Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Pennsylvania, 1910. / Folded table and diagram laid in. Bibliography: p. 49-61.

Thesis (PH. D.)--University of Pennsylvania, 1910. / Folded table and diagram laid in. Bibliography: p. 49-61. Also available in digital form on the Internet Archive Web site.

This research was designed to assess 7-week-old infants' preference for infant directed and adult directed talk. (IDT and ADT) using the infant controlled habituation/dishabituation looking procedure. Infants were presented with short audio recordings of either a female or a male speaking in IDT during habituation and ADT during dishabituation or the reverse. In the control conditions, the stimulus did not change. Infants demonstrated preference for IDT over ADT in both male and female speaker conditions. They also demonstrated preference for the female speaker used in this study over the male speaker. Interactions among the dependent variables (first three looks), and the independent variables (infant gender, and style of speaking as well as infant gender, and speaker gender), suggest that the preference might not be as robust as the preference found in infants over 4 months. Evidence for discrimination between IDT and ADT was inferred from the between group demonstration of preference, but no evidence of within infant discrimination was found. Because the evidence suggests that 7-week-old infants demonstrate weaker preference for IDT over ADT than do infants of 4 months, it is assumed that infant preferences follow a developmental sequence. Thus, it is possible that developing preferences are influenced by experiential factors. / Arts, Faculty of / Psychology, Department of / Graduate

Human language has two fundamental requirements: it must allow competent speakers to exchange messages efficiently, and it must be readily learned by children. Recent work has examined effects of language predictability on language production, with many researchers arguing that so-called “predictability effects” function towards the efficiency requirement. Specifically, recent work has found that talkers tend to reduce linguistic forms that are more probable more heavily. This dissertation proposes the “Predictability Bootstrapping Hypothesis” that predictability effects also make language more learnable. There is a great deal of evidence that the adult grammars have substantial statistical components. Since predictability effects result in heavier reduction for more probable words and hidden structure, they provide infants with direct cues to the statistical components of the grammars they are trying to learn. The corpus studies and computational modeling experiments in this dissertation show that predictability effects could be a substantial source of information to language-learning infants, focusing on the potential utility of phonetic reduction in terms of word duration for syntax acquisition. First, corpora of spontaneous adult-directed and child-directed speech (ADS and CDS, respectively) are compared to verify that predictability effects actually exist in CDS. While revealing some differences, mixed effects regressions on those corpora indicate that predictability effects in CDS are largely similar (in kind and magnitude) to predictability effects in ADS. This result indicates that predictability effects are available to infants, however useful they may be. Second, this dissertation builds probabilistic, unsupervised, and lexicalized models for learning about syntax from words and durational cues. One series of models is based on Hidden Markov Models and learns shallow constituency structure, while the other series is based on the Dependency Model with Valence and learns dependency structure. These models are then used to measure how useful durational cues are for syntax acquisition, and to what extent their utility in this task can be attributed to effects of syntactic predictability on word duration. As part of this investigation, these models are also used to explore the venerable “Prosodic Bootstrapping Hypothesis” that prosodic structure, which is cued in part by word duration, may be useful for syntax acquisition. The empirical evaluations of these models provide evidence that effects of syntactic predictability on word duration are easier to discover and exploit than effects of prosodic structure, and that even gold-standard annotations of prosodic structure provide at most a relatively small improvement in parsing performance over raw word duration. Taken together, this work indicates that predictability effects provide useful information about syntax to infants, showing that the Predictability Bootstrapping Hypothesis for syntax acquisition is computationally plausible and motivating future behavioural investigation. Additionally, as talkers consider the probability of many different aspects of linguistic structure when reducing according to predictability effects, this result also motivates investigation of Predictability Bootstrapping of other aspects of linguistic knowledge.

The thesis presents a pragmatic analysis focused on the communication of twins from the 35th to the 37th month of their life in different communicative situations. The paper is based on a case study of twins. The theoretical part of the thesis is based on texts on language acquisition and communication of 3-year-old children and acquisition of pragmatics. The material for the analysis comprises of audiovisual recordings made with informed consent from the parents of the twins who were further supplemented by information obtained through parental questionnaires and interviews with the parents. Video recordings are transcribed according to the principles of CHAT of CHILDES corpus. The material is analyzed in terms of means that the children use to express communication plans. The results of the analysis are compared with the results from the theoretical part. Keywords Child speech, child language, communication, twins

The dissertation thesis examines czech literary censorship after 1989. It presents a polemical addition to a monograph published one year earlier entitled V obecném zájmu [In the General Interest], which covered the same period. The main methodological resource is represented by the books of a British theatrologist Helen Freshwater, who based her inclusive model of censorship on the border crossing of hard and soft censorship. Moreover, she moved her emphasis on discourse as the main indicator of what is considered a censor´s intervention in a particular historical moment. The core of the thesis consists of four chapters, which on the basis of the original research examine the typical cases of censorship and related discourse. These chapters are included in a broader frame of a changing notion of censorship and political correctness in the discussed period. The chapter devoted to the banned skinhead music group Braník is based on the examination of the respective court´s files and the analysis of the changing notion of freedom of speech in the beginning of the 1990s. The chapter about the censorship of literature for children and youth is based on the comparison of various editions of books written by Bohumil Říha. Furthermore, the conditions are observed, under which the interventions to these new editions were identified as censorship. Censorship on internet is treated in the chapter devoted to the regulation of the virtual (literary) child pornography, while the chapter devoted to political correctness focuses on texts and paratexts of splatterpunk literature. This doctoral work should offer a complex picture of changing ways of censorship and thinking after 1989.