published_or_final_version / Curriculum Studies / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

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

This study examines how Chinese speakers understand sentences describing events that have varying degrees of typicality. How the interpretation of typicality is obtained from linguistic input is not fully understood. In this study, I investigate the association of pairs of content words in order to determine their contribution to judgments of event typicality. The associations between words could influence the interpretation of event typicality. Two words that are not associated semantically, for example baby and wine, may be seen as an atypical combination. However, when these words are placed in a sentence context, the resulting sentences can be a typical scenario, such as the baby spilled the wine. Four offline judgment studies were conducted to obtain quantitative measurements of the association of word pairs and of judgments of event typicality in sentences. These studies demonstrated that noun pairs showed larger differences in their association ratings than those of noun-verb pairs. When the sentences containing the word pairs were judged, the association of the noun pair strongly influenced the sentence’s event typicality ratings, regardless of word order or of the typicality of the verb. Two online, word-by-word self-paced reading studies were conducted to examine whether judgments of word associations and event typicality are used in real-time sentence processing. The results showed that there was a slowdown in reading times at the critical regions when the noun pairs were atypical. The typicality of the verb did not result in a difference in reading times, regardless of the word order of the sentences, although offline judgment scores of event typicality were predictive of online reading times. The findings of these studies suggest that: (1) event typicality is more than the semantic association between words. Noun-noun and noun-verb associations contribute to event typicality but the association of two nouns has a more significant contribution and is not affected by an intervening word, (2) the typicality of verbs contributed to real-time sentence processing, insofar as the verbs contributed to the judged typicality of the events expressed by SVO and SOV clauses, and (3) in real-time sentence processing, regardless of the sentence’s word order, the association of nouns has greater impact on event typicality processing. This is not likely to be due simply to a priming effect between nouns, but rather also reflects the processing of the sentence’s event typicality. / text

Spontaneous speech is replete with disfluencies: pauses, hesitations, restarts, and less than ideal deliveries of information. Disfluency is a topic of interdisciplinary research with insights from psycholinguistics, phonetics and speech technology. Researchers have tried to determine: When does disfluency occur?, Can disfluency be reliably predicted to occur?, and ultimately, Why does disfluency occur? The focus of my thesis will be to address the question of why disfluency occurs by reporting the results of analyses of disfluency frequency and the relationship between disfluency and eye gaze in a collaborative dialogue. Psycholinguistic studies of disfluency and collaborative dialogue differ on their answers to why disfluency occurs and its role in dialogue. One hypothesis, which I will refer to as Strategic Modelling, suggests that disfluencies are designed by the speaker. According to the alternative view, which I will call the Cognitive Burden View, disfluency is the result of an overburdened language production system. Throughout this thesis, I will contrast these two theories for an ultimate answer to why disfluency occurs. Each hypothesis attaches a functional role to a structural definition of disfluency and therefore in order to determine why disfluency occurs, I will contrast the structural and functional characteristics of disfluency. I will attempt to do this by analysing the dialogue behaviour in terms of speech goals and eye gaze behaviour a speaker is engaged in when they make certain types of disfluencies. A multi-modal Map Task paradigm was used in this thesis, in which speakers were asked to describe the route on a cartoon map to a distant confederate listener who provided either visual or verbal feedback. Speakers were eye-tracked during the dialogue and a record was kept of when the speaker attended to the listener’s visual feedback. Experiment 1 tested the visual feedback paradigm to establish its validity as a baseline condition. Speakers were found to make more disfluencies when they could interact with the visual feedback, suggesting disfluency is more common in interactive circumstances. Experiment 2 added verbal feedback to the experimental paradigm to test whether listeners react differently to the two modalities of feedback. Speakers made more disfluencies when the feedback was more complicated. Structural disfluency types were also observed to fulfil different functions. Finally, Experiment 3 manipulated the motivation of the speaker and found that Motivated speakers gazed more often and were more disfluent per opportunity than Control speakers suggesting that highly motivated subjects are more willing to engage in difficult tasks.

