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No description available.

Word frequency and age of acquisition (AoA) influence word and object recognition and naming. High frequency and early acquired items are processed faster than low frequency and/or late acquired items. The high correlation between word frequency and AoA make these effects difficult to distinguish. However, this difficulty can be avoided by investigating the effects of AoA in the domain of recognising and naming famous faces and names. Face processing a suitable domain because the functional models of face processing were developed by analogy to word and object processing models. Nine experiments on the effects of AoA on face and name processing are reported. Experiment 1 investigated the influence of variables on naming famous faces. The variables were regressed on the speed and accuracy of face naming. Only familiarity and AoA significantly predicted successful naming. A factorial analysis and full replication revealed a consistent advantage for name production to early acquired celebrities' faces (Experiments 2 & 3). Furthermore this advantage was apparent from the first presentation (Experiment 4).Faster face and name recognition occured for early acquired than late acquired celebrities (Experiments 5 & 8). Early acquired names were read aloud faster than late acquired names (Experiment 7). Conversly semantic classifications were made faster to late acquired celebrities' faces (Experiment 6), but there was no effect in the same task to written names (Experiment 9).An effect of AoA for celebrities, whose names are acquired later in life than object names is problematic for the developmental account of AoA. Effects of AoA in recognition tasks are problematic for theorists who propose that speech output is the locus of AoA. A mechanism is proposed to account for the empirical findings. The data also presents a challenge for computer modelling to simulate the combined effects of AoA and cumulative frequency.

Natural spoken language is full of disfluency. Around 10% of utterances produced in everyday speech contain disfluencies such as repetitions, repairs, filled pauses and other hesitation phenomena. The production of disfluency has generally been attributed to underlying problems in the planning and formulation of upcoming speech. However, it remains an open question to what extent factors known to affect the selection and retrieval of words in isolation influence disfluency production during connected speech, and whether different types of disfluency are associated with difficulties at different stages of production. Previous attempts to answer these questions have largely relied on corpora of unconstrained, spontaneous speech; to date, there has been little direct experimental research that has attempted to manipulate factors that underlie natural disfluency production. This thesis takes a different approach to the study of disfluency production by constraining the likely content and complexity of speakers utterances while maintaining a context of naturalistic, spontaneous speech. This thesis presents evidence from five experiments based on the Network Task (Oomen & Postma, 2001), in addition to two related picture-naming studies. In the Network Task, participants described to a listener the route of a marker as it traverses a visually presented network of pictures connected by one or more paths. The disfluencies of interest in their descriptions were associated with the production of the picture name. The experiments varied the ease with which pictures in the networks could be named by manipulating factors known to affect lexical or pre-lexical processing: lexical access and retrieval were impacted by manipulations of picture-name agreement and the frequency of the dominant picture names, while visual and conceptual processing difficulty was manipulated by blurring pictures and through prior picture familiarisation. The results of these studies indicate that while general production difficulty does reliably increase the likelihood of disfluency, difficulties associated with particular aspects of lexical access and retrieval have dissociable effects on the likelihood of disfluency. Most notably, while the production of function word prolongations demonstrates a close relationship to lexical difficulties relating to the selection and retrieval of picture names, filled pauses tend to occur predominantly at the beginning of utterances, and appear to be primarily associated with message-level planning processes. Picture naming latencies correlated highly with the rates of observed hesitations, establishing that the likelihood of a disfluency could be attributed to the same lexical and pre-lexical processes that result in longer naming times. Moreover, acoustic analyses of a subset of observed disfluencies established that those disfluencies associated with more serious planning difficulties also tended to have longer durations, however they do not reliably relate to longer upcoming delays. Taken together, the results of these studies demonstrate that the elicitation of disfluency is open to explicit manipulation, and that mid-utterance disfluencies are related to difficulties during specific production processes. Moreover, the type of disfluency produced is not arbitrary, but may be related to both the type and location of the problem encountered at the point that speech is suspended. Through the further exploration of these relationships, it may be possible to use disfluency as an effective tool to study online language production processes.

The thesis discusses the variety of English that is spoken today in Brunei Darussalam and assesses its status as a 'New English'. Using a corpus of spoken data which was recorded and transcribed by the author, the thesis attempts to produce an empirically based linguistic description of the grammatical, lexical and discourse features found in spoken Brunei English and to discuss the ways in which these features differ from the equivalent features in Standard British English. The final part of the study is concerned with the pedagogical and language planning implications of recognizing the existence of a Bruneian variety of English, and with proposing an appropriate English language teaching model for the Bruneian education system.

No description available.

The present work contributes to the ongoing discussion of the factors involved in perfecting foreign language learning through a close examination of vocabulary use. Motivated by Laufer’s (1991) argument that the use of less frequent vocabulary items is a sign that a language learner is approximating the lexical competence of a native speaker, I set out to model Laufer and Nation’s (1995) study that assessed lexical frequency. The first goal of this work was to assess the usefulness of the lexical frequency profile (Laufer and Nation, 1995) in evaluating written texts produced by learners of German. This lexical frequency profile had mostly been used to examine vocabulary use of learners of English. Instead of using frequency bands of German, this work relied on three generated word frequency lists. The second goal of this work was to examine how the language repertoire of aspiring bilinguals varies at the lexical level by comparing vocabulary use at three competency levels (Introductory German I, II and Intermediate German). The analysis revealed that the lexical frequency profile is a valuable tool for evaluating lexical use by language learners, although the tool was difficult to adapt for research of texts in German. Furthermore, learners in all three courses relied heavily on vocabulary from learning materials used in their courses, and they were more likely to use less frequent words as they progressed from the introductory to the intermediate language course.

The present work contributes to the ongoing discussion of the factors involved in perfecting foreign language learning through a close examination of vocabulary use. Motivated by Laufer’s (1991) argument that the use of less frequent vocabulary items is a sign that a language learner is approximating the lexical competence of a native speaker, I set out to model Laufer and Nation’s (1995) study that assessed lexical frequency. The first goal of this work was to assess the usefulness of the lexical frequency profile (Laufer and Nation, 1995) in evaluating written texts produced by learners of German. This lexical frequency profile had mostly been used to examine vocabulary use of learners of English. Instead of using frequency bands of German, this work relied on three generated word frequency lists. The second goal of this work was to examine how the language repertoire of aspiring bilinguals varies at the lexical level by comparing vocabulary use at three competency levels (Introductory German I, II and Intermediate German). The analysis revealed that the lexical frequency profile is a valuable tool for evaluating lexical use by language learners, although the tool was difficult to adapt for research of texts in German. Furthermore, learners in all three courses relied heavily on vocabulary from learning materials used in their courses, and they were more likely to use less frequent words as they progressed from the introductory to the intermediate language course.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hong Kong, 2010. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 211-223). Also available in print.

Thesis (M. Phil.)--University of Hong Kong, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 100-104).