Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, 1998. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 165-170).

People perceive the world in their own terms: our use of language reflects our perceptions. The way in which we perceive the world and the words we use to reflect that perception Grinder and Bandler (1976) call a "representational system." The authors isolate three types of representational systems, visual, kinesthetic, and auditory, and they present a technique for mapping these systems. These authors state that a sensory preference profile can be mapped accurately and reliably via an individual's use of language. For example, words such as "clear," "see" and expressions of the kind "I get a picture" would connote a visual modality. Words such as "feel," "hard" and expressions of the kind "I can't grasp it" would connote a kinesthetic modality. An individual's profile is the frequency of words used in each sensory modality.

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Hesitations in speech marked by pauses, fillers such as er, and prolongations of words are remarkably common in most spontaneous speech. Experimental evidence indicates that they affect both the processing of speech and the lasting representation of the spoken material. One theory as to the mechanisms that underlie these effects is that filled pauses heighten listeners' attention to upcoming speech. For example, in the utterance: (1) She hated the CD, but then she's never liked my taste in er music The hesitation marked by the filler er would heighten listeners' attention to the post-dis fluent material (music) which would then be processed and represented differently to an equivalent stimulus in a passage of fluent speech. The thesis examines this proposition in the context of an explicit de finition of attention. The first half of the work investigates whether hesitations heighten two different aspects of listeners' attention: these are the immediate engagement of attention to post-dis fluent stimuli at the point they are encountered, and the continued attention to the representation of stimuli after they are encountered. In experiment 1, a speech `oddball' paradigm is used to show that event-related potentials (ERPs) associated with attention (MMN and P3) are affected by a preceding hesitation, indicating an immediate effect of hesitations on listeners overt attention. Experiments 2 and 3 use behavioural responses and eye-movements measures during a change-detection paradigm. These experiments show that there is also an effect on the listeners' attention to the post-dis fluent material after the initial presentation of the utterance. The second half of the thesis concerns itself with the timecourse of the attentional effects. It addresses questions such as: how long-lived is the attentional heightening and what is the attentional heightening trigger? Experiments 4{7 explore the relationship between the filler er and periods of silent pause that surround it. Behavioural (exp. 4{6) and ERP (exp. 7) results show that while extending the period of silence after the filler er does not affect the immediate engagement of attention, it will affect subsequent attention to the post-disfluent material: constituents that are not immediately preceded by the filler er are not attended to in an enhanced way. Together, these experiments confirm the proposition that hesitations heighten listeners' attention to upcoming speech. The thesis outlines the ways in which the components of this attentional heightening are differentially affected by interaction between the content and timing of the hesitations encountered. Attention has an important role to play in the processing of any stimulus. Using disfluency as a test case, this thesis illuminates its importance in language comprehension.

This thesis explores cross-linguistic structural phenomena in the language production of bilinguals in the specific context of translation. In recent years, cross-linguistic phenomena on the level of syntax have become an increasingly prominent issue in psycholinguistic research, and are a well-known feature in language productions of multilinguals, from language learners to translators. The work presented in this thesis takes current perspectives from psycholinguistics (discussed in Chapter 2) as its foundation; impulses from research on bilingualism and advanced Second Language Acquisition (Chapter 3) and Translation and Interpreting (Chapter 4) allow to develop a specific approach to translation as a special instance of bilingual production, elementary concepts of which are available to all bilingual speakers. On this basis, an experimental paradigm for psycholinguistic research into structural phenomena of translation is developed and refined (Chapters 5 and 6) that allows to access both off-line and on-line data from simple text-to-speech translations. Experiment 1 (Chapter 5) confirms the existence of priming-like, on-line facilitation in translations where source and target sentences are structurally matched. Experiment 2 (Chapter 6) obtains a structural priming effect from sources where several target structures are available, and refines material specifications for the experimental paradigm and analysis techniques for on-line data. In Experiment 3 (Chapter 7), off-line structural priming is observed in translations into and out of L2. The corresponding on-line facilitation of primed productions, however, is discovered only in translations from L1 to L2, a finding that agrees with predictions from research in L2 acquisition and translation. On this basis, Experiment 3 is repeated in Experiment 4 (Chapter 8) with a modification to materials so that an additional restructuring operation becomes necessary. Although structural priming is still evident in translations from L1 to L2, on-line facilitation is not, suggesting that syntactic operations do not add to each other but are processed in one go. Results are discussed comprehensively (in Chapter 9) with respect to their entailments for adjacent fields of research, in particular with a view to theories of syntactic production and directionality in translation. Several possibilities for future applications of the approach are proposed.