This thesis investigates children’s mental representation of syntactic structure and how their acquisition and production of syntax is affected by lexical and semantic factors, focusing on three- and four-year-old children. It focuses on a construction that has been a frequent subject of language acquisition research: the passive. It is often claimed that English-speaking children acquire the passive relatively late in language development (e.g. Horgan, 1978): previous studies have typically found unreliable comprehension and infrequent production of passives by children younger than five (e.g. Fraser et al., 1963). However, there is some evidence from studies providing an appropriate pragmatic context for passives (e.g. Crain et al., 1987) and studies which increase children’s exposure to passives (e.g. Whitehurst et al., 1974) to suggest that children can produce this structure at a younger age. Converging evidence comes from studies of syntactic priming, or the tendency to repeat syntactic structure (e.g. Bencini & Valian, 2008). Syntactic priming effects are potentially informative about the nature of syntactic representation, as they are assumed to reflect the repeated use of the same syntactic representation across successive utterances. With respect to language acquisition, syntactic priming effects can be informative about the extent to which children have acquired an abstract representation of a structure. Specifically, if children have a syntactic representation of the passive, then it should be possible to prime their production of passives, such that they should be more likely to produce passives after hearing passives than after hearing actives. Furthermore, by examining the conditions under which such priming occurs, it is possible to draw inferences about the nature of their passive representation. This thesis presents seven experiments, six using a syntactic priming paradigm, to examine children’s knowledge of passives. Experiment 1 establishes a syntactic priming effect for actives and passives in three- and four-year-old children, and shows that priming occurs for both structures within an experimental session, using a withinparticipants design. Experiments 2, 3 and 4 examine whether young children’s acquisition of the passive is semantically constrained. Experiments 2 and 3 show that children can be primed to produce passive responses by actional and non-actional passive primes. Experiment 4, a picture-sentence matching task, replicates the results of other studies, however, showing that children find subject-experiencer non-actional verb passives more difficult to understand than actional verb passives; this mis-match between the results from the different tasks suggests that some effects of verb-type may be task-related. Experiments 5 and 6 examine whether the observed priming effect could be a lexically-driven effect that is dependent on the repetition of function words (the preposition by or the passive auxiliary). They show that this explanation can be ruled out: children are more likely to produce passives following both passive primes that do not express the agent using a by-phrase and passive primes involving a different auxiliary verb. Experiment 7 examines the later development of passive structures by testing passive production in six- and nine-year-old children. It finds evidence that at six, they still have difficulties with the construction, however by nine, children have an adult-like representation of the passive. I conclude that by four, children have begun to develop a syntactic representation for the passive which is already common to a range of different possible forms(short, full, get and be), and which is not restricted to particular semantic classes of verb. However, these results also suggest that children do not fully master the passive construction before six: young children make morphological errors and errors mapping thematic roles to syntactic positions, even following passive primes. Hence children may acquire the purely syntactic aspects of the passive, leading to a syntactic priming effect, before they acquire other aspects of this structure, hence the children’s occasional errors producing passives.

With a growing multilingual global population, it is becoming increasingly important to know how people of varying cultures respond to persuasive appeals. Cross-cultural studies on persuasion have found differences in American and Chinese advertisements that reflect individualistic and collectivist cultural values. However, these studies have ignored the possible effect of language, despite research showing that language can activate specific cultural ideas and behaviors in bilingual individuals. Additionally, differences have been found in thinking and emotionality in the native (L1) versus the non-native language (L2), that seem to parallel the central and peripheral routes of elaboration in persuasion. Therefore, the proposed study will explore relationship between culture, language and attitude change. In stage 1, participants will report their initial attitudes towards the topics of air travel and nuclear power and their L1 preference. In stage 2, participants will read 2 stories that contain a cultural prime (magpie/red light from a lantern) with contrasting cultural association in American and Chinese culture and fictional scenarios about air travel and nuclear power. Participants will report their attitudes after reading the stories and attitude change will be examined. Two possible outcomes for main effects and interactions between Linguistic/Cultural association and L1 preference on the dependent variable of attitude change will be explored with the intent of discovering which processes are dominant in the bilingual brain.

The purpose of this study proposal is to examine the potential relationship between linguistic creativity and mood disorders, specifically depression and bipolar disorder. Participants will be approximately 67 adults who have either bipolar disorder, major depressive disorder, or serve as a healthy control group. Participants will complete prompts in order to measure linguistic creativity and then fill out several questionnaires relating to depressed mood, mania, general creativity, and rumination levels. It is predicted that bipolar disorder will have higher levels of certain types of linguistic creativity, such as lexical and semantic creativity, whereas depression will have more syntactic creativity. Furthermore, it is anticipated that higher rumination levels in the depressed group will be associated with higher levels of linguistic creativity, as opposed to participants in the depressed group with lower levels of rumination. Lastly, it is predicted that the type of writing prompt will influence the amount of creativity exhibited by each participant group. The proposed study has implications for therapeutic benefits, the emergence of a new area of research in two separate fields, and a new way of analyzing shifts in speech patterns of those with mood disorders.

