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affect, concreteness, corpus linguistics, cognitive science, cognitive linguistics, stereotype accuracy, national character stereotypes, semantic prosody / Increasing use of natural language corpora and methods from corpus and computational linguistics as a supplement to traditional modes of scholarship in the social sciences and humanities has been labeled the "text as data movement." Corpora afford greater scope in terms of sample sizes, time, geography, and subject populations, as well as the opportunity to ecologically validate theories by testing their predictions within behaviour which is not elicited by an experimenter. Herein, five projects are presented, each either exploiting or taking inspiration from natural language data to make novel contributions to a subject matter area in the psychological sciences, including social psychology and psycholinguistics. Additionally, each project incorporates notions of word meaning grounded in psycholinguistic and psychoevolutionary theory, either the affective or sensorimotor connotations of words. This thesis ends with a discussion of the necessity of taking both experimental and observational approaches, as well as the challenge of how to link natural language data to psychological constructs. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / The internet and modern computers are changing how scientists study the mind. Instead of doing experiments within a laboratory, it is more and more common for cognitive scientists to observe patterns in online language use. These patterns in language use are then used to comment on how the mind works. Online language use is created by diverse people as they go about their lives. This is valuable for scientists studying the mind. Our experiments are often limited by how many people and which people do experiments. Sometimes, experiments can be misleading because people don't act in the real world like they do in a lab. This thesis has five studies, each using online language use to comment on some part of how the mind works. Also, each study involves how words make people feel, or whether a word refers to something you can see or touch. Studying real people as they communicate offers new perspectives on old ideas or unanswered questions.

no / The majority of studies have demonstrated a right hemisphere (RH) advantage for the perception of emotions. Other studies have found that the involvement of each hemisphere is valence specific, with the RH better at perceiving negative emotions and the LH better at perceiving positive emotions [Reuter-Lorenz, P., & Davidson, R.J. (1981) Differential contributions of the 2 cerebral hemispheres to the perception of happy and sad faces.Neuropsychologia, 19, 609¿613]. To account for valence laterality effects in emotion perception we propose an `expectancy¿ hypothesis which suggests that valence effects are obtained when the top-down expectancy to perceive an emotion outweighs the strength of bottom-up perceptual information enabling the discrimination of an emotion. A dichotic listening task was used to examine alternative explanations of valence effects in emotion perception. Emotional sentences (spoken in a happy or sad tone of voice), and morphed-happy and morphed-sad sentences (which blended a neutral version of the sentence with the pitch of the emotion sentence) were paired with neutral versions of each sentence and presented dichotically. A control condition was also used, consisting of two identical neutral sentences presented dichotically, with one channel arriving before the other by 7 ms. In support of the RH hypothesis there was a left ear advantage for the perception of sad and happy emotional sentences. However, morphed sentences showed no ear advantage, suggesting that the RH is specialised for the perception of genuine emotions and that a laterality effect may be a useful tool for the detection of fake emotion. Finally, for the control condition we obtained an interaction between the expected emotion and the effect of ear lead. Participants tended to select the ear that received the sentence first, when they expected a `sad¿ sentence, but not when they expected a `happy¿ sentence. The results are discussed in relation to the different theoretical explanations of valence laterality effects in emotion perception.

