Originally presented as the author's thesis, Paris. / Bibliography: p. [205]-222.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Notre Dame, 2006. / Thesis directed by John Borkowski for the Department of Psychology. "July 2006." Includes bibliographical references (leaves 63-74).

Linguistics has developed elaborate accounts of the <u>social</u> aspects of language use - 'how to do things with words' - but the <u>emotional-dynamic</u> aspects have hitherto received less attention. Such discussions of emotive or affective meaning as there have been have tended to concentrate on the linguistic resources that are coded into the language system, rather than the dynamics of emotional interaction enacted through language use. The clinical discipline of Kleinian psychoanalysis, by contrast, has made emotional dynamics its central concern. Furthermore the main tool of the psychoanalyst's trade is the verbal interpretation of the patient's material, much of which is itself verbal. These factors have led to the development in Kleinian psychodynamic theory of a particularly rich vocabulary for understanding emotional-dynamic interaction, and specifically those aspects which are verbally enacted. The goal of this thesis is to outline a linguistic theory of emotional dynamics based on insights derived from Kleinian psychoanalysis. It aims to extrapolate from a clinical context Kleinian ideas that can be integrated with those of the school of Linguistic thought that has emphasised the dynamic aspects of locally-managed discourse meaning.

The current dissertation represents one of the first systematic studies of the distribution of speech errors within supralexical prosodic units. Four experiments were conducted to gain insight into the specific role of these units in speech planning and production. The first experiment focused on errors in adult English. These were found to be systematically distributed within the highest-level supralexical prosodic unit, the Intonational Phrase (IP), providing evidence for its psychological reality. The specific distribution of errors--fewest in unit-initial position, with a gradual increase in errors across the unit--was interpreted to suggest that the IP functions as a planning domain: the unit is activated as a whole, and activation gradually decays with time leading to an increase in errors. The second experiment was motivated by the idea that a decrease in IP activation is best understood in the context of working memory processes. Children's speech was examined in preference to adult speech because it is less automatized and so likely more influenced by working memory. The findings were that children with better working memories produced shorter IPs and relatively more anticipatory errors than children with poorer working memories. The results provided further evidence for the role of IPs in planning. The third and fourth experiments extended the investigation to another language, Korean, and examined the role of a mid-level prosodic unit, the Accentual Phrase (AP), in planning and production. The results indicated the same pattern of error distribution in the Korean IP as in the English IP. In contrast, more errors occurred in AP-initial position than in the second half of the unit, and the elicited errors tended to preserve AP-internal structure. The results were interpreted to suggest that the AP provides a structural frame within which elements are slotted for production. Overall, the results are consistent with the idea that these units play a critical role in the planning and production process. The results also suggest that different units within the prosodic hierarchy function differently: the IP functions as a planning domain, and mid-level units (i.e., AP) provide the structure needed to accomplish serial ordering in speech. This dissertation includes previously published co-authored material.

Syntactically ambiguous sentences offer an insight into how sentences generally are processed, by examining how readers recognise and reanalyse the ambiguity. However, it is only more recently that the comprehension product of syntactic analysis has been adequately tested, demonstrating that ambiguities are not always fully processed. This work has led to the good-enough approach to language processing and comprehension (e.g., Ferreira &amp; Patson, 2007), which argues that sentence processing is merely good enough for the current task, and that our comprehension may not exactly match the content of what has been read. The work presented in this thesis set out to examine what it means for syntactic ambiguity processing to be good enough, by monitoring patterns of eye movements as people read sentences containing a temporary syntactic ambiguity. Comprehension questions probed the extent to which the syntactic ambiguity had been resolved. Across six experiments, it was demonstrated that both online sentence processing and comprehension are influenced by the presence of an extrinsic memory load, the presence or absence of comprehension questions, the length of texts being read, and the age of participants. Eye movement patterns were more superficial if the task permitted it; similarly, syntactic ambiguities were misinterpreted more commonly as the task demands increased. The results support a good-enough, adaptive sentence processing system, where initial misinterpretations can linger in the product of syntactic analysis, and which is affected by task demands and individual differences.

