talker babble as background noise and 4) an adaptive staircase procedure that individualizes the level of background babble. The first experiment investigated the potential benefits of different versions of the SED training program. The effect of stimulus variability (single speaker vs. multiple speakers) and design of background babble (constant vs. adaptive staircase) were examined using English voiceless-voiced plosives /t/-/d/ phonemic contrast as the training materials. No improvements were found in the identification accuracy on the /t/-/d/ contrast in post-test, but identification improvements were found on the untrained English /ε/-/æ/ phonemic contrast. The effectiveness of SED training was re-examined in Chapter 3 using the English /ε/-/æ/ phonemic contrast as the training material. Three experiments were conducted to compare the SED training paradigms that had the background babble implemented either at a constant level (Constant SED) or using the adaptive staircase procedure (Adaptive Staircase SED), and the longevity of the training effects. Results revealed that the Adaptive Staircase SED was the more effective paradigm as it generated greater training benefits and its effect generalized better to the untrained /t/-/d/ phonemic contrast. Training effects from both SED paradigms retained six months after the last training section. Before examining whether SED training leads to improvements in speech production, Chapter 4 investigated the phonetics perception pattern of L1 Mandarin Malaysian speakers, L1 Malaysian English speakers and native British English speakers. The production intelligibility of the L1 Mandarin speakers was also evaluated by the L1 Malaysian English speakers and native British English speakers. Single category assimilation was observed in both L1 Mandarin and L1 Malaysian English speakers whereby the /ε/ and /æ/ phonetic sounds were assimilated to a single/æ/ category (Best, McRoberts, & Goodell, 2001). While the British English speakers showed ceiling performance for all phonetic categories involved, the L1 Malaysian English speakers had difficulty identifying the British English /ε/ phoneme and the L1 Mandarin speakers had difficulty identifying the /d/ final, /ε/ and /æ/ phonemes. As seen by their perceptual performance, the L1 Mandarin speakers also had difficulty producing distinct /d/ final, /ε/ and /æ/ phonemes. Two experiments in Chapter 5 examined whether the effects of SED training generalizes to speech production. The results showed that L1 Malaysian English speakers and native British English speakers found different SED paradigms to be more effective in inducing the production improvement. Only the production intelligibility of the /æ/ phoneme improved as a result of SED training. Collectively, the seven experiments in this thesis showed that SED training was effective in improving Malaysian speakers’ perception and production performance of difficult English phonemic contrasts. Further research should be conducted to examine the efficacy of SED training in improving speech perception and production across different training materials and in speakers who come from different language backgrounds.

This thesis examines phonetic symbolism, the meaningful use of individual speech sounds to convey and infer size, shape, and motion. Chapter 1 presents a summary of the literature. Though there is evidence suggesting that phonetic symbolism exists and is pervasive, the literature presents several research opportunities. In nine experiments and one pre-test (total N = 357 participants), we use graded stimuli throughout, which is uncommon in the previous research. This use of non-dichotomous stimuli allows for the hypotheses that have arisen from a gestural model of language evolution and the Frequency Code to be more fully investigated. In the first set of experiments (Chapter 2), we demonstrate that phonetic marking for size is graded, i.e., it does not mark just very large and very small objects. In Chapter 3, the focus is on marking for size and shape, and their possible interactions. We show that marking for size and for shape are not as in line with each other as previous works might suggest. Marking for movement is the topic of Chapter 4, which includes moving stimuli, not just implied motion. We find that trait permanence is at play with the naming for motion tasks, with marking only occurring when naming the motion itself. Finally, a concluding chapter summarizes and further expounds on the results of the thesis, and how those results relate to the hypotheses suggested by gestural models and frequency code. The conclusion also includes a section of current and future research directions.

The thesis is based on the learning of word-orders in a cross-lingUistic and historic perspective. In linguistics, a certain hannony is expected in word order. X-bars of a language are supposed to be right-branched or left-branched. So, a language, which is right-branched has its head usually first, and a language, which is left-branched has its head usually last. In the generative framework, linguists argue that when a child encounters a structure where the head is to the right, she will assume that the whole language is constructed this way. Cognitive scientists like Christiansen argue that inconsistencies, that means a mixture of right- and left- branching are more difficult to learn because of recursive embeddings, and thus inconsistencies should simply die out or never come into existence in the first place. Greenberg established language universals after having considered forty languages. These universals would show consistencies in an X-bar branching, but Greenberg also cited exceptions and spoke of statistical universals. We are interested in these inconsistencies. If they are really more difficult to learn, why do they evolve in the first place and why are they often quite consistent in language evolution, i.e. they do not die out. Historical linguistics often argue that languages tend to develop from one consistent language via a transitional one and then develop again towards a consistent language. Inconsistent structures exist in most languages although there is a statistical trend towards consistencies. So, how do languages change and what makes persons learn at one stage a language differently and what are the mechanisms involved in learning that we can see as an end-result in language change. We will examine some of these phenomena, when we discuss�· language change in Romance, the introduction of postpositions in Gennan, and the role of the infinite verb in Gennan and in Old English. Experimental work has been done for the frontability of Gennan particles, which is closely linked to the introduction of postpositions. We did an experiment in English language for the role of the infinite verb in verb-final languages such as Gennan and replicated this experiment in French because of its richer verb morphology because this gives us a greater distinction between finite and infinite verbs. An SRN-simulation on the role of the infinite verb supports the experiments.