Neuere Forschungsergebnisse aus dem Bereich der Musikpsychologie zeigen, dass die subjektive Beurteilung, ob jemand spricht oder singt, nicht nur von Eigenschaften des empfangenen akustischen Signals abhängt. Obwohl die Tonhöhe beim Sprechen anders moduliert wird als beim Singen, kann der Tonhöhenverlauf einer gesprochenen Äußerung vom Rezipienten als eine musikalische Tonfolge wahrgenommen werden. Dieser Eindruck brachte Musikschaffende und Sprachwissenschaftler bereits seit Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts dazu, Sprechmelodien in Form musikalischer Notenschrift aufzuzeichnen. Im aktuellen Diskurs der Linguistik setzte sich diese Art von Notation nicht durch. Für die Beschreibung der grammatikalisch relevanten Eigenschaften der Sprechmelodie in Intonationssprachen wie Deutsch und Englisch werden schematische Darstellungen eingesetzt, in denen es im Wesentlichen auf die binäre Unterscheidung zwischen Hoch- und Tieftönen ankommt. Um die Sprechmelodie aus musiktheoretischer Sicht zu betrachten, kann sich jedoch die Transkription in musikalische Notenschrift als ein wertvolles Werkzeug erweisen. Durch die Notation wird die Vielfalt der intervallischen Strukturen von Sprechmelodien erfassbar und eine Grundlage für deren musikalische Analyse geschaffen. In diesem Artikel wird zunächst ein methodischer Ansatz zur gehörmäßigen Erfassung von Sprechmelodien erprobt. Der Vergleich zwischen der exemplarisch transkribierten Sprechmelodie und den Messwerten der Grundfrequenz des Sprachsignals deutet darauf hin, dass das Gehör die verfügbare Tonhöheninformation selektiert, um daraus die Vorstellung einer musikalischen Tonfolge zu konstruieren. Im Bereich von Tonhöhenakzenten orientiert sich die Wahrnehmung scheinbar nach dem lokalen Maximum der Grundfrequenzfunktion, während sich in den übrigen Silben deren Mittelwert als auschlaggebend herausstellt. Anhand der Transkription werden mögliche analytische Ansätze dargelegt, die strukturelle Gemeinsamkeiten zwischen sprachlichen und musikalischen Melodien veranschaulichen. / Recent research results from the field of music psychology show that the subjective assessment of whether someone speaks or sings does not only depend on the characteristics of the received acoustic signal. Although the pitch is modulated differently when speaking than when singing, the recipient can perceive the pitch of a spoken utterance as a musical tone sequence. This impression has since the end of the 18th century led musicians and linguists to record speech melodies in the form of musical notation. In the current discourse of linguistics, this kind of notation has not prevailed. For the description of the grammatically relevant characteristics of the speech melody in intonation languages such as German and English, schematic representations are used in which the main focus lies on the binary distinction between high and low tones. However, to approach speech melody from the perspective of music theory, the transcription in musical notation can be a useful tool. Notation allows to capture the variety of intervallic structures of speech melodies and provides a basis for their musical analysis. This paper introduces a methodical approach to the aural recording of speech melodies. The comparison between the transcribed speech melody and the measured values of the fundamental frequency of the speech signal suggests that the auditory system selects the available pitch information in order to construct the representation of a musical tone sequence. In the area of pitch accents, the perception seems to be driven by the local maximum of the fundamental frequency function, while in the remaining syllables, its mean value appears to be determinant. Based on the transcription, possible analytical approaches are presented, illustrating structural similarities between linguistic and musical melodies.

This thesis explores the variable behavior of bare nouns in Persian. Bare singular nouns realize different grammatical functions, including subject, object and indirect object. They receive different interpretations, including generic, definite and existential readings. However, the task of understanding the reasons for, and limits on, this variation cannot be achieved without understanding a number of pivotal features of Persian sentential architecture, including Information Structure, prosody, word order, and the functions of various morphological markers in Persian. After a brief introduction, chapters 2-3 deal with bare noun objects, firstly comparing them with nominals marked with indefinite morpheme -i suffixed to the noun, and the determiner yek. A bare noun object differs from morphologically marked nominals as it shows properties associated with noun incorporation in the literature (chapter 2). Of particular interest are the discourse properties of these ‘quasi-incorporated’ nominals. With respect to the discourse transparency of Incorporated Nominals, Persian belongs to the class of discourse opaque languages within Mithun’s classification (1984). However, under certain circumstances, Persian bare nouns show discourse transparency. These circumstances are examined in chapter 3, and it is proposed that bare nouns do introduce a number neutral discourse referent. There are no overt anaphoric expressions that could match such number-neutral antecedents in Persian. But covert anaphora lack number features, and hence can serve as means to pick up a number-neutral discourse referent. Also, in case world knowledge tells us that the number-neutral discourse referent is anchored to an atomic entity or to a collection, then an overt singular pronoun or an overt plural pronoun might fit the combined linguistic and conceptual requirements, and may be used to pick up the number-neutral discourse referent. This proposal is phrased within Discourse Representation Theory. In the second half of the dissertation, the interpretation of bare nouns in different positions and with different grammatical functions are discussed. Under the independently supported hypothesis of position>interpretation mapping developed by Diesing (1992), we will see the role of the suffix -ra in indicating that an object has been moved out of VP. Following Diesing, I assume that VP-internal variables are subject to an operation of Existential Closure. In many cases, VP-external –ra-marked objects have a different interpretation to their VP-internal, non-ra-marked, counterparts, because of escaping Existential Closure. For subjects, there is no morphological marking corresponding to –ra on objects, and we have to rely on prosody and word order to determine how a VP is interpreted using theories of the interaction of accent and syntactic structure. We assume that VP-internal subjects exist, under two independent but converging assumptions. The first is prosodic in nature: Subjects can be accented without being narrowly focused; theories of Persian prosody predict then that there is a maximal constituent that contains both the subject and the verb as its head. The second is semantic in nature: Bare nouns require an external existential closure operation to be interpreted existentially, and we have to assume existential closure over the VP for our analysis of the interpretation of objects. So, this existential closure would provide the necessary quantificational force for bare noun subjects as well. It is proposed that both subject and object originate within the VP, and can move out to the VP-external domain. The motivation for these movements are informational-structural in nature, relating in particular to the distinctions between given and new information, and default and non-default information structure.

