Submitted in partial fulfilment for the degree Masters in Research Psychology, University of the Witwatersrand, Faculty of Humanities, School of Human and Community Development, 2016 / Background: South Africa finds itself at the heart of an ever escalating global trend towards increased multilingualism. Along with this realisation has come an ever growing investigation of the impact of bi/multilingualism on our cognitive abilities; both positively and negatively. Aim: This rationale gets explored here in order to investigate whether multilingualism influences the executive functioning ability of South African youth. Method: This was facilitated through the current study aiming to investigate the relationship between the self reported language experience of 30 young adults and their performance on executive function tasks. The four executive functions that were targeted were planning, inhibition, cognitive flexibility and fluency. Results and Conclusion: Taking the unique South African milieu into consideration results indicated that for the characteristics investigated here cognitive flexibility did not show a significant relationship with language experience. In turn planning and inhibition only produced a moderate degree of significance for their relationships with language experience. Finally fluency showed to have a significant relationship to the language experience of these individuals. The South African reality and history was then engaged with in a discussion around these results. The conclusion was then drawn that the South African population in this sample did not perform to the preconceived internationally recorded influence of the multilingual advantage. / GR2017

Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASDs) are frequently associated with communicative impairment, regardless of IQ or mental age. The most significant feature of this impairment tends to be in the dimension of both expressive and receptive prosody, possibly due to reduced neural connectivity between disparate brain areas responsible for language. Despite extensive overlap between the auditory and structural features linking prosody and music as well as extensive shared neural resources, music listening and performance are not impaired. In fact, there is some evidence that these abilities may even be heightened in some ASD individuals. Using behavioral and EEG/ERP methods, the present study sought to investigate this dissociation. A similar electrophysiological response has been observed for both prosody and music, the Closure Positive Shift (CPS), and Music CPS, respectively. This study used language and music stimuli in order to investigate the differences between language and music processing for individuals with ASDs and neuro-typicals. While a CPS was observed for language for the ASD group, it was substantially reduced in its distribution and amplitude. Further, the presence of an offset N1 response to the onset of pauses interfered with the clarity of the CPS response. In music, no music CPS was observed, however, a sustained centrally maximal positivity was observed for both the neuro-typical and ASD groups during the phrase boundary. Additionally, the ASD group showed a similar positivity in response to phrase boundaries in the condition in which the phrase-final note was prolonged. This positivity was similar to the language CPS in duration and amplitude, and suggests similar processing responses to phrase boundaries in language and music. The positivity in response to the second condition suggests that some individuals with ASDs may indeed have heightened processing ability for music. These results support the theories of functional under-connectivity in language and local bias toward sensory features of auditory information at the expense of global prosodic processing. Possible explanations, including the presence of repetition found in music, yet generally absent in language, are considered. / acase@tulane.edu

Thesis (doctoral)--Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster, 2009.

published_or_final_version / Linguistics / Master / Master of Philosophy

published_or_final_version / abstract / toc / Linguistics / Master / Master of Philosophy

The studies included in this thesis had as aim to elucidate how individual differences in phonetic learning abilities might be related to differences in more general, psychoacoustic learning abilities, and in how they might be related to differences in brain function and brain morphology. / We tested and trained English speaking volunteers to perceive the Hindi dental-retroflex phonetic contrast. We found evidence suggesting that the ability to accurately perceive "difficult" non-native contrasts is not permanently lost during development. We also tested and trained subjects to perceive the difference between non-linguistic rapidly changing and steady-state tonal sounds, and found evidence supporting the hypothesis that successful phonetic learning is in part a function of a more general psychoacoustic ability to process rapidly changing sounds. / The aim of the second study was to determine how the pattern of brain activity may change as a result of training with non-native speech sounds, and in whether it is possible to differentiate "learners" from "non-learners" on the basis of neural activation patterns. Results of this functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) investigation suggested that successful learning of a non-native contrast results in the recruitment of the same areas that are involved in the processing of native contrasts; but the degree of success in learning is accompanied by more efficient neural processing in classical frontal speech regions, while making greater processing demands in left parieto-temporal speech regions. / In the final study, we correlated phonetic learning measures with brain morphology throughout the whole brain volume. We found evidence for overall larger parietal volumes in the left relative to the right hemisphere, and for more white relative to gray matter in the left hemisphere in the learners and not in the nonlearners. This finding is consistent with findings by other investigators suggesting that left-hemispheric dominance for speech may be in part accounted for by hemispheric differences in white matter connectivity, which may allow faster intra- and inter-hemispheric neural transmission. This latter feature may be critical for the processing of consonant speech sounds, which depends on the ability to process sounds that change on the time scale of 30--50 milliseconds.

No description available.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--McMaster University, 2005. / Supervisor: Suzanna Becker. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2004. / Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 432-460). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Murdoch University, 2009. / Thesis submitted to the Faculty of Health Sciences. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 220-238)