This thesis investigates the social construction of an increasingly relevant aspect of social life, namely mental depression, in British and Chinese news media over the last two decades, aiming at delivering a contribution to people’s understanding of the link between discourse and the social reality of depression. A discourse is understood as the totality of all the texts that have been produced within a particular discourse community. The special discourse analysed consists of two diachronic corpora including articles in which the lexical item depression or 抑郁症 (yiyuzheng, ‘depression’) occurs in British and Chinese national newspapers from 1984 to 2009. Corpus analysis is complemented by a targeted paraphrase analysis of the paraphrastic content expressed in the context of relevant keywords. My findings suggest that in the British corpus, there has been a circular movement in the construction of the meanings of depression, swinging between a psychological problem that needs psychotherapy and a biochemical condition that needs pharmaceutical intervention. The Chinese corpus constructs ‘抑郁症’ (yiyuzheng, ‘depression’) as a problem that is normally caused by external social factors, and therefore psychological support and improvement of the social environment have been represented as more helpful than medical treatment.

Bilingualism means more than speaking two languages, it also has cognitive consequences. Recently, the question whether bilingualism affects cognitive control abilities or not has raised a fierce debate. In this thesis, the effect of bilingualism on executive control was tested in different domains. First, bilingual speakers showed enhanced attentional control abilities while performing non-verbal executive control tasks. This was evident in terms of their response distribution profiles, which showed less extreme distribution tails than those of monolinguals, suggesting less frequent lapses of attention. Second, bilingual speakers resolved intra-language lexical competition differently from monolingual speakers. Their response distribution profiles as well as their brain activities were differentially affected in a picture naming task that manipulated the level of lexical competition. These results were best explained by bilingual speakers having enhanced engagement of executive control while resolving lexical competition within a single language, even though this might not be reflected at behavioural level. Third, bilingual speakers demonstrated enhanced task shifting abilities at a latent factor level, while they did not differ from monolinguals with regard to inhibition and updating abilities. Results also suggested a more correlated network of executive control for bilingual speakers than for monolingual speakers. Therefore, this thesis has obtained converging evidence that bilingualism benefits executive control. Reasons for inconsistencies in the literature and absence of the bilingualism effects are discussed.

To describe a transitive event, the English language allows a choice of two Voices. The canonical form is the active-voice, and the alternative is the passive-voice, which offers its own semantic and syntactic functions. The passive-voice can also be divided into two further variants: be-passives and get-passives. Though theories are numerous, literature from both Linguistics and Psychology falls short in describing the functions and uses of these two forms. In this thesis, I present a rethink of passive syntactic representation, simplifying its description under a single structural unit. The proposed pvP theory allows for the variation between the two passive-types, while accounting for the features that are shared by all passive forms. I also present several experiments that explore the differing semantics and syntax of be-passives and get-passives. The results of these studies show a clear preference for the be-passive over the get-passive, especially in self-reporting and tasks that allow self-correction. However, it is also clear that, though there is overlap between them, each form serves its own purposes and exhibits preference for use in specific contexts.

The ability to express thought in language, to communicate, and to rapidly understand who did what to whom is a highly complex cognitive skill and ultimately the cognitive trait that defines us as being human. For the most part, language comprehension runs very smoothly and people perform it extremely quickly and efficiently. One might think this is nothing exceptional, were it not for the fact that everyday speech contains plenty of ambiguities, speech errors, and otherwise conflicting or interfering information. Similar to any other cognitive system, the language system is fitted out with mechanisms that detect conflicts and trigger compensating adjustments ‘on-the-fly’ in order to make sense of what has been said. Inevitably, language comprehension requires a combination of automatic and controlled processes and, depending on the context, we engage in both to varying degrees. Historically, linguistic conflict resolution has been investigated regarding to what extent linguistic modules such as ‘syntax’ and ‘semantics’ contribute to the process. In this thesis I take a step away from the traditional approach towards the question how the mechanisms underlying linguistic conflict resolution fit into domain-general cognition. It has been shown that controlled processing reliably results in activation of large-scale networks throughout the cortex. Importantly, neuroimaging studies have shown that the crucial brain region that enables us to flexibly make adjustments is the prefrontal cortex (PFC). In this thesis I present four case studies that investigated brain oscillations (as recorded in the EEG and MEG signal) in the time-frequency- (TFR), amplitude-time- (ERP), and source domain to determine how the language system relates to general executive functions. The materials employed structures that are amongst the most well-studied in psycholinguistic research: locally ambiguous garden-path sentences (e.g. “The nurse examined by the doctor was not on duty”), gender-agreement mismatches in anaphora and cataphora (e.g.“The king left London after reminding himself/herself about the letter”/ “After reminding himself/herself about the letter, the king left London.”), and syntactically complex garden-path sentences (“The receptionist realized that the nurse examined by the doctor was not on duty.”).The results in this thesis support the notion that there is indeed a connection between the language system and general executive functions during linguistic conflict resolution. Still, there are also situations where specialized ‘modules’ perform conflict resolution in a highly automatised fashion, particularly when contextual information sufficiently cues future input. However, as soon as increased uncertainty comes into play or capacity limits are reached, the brain appears to rely on extremely flexible mechanisms in prefrontal cortex regions.