This thesis explores the variable behavior of bare nouns in Persian. Bare singular nouns realize different grammatical functions, including subject, object and indirect object. They receive different interpretations, including generic, definite and existential readings. However, the task of understanding the reasons for, and limits on, this variation cannot be achieved without understanding a number of pivotal features of Persian sentential architecture, including Information Structure, prosody, word order, and the functions of various morphological markers in Persian. After a brief introduction, chapters 2-3 deal with bare noun objects, firstly comparing them with nominals marked with indefinite morpheme -i suffixed to the noun, and the determiner yek. A bare noun object differs from morphologically marked nominals as it shows properties associated with noun incorporation in the literature (chapter 2). Of particular interest are the discourse properties of these ‘quasi-incorporated’ nominals. With respect to the discourse transparency of Incorporated Nominals, Persian belongs to the class of discourse opaque languages within Mithun’s classification (1984). However, under certain circumstances, Persian bare nouns show discourse transparency. These circumstances are examined in chapter 3, and it is proposed that bare nouns do introduce a number neutral discourse referent. There are no overt anaphoric expressions that could match such number-neutral antecedents in Persian. But covert anaphora lack number features, and hence can serve as means to pick up a number-neutral discourse referent. Also, in case world knowledge tells us that the number-neutral discourse referent is anchored to an atomic entity or to a collection, then an overt singular pronoun or an overt plural pronoun might fit the combined linguistic and conceptual requirements, and may be used to pick up the number-neutral discourse referent. This proposal is phrased within Discourse Representation Theory. In the second half of the dissertation, the interpretation of bare nouns in different positions and with different grammatical functions are discussed. Under the independently supported hypothesis of position>interpretation mapping developed by Diesing (1992), we will see the role of the suffix -ra in indicating that an object has been moved out of VP. Following Diesing, I assume that VP-internal variables are subject to an operation of Existential Closure. In many cases, VP-external –ra-marked objects have a different interpretation to their VP-internal, non-ra-marked, counterparts, because of escaping Existential Closure. For subjects, there is no morphological marking corresponding to –ra on objects, and we have to rely on prosody and word order to determine how a VP is interpreted using theories of the interaction of accent and syntactic structure. We assume that VP-internal subjects exist, under two independent but converging assumptions. The first is prosodic in nature: Subjects can be accented without being narrowly focused; theories of Persian prosody predict then that there is a maximal constituent that contains both the subject and the verb as its head. The second is semantic in nature: Bare nouns require an external existential closure operation to be interpreted existentially, and we have to assume existential closure over the VP for our analysis of the interpretation of objects. So, this existential closure would provide the necessary quantificational force for bare noun subjects as well. It is proposed that both subject and object originate within the VP, and can move out to the VP-external domain. The motivation for these movements are informational-structural in nature, relating in particular to the distinctions between given and new information, and default and non-default information structure.