During language production, conceptual messages are encoded into a target language and articulated. Existing models of language production assume several stages of processing including a conceptual level, a level where lexical selection and syntactic processing occurs and a level where morphological and phonological features are added ready for production (e.g. Levelt et al., 1999). Previous research has considered how lexical and syntactic information could be stored via lemma (Kempen & Huijbers, 1983), syntactic nodes (Levelt at el., 1999) and combinatorial nodes (Pickering & Braingan, 1998), but little is understood about how syntactic structures are selected. This thesis examines how constituent structures are selected by investigating choice of structure in unbounded dependencies such as Which jug with the red spots is the nun giving the monk? and how this is affected by factors such as verb-subcategorisation preferences and global sentence structure complexity. A series of language production experiments investigate how global structure complexity and verb-subcategoricatisaion preferences affect choice of syntactic structure at the clause level in unbounded dependencies. A picture description task reveals an unusual preference for the dispreferred passive voice structure as a result of global structural complexity. Sentence recall experiments demonstrate that both global structural complexity and verb-subcategorisation preferences can affect choice of structure and that competition between these factors decides the final structure. Finally, syntactic priming experiments show that processing mechanisms are shared between simple matrix clause structures and unbounded dependency clause structures, but that the influence of these shared mechanisms vary between the different structure types. This could be attributed to a modal of processing where choice of structure is decided by competition between structure representations which are influenced by different factors in different global syntactic conditions. The results suggest that choice of syntactic structure is decided through competition between possible structures. These possible structures may receive further activation or inhibition from other factors such as global structural complexity or verb-subcategorisation preferences and thematic fit. Global structural complexity may influence structure preferences through increased processing load or through attempts to integrate the clause structure with another global structure. Thematic role arguments may influence structure through a preference that syntactic roles fit with specified thematic roles. (e.g. experiencer as subject). This model assumes parallel processing of possible structures and individual structures within a complex larger structure. It also assumes an incremental model of processing which attempts to integrate structures as soon as possible.

This thesis explores the processing of lexical ambiguity: words with several unrelated meanings (homonymy) or many related senses (polysemy). Chapter I provides a literature overview of studies investigating this topic. Chapters 2 and 3 pursue a first goal: to investigate whether effects are influenced by the methodology of defining lexical ambiguity. The results support the hypothesis (Rodd, Gaskell, & Marslen- Wilson, 2002) that studies using questionnaires to define lexical ambiguity (e.g. Rubenstein, Garfield, & Millikan, 1970) found a polysemy advantage rather than a homonymy advantage. Questionnaire-based ambiguity classifications are more similar to dictionary-defined polysemy than to homonymy (Experiment 1). Moreover, earlier findings (e.g. Rodd et al., 2002) of a polysemy advantage and homonymy disadvantage are replicated, and the questionnaire-based classifications result in effects more similar to the former than to the latter (Experiments 2 to 4). Chapters 4 to 6 pursue a second goal: to explore the effects of polysemy and homonymy with new stimuli. Chapters 4 and 5 indicate that polysemy effects are sensitive to concreteness (Experiments 5 & 6), frequency (Experiment 7), and level of processing (Experiment 8). Furthermore, polysemy effects seem to take place relatively late (Experiment 9). In contrast, Chapter 6 does not find any effects of homonymy (Experiments 10 to 12). Chapter 7 pursues a third goal: to test whether the relationship between senses plays a role in word processing. Sense relationship influences word recognition (Experiments 13 & 16), but not semantic categorization (Experiment 14). The temporal locus of the lexical decision effect cannot be determined (Experiment 15). Finally, Chapter 8 shows that the current findings fit reasonably well within an account by Rodd, Gaskell, and Marslen- Wilson (2004), and suggests possible directions for further research.

University of Macau / Faculty of Arts and Humanities. / Department of Portuguese

Thesis (M.S.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Linguistics and Philosophy, 1981. / MICROFICHE COPY AVAILABLE IN ARCHIVES AND HUMANITIES. / Bibliography: leaves 43-44. / by Jan Edwards. / M.S.

In study III, two event-related-potential (ERP) experiments show a clear modulation from preceding object noun on the early ERP components of the following object picture that are known to be associated with perceptual processes and provide by far the strongest evidence that semantic processing cannot account fully for the congruence effects supposed to indicate color representation. / In summary, color representaion is found to be present not only for color information implied by the global phrase context but also for color information irrelevant to the global phrase context, not only for words with direct and concrete associations with color but also for words where such associations are indirect and less concrete. ERP results also provide strong support that color simulation does occur at the perceptual level as argued by embodied cognition theorists and cannot be attributed totally to semantic processing. Briefly, the present research provides a rich dataset and valuable insights deepening the understanding of perceptual color simulation in phrase and words. / Results from all three experiments in the first study showed a robust demonstration of the activation of perceptual representation of color information or the presence of color simulation in phase processing. Results from primetarget stimulus-onset-asynchrony (SOA) manipulation provided time course information of the relative activation of the two types of colors. / The present research was conducted to give a systematic treatment of color simulation in language processing to enrich understanding of perceptual simulation. Two main questions have been addressed here, namely 'what is the time course of color activation in language unites such as noun phrase and abstract words? ' and 'do linguistic simulation and perceptual simulation (especially the unconscious part) of color co-exist in language understanding? ' / The second study involving three experiments, further extended the finding in Study I to demonstrate the presence of color simulation to an even smaller and abstracter linguistic unit of single words. Results from SOA manipulation indicates a more rapid activation of color information for the words psychologically-related to color, followed by activation of color for object nouns, and slowest color activation for verbs. / Lu, Aitao / Adviser: Wai Chan. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 72-11, Section: B, page: . / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2009. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 89-99). / Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Electronic reproduction. [Ann Arbor, MI] : ProQuest Information and Learning, [201-] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Abstract also in Chinese; some appendices include Chinese characters.