This dissertation addresses an unanswered question in Arabic psycholinguistics. Arabic words are characterized by their nonconcatenative structure, in which a consonantal root that encodes the main semantic content is interleaved with a derivational pattern (called "binyan", pl. "binyanim"), which is typically vocalic but may also contain consonantal elements and contributes grammatical information. The canonical example of the Semitic root and binyan system is the combination of root /ktb/ which denotes the broad semantic sense of "writing" with verbal binyan /CaCaC/ (with Cindicating a root consonant) to form [katab] "he wrote" and with nominal place binyan/maCCaC/ to form [maktab] "office". Although significant work has been done on the psycholinguistic reality of Arabic morphemes by exploring various phonological, morphological and semantic features across numerous experimental modalities in both the visual and auditory domains (Boudelaa and Marslen-Wilson, 2004, 2005, 2011), no study has investigated the roles of base/morpheme frequency and surface/word frequency and their implications for underlying morphological structure in the lexicon of Arabic as has been done for English, Dutch, and Finnish (Baayen et al., 1997; Alegre and Gordon, 1999; New et al., 2004; Taft, 1979, 2004). Competing models of word recognition propose various integrations of morphology. Whole-word models suggest that there are no separate representations for morphemes, and that the co-activation of related words can be attributed to similarity in form and meaning (Norris and McQueen, 2008; Tyler et al., 1988). Decomposition models posit that words are recognized by accessing the words' constituent morphemes (Meunierand Segui, 1999; Taft et al., 1986; Wurm, 2000). Hybrid models incorporate multiple pathways to recognition. Words are either recognized holistically or by their constituent morphemes depending on multiple factors (Balling and Baayen, 2008; Taftand Nguyen-Hoan, 2010; Lopez-Villasenor, 2012). Of most relevance to the current study is the role of the productivity of the words' derivational affixes: words with unproductive affixes are processed holistically whereas words with productive affixes are processed as a function of their morphemes. This dissertation presents results from four auditory lexical decision experiments performed with native Jordanian speakers in Amman, Jordan, and provides evidence that binyan productivity determines whether the frequency of the base morpheme affects the speed of recognition. By manipulating root and word frequency for three binyanim, one more productive and two less productive, I provide evidence that verbs in the productive binyan are fully decomposable during lexical access and verbs in less productive binyanim are recognized holistically. For a more productive binyan, I examine Binyan I of the form /CaCaC/, and two less productive binyanim are Binyan VIII of the form /iCtaCaC/and Binyan X of the form /staCCaC/. These results together support a hybrid model of lexical access in which some words are recognized via decomposition into the morphemes they are composed of, and others are recognized by their whole word form. These results are consistent with those of Balling and Baayen (2008); Taft and Nguyen-Hoan (2010); Bertramet al. (2000), among others, as derivational affix productivity is the deciding factor determining whether a word will be recognized holistically or decomposed during lexical access.

A research report submitted to the faculty of education of the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Education in Educational Psychology. Johannesburg 1991 / This study of the performance of a sample of average readers on a bax t any of psycholinguistic tests, was conducted in order to provide norms fat' these tests. The sample was drawn from two private schools in Johannesburg and was selected on the basis of age~appropriate performance on the Schonell Graded Word Reading Test. Scores on the Psycholinguistic Tests were expected to conform to predictions of an Information Processing Model which identifies two reading strategies: a direct strategy for reading, which depends on the recognition of the visual appearance of the whole word; and a second indirect or phonological strategy, which is dependent on the use of grapheme-phoneme correspondence. This functional model of adult language processing has been applied in the present study to the development of reading abi Ii ties in children. Research has shown that children use dual routes in reading as well, and that I while younger readers are more dependent on the indirect or phonological route, more proficient older readers rely predominantly on the lexical or direct route. It was expected therefore that different reading strategies would be used for different word types at different ages. As the means for the tests supplied by this study conform to p~edictions of the Dual Processing Model and support the pr oposition of developmental changes in reading strategies, these means may be used as an indication of normal processing strategies in children, thereby permitting the identification of deviant reading strategies in children of different ages. / MT2017

This study examines gaze patterns of monolinguals and bilinguals encoding speech in familiar and unfamiliar languages. In condition 1 English monolinguals viewed videos in familiar and unfamiliar languages (English and Spanish or Icelandic). They performed a task to ensure encoding: on each trial, two videos of short sentences were presented, followed by an audio-only recording of one of those sentences. Participants choose whether the audio-clip matched the first or second video. Participants gazed significantly longer at speaker's mouths when viewing unfamiliar languages. In condition 2 Spanish-English bilingual's viewed English and Spanish, no difference was found between the languages. In condition 3 the task was removed, English monolinguals viewed 20 English and 20 Icelandic videos, no difference in the gaze patterns was found, suggesting this phenomenon relies on encoding. Results indicate people encoding unfamiliar speech attend to the mouth presumably to extract more accurate audiovisually invariant and highly salient speech information. / by Lauren Wood Mavica. / Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2013. / Includes bibliography. / Mode of access: World Wide Web. / System requirements: Adobe Reader.