Arising from the increasing demands of the twenty-first century workplace, concern over learner reading performance is at the forefront of national education. The increasing demands have raised the literacy bar for learners and subsequently, schools have been forced to accommodate instruction for these increased expectations. Successful reading requires the learner to incorporate a number of reading skills in appropriate ways. Oral reading fluency and reading comprehension are identified as components in effectively gaining meaning from text. A reciprocal relationship exist between the two that allows one to comprehend more thoroughly as one reads more fluently. Additionally, as one reads more fluently, one‟s ability to comprehend also improves. This is due to the fact that one‟s brain is more capable in processing text when one is able to read fluently. Therefore, when one automatically identifies words one is able to comprehend text more completely. The purpose of this study was to determine whether a linear relationship exists between Grade 4 learners‟ oral reading fluency on different types of tests and their reading comprehension. The study was conducted within a positivistic research paradigm. A one-shot crosssectional survey design was used to determine the relationship between oral reading fluency and reading comprehension of Grade 4 learners in selected schools in Kimberley in the Northern Cape Province. Five schools, representing the different quintiles, were selected to participate in the study. A total of 406 Grade 4 learners made up the study population. Two tests were developed and validated in order to assess the learners‟ oral reading fluency and reading comprehension. The data was analysed by means of descriptive statistics as well as Pearson product-moment correlations. The results indicate that learners in rural schools could only read at 52 words per minute (wpm) which meant that they could be grouped in the 10th percentile. With regard to reading comprehension the learners in the rural areas scored an average of 54% on the first reading comprehension test. Their results on the second comprehension test indicated that they experienced difficulties with inference questions. The results indicated that learners in urban schools read at 107.5 words per minute (wpm) which meant that they could be grouped between the 50th and 75th percentile. In their first reading comprehension test they scored an average of 78%. Their results on the second comprehension test indicated that they experienced difficulties with interpretation questions. Pearson product moment correlations indicated a practically significant difference between rural and urban schools on oral reading fluency and reading comprehension with urban schools outperforming rural schools. Overall, the results indicated a practically significant relationship of r = 0.69 between oral reading fluency and reading comprehension. The findings of this study should be noted by teachers as well as be addressed in interventions as a matter of urgency. / MEd (Learner Support), North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2014

Arising from the increasing demands of the twenty-first century workplace, concern over learner reading performance is at the forefront of national education. The increasing demands have raised the literacy bar for learners and subsequently, schools have been forced to accommodate instruction for these increased expectations. Successful reading requires the learner to incorporate a number of reading skills in appropriate ways. Oral reading fluency and reading comprehension are identified as components in effectively gaining meaning from text. A reciprocal relationship exist between the two that allows one to comprehend more thoroughly as one reads more fluently. Additionally, as one reads more fluently, one‟s ability to comprehend also improves. This is due to the fact that one‟s brain is more capable in processing text when one is able to read fluently. Therefore, when one automatically identifies words one is able to comprehend text more completely. The purpose of this study was to determine whether a linear relationship exists between Grade 4 learners‟ oral reading fluency on different types of tests and their reading comprehension. The study was conducted within a positivistic research paradigm. A one-shot crosssectional survey design was used to determine the relationship between oral reading fluency and reading comprehension of Grade 4 learners in selected schools in Kimberley in the Northern Cape Province. Five schools, representing the different quintiles, were selected to participate in the study. A total of 406 Grade 4 learners made up the study population. Two tests were developed and validated in order to assess the learners‟ oral reading fluency and reading comprehension. The data was analysed by means of descriptive statistics as well as Pearson product-moment correlations. The results indicate that learners in rural schools could only read at 52 words per minute (wpm) which meant that they could be grouped in the 10th percentile. With regard to reading comprehension the learners in the rural areas scored an average of 54% on the first reading comprehension test. Their results on the second comprehension test indicated that they experienced difficulties with inference questions. The results indicated that learners in urban schools read at 107.5 words per minute (wpm) which meant that they could be grouped between the 50th and 75th percentile. In their first reading comprehension test they scored an average of 78%. Their results on the second comprehension test indicated that they experienced difficulties with interpretation questions. Pearson product moment correlations indicated a practically significant difference between rural and urban schools on oral reading fluency and reading comprehension with urban schools outperforming rural schools. Overall, the results indicated a practically significant relationship of r = 0.69 between oral reading fluency and reading comprehension. The findings of this study should be noted by teachers as well as be addressed in interventions as a matter of urgency. / MEd (Learner Support), North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2014