Over the past few decades, our understanding of the cognitive processes underpinning our navigational abilities has expanded considerably. Models have been constructed that attempt to explain various key aspects of our wayfinding abilities, from the selection of salient features in environments to the processes involved in updating our position with respect to those features during movement. However, there remain several key open questions. Much of the research in spatial cognition has investigated visuospatial performance on the basis of sensory input (predominantly vision, but also sound, hapsis, and kinaesthesia), and while language production has been the subject of extensive research in psycholinguistics and cognitive linguistics, many aspects of language encoding remain unexplored. The research presented in this thesis aimed to explore outstanding issues in spatial language processing, tying together conceptual ends from different fields that have the potential to greatly inform each other, but focused specifically on how landmark information and spatial reference frames are encoded in mental representations characterised by different spatial reference frames. The first five experiments introduce a paradigm in which subjects encode skeletal route descriptions containing egocentric (“left/right”) or allocentric (cardinal) relational terms, while they also intentionally maintain an imagined egocentric or allocentric viewpoint. By testing participants’ spatial knowledge either in an allocentric (Experiments 1-3) or in an egocentric task (Experiments 4 and 5) this research exploits the facilitation produced by encoding-test congruence to clarify the contribution of mental imagery during spatial language processing and spatial tasks. Additionally, Experiments 1-3 adopted an eye-tracking methodology to study the allocation of attention to landmarks in descriptions and sketch maps as a function of linguistic reference frame and imagined perspective, while also recording subjective self-reports of participants’ phenomenal experiences. Key findings include evidence that egocentric and allocentric relational terms may not map directly onto egocentric and allocentric imagined perspectives, calling into question a common assumptions of psycholinguistic studies of spatial language. A novel way to establish experimental control over mental representations is presented, together with evidence that specific eye gaze patterns on landmark words or landmark regions of maps can be diagnostic of different imagined spatial perspectives. Experiments 4 and 5 adopted the same key manipulations to the study of spatial updating and bearing estimation following encoding of short, aurally-presented route descriptions. By employing two different response modes in this triangle completion task, Experiments 4 and 5 attempted to address key issues of experimental control that may have caused the conflicting results found in the literature on spatial updating during mental navigation and visuospatial imagery. The impact of encoding manipulations and of differences in response modality on embodiment and task performance were explored. Experiments 6-8 subsequently attempted to determine the developmental trajectory for the ability to discriminate between navigationally salient and non-salient landmarks, and to translate spatial relations between different reference frames. In these developmental studies, children and young adolescents were presented with videos portraying journeys through virtual environments from an egocentric perspective, and tested their ability to translate the resulting representations in order to perform allocentric spatial tasks. No clear facilitation effect of decision-point landmarks was observed or any strong indication that salient navigational features are more strongly represented in memory within the age range we tested (four to 11 years of age). Possible reasons for this are discussed in light of the relevant literature and methodological differences. Globally, the results presented indicate a functional role of imagery during language processing, pointing to the importance of introspection and accurate task analyses when interpreting behavioural results. Additionally, the study of implicit measures of attention such as eye tracking measures has the potential to improve our understanding mental representations, and of how they mediate between perception, action, and language. Lastly, these results also suggest that synergy between seemingly distinct research areas may be key in better characterising the nature of mental imagery in its different forms, and that the phenomenology of imagery content will be an essential part of this and future research.

Bilinguals have the unique ability to translate words between their languages. Although translation is a seemingly deliberate and conscious process, recent research has shown that first language (L1) translation equivalents can be automatically and quickly activated during second language (L2) word reading. Automatic translation activation strongly supports the idea of non-selective lexical access. This thesis investigates L1 (Chinese) translation activation during L2 (English) word reading in Chinese-English bilinguals, mainly through using the hidden translation repetition paradigm. In a series of behavioural and electrophysiological experiments using carefully selected stimuli, English words were subliminally or visibly presented to Chinese-English bilinguals in an attempt to seek the source of automatic translation activation (phonology: segment and/or tone, and/or orthography) and to explore to what extent translation activation is automatic. In contrast to previous studies, the behavioural investigations revealed that automatic translation only occurs for target words, which were visible to bilinguals, but not for the invisible masked primes. In addition, in the electrophysiological study, the event-related brain potentials and event-related brain oscillations provided evidence for the dominant role of Chinese segmental (consonants and vowels) activation during English word reading. Possible interpretations for these new findings are provided. Theoretical and methodological implications of the present thesis are also discussed.