Doctorat en sciences psychologiques / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

Doctorat en sciences psychologiques / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

The research presented in this PhD dissertation examines the phenomenon of semantic implicit learning, using semantic preferences of novel verbs as a test case. Implicit learning refers to the phenomenon of learning without intending to learn or awareness that one is learning at all. Semantic preference (or selectional preference – as preferred in computational linguistics) is the tendency of a word to co-occur with words sharing similar semantic features. For example, ‘drink’ is typically followed by nouns denoting LIQUID, and the verb ‘chase’ is typically followed by ANIMATE nouns. The material presented here spans across disciplines. It examines a well-documented psychological phenomenon - implicit learning – and applies it in the context of language acquisition, thereby providing insights into both fields. The organisation of this dissertation groups its experiments by their methodology. Chapter 1 provides an overview of the current psychological and linguistic literature. Chapter 2 includes a pen-and-paper study carried out in a classroom environment on Polish learners of English, where awareness is assessed by subjective measures taken at each test question as well as a post-experiment questionnaire. Chapter 3 includes a collection of 5 computer-based experiments based on a false-memory paradigm. After exposure to sentential contexts containing novel verbs, participants are shown to endorse more previously unseen verb-noun pairings that follow the correct semantic preference patterns to the pairings that violate it. The result holds even when participants do not reveal any explicit knowledge of the patterns in the final debriefing. Awareness is additionally assessed using indirect measures examining correlations of confidence judgements with performance. Chapter 4 examines whether implicit learning of novel verb semantic preference patterns is automatic. To this end, a reaction time procedure is developed based on two consecutive decisions (“double decision priming”). The method reveals that semantic implicit learning, at least in the described cases, exerts its influence with a delay, in post-processing. Chapter 5 comprises research done in collaboration with Dr Nitin Williams, University of Reading. It documents an attempt at finding neural indices of implicit learning using a novel single-trial analysis of an electroencephalographic (EEG) signal, based on empirical mode decomposition (EMD) denoising. Chapter 6 presents a final discussion and indications for future research. The main contribution of this dissertation to the general field of implicit learning research consists in its challenging the predominant view that implicit learning mainly relies on similarity of forms presented in training and test. The experiments presented here require participants to make generalisations at a higher, semantic level, which is largely independent of perceptual form. The contribution of this work to the field of Second Language Acquisition consists of empirical support for the currently popular but seldom tested assumptions held by advocates of communicative approaches to language teaching, namely that certain aspects of linguistic knowledge can develop without explicit instruction and explanation. At the same time, it challenges any view assuming that vocabulary learning necessarily relies on explicit mediation. The experiments collected here demonstrate that at least word usage in context can be learnt implicitly. A further contribution of this dissertation is its demonstration that the native language may play a key role in determining what is learnt in such situations. A deeper understanding of the phenomenon of semantic implicit learning promises to shed light on the nature of word and grammar learning in general, which is crucial for an account of the processes involved in the development of a second language mental lexicon.

Bilingual language control refers to how bilinguals are able to speak exclusively in one language without the unintended language intruding. Two prominent verbal theories of bilingual language control have been proposed by researchers: the inhibitory control model (ICM) and the lexical selection mechanism model (LSM). The ICM posits that domain-general inhibition is employed in order to suppress the unintended language’s activation. The LSM posits that inhibition is not used; rather a lexical selection mechanism targets only the intended language’s words. In order to better test the theories’ hypotheses, I developed computational models to estimate participants’ reaction times when naming in blocks of semantically related pictures and in blocks of semantically unrelated pictures. For these tasks, the ICM model predicts that semantic interference will be abolished when bilinguals switch languages, while the LSM model does not. In Experiment One, English-Spanish bilinguals named pictures that were either semantically related to the previous four trials, or semantically unrelated to the previous four trials. Research indicated that language switching did not abolish priming effects, supporting the ICM. These results contradict conclusions found in previous literature. To reconcile this, another experiment was conducted. It was similar to Experiment One, except filler trials separated semantically related trials. Results showed that each time a semantically related neighbor was presented, naming latency increased by ~10ms regardless of language switching or number of filler items. It suggests that the existing literature mistook incremental learning effects as priming effects, and it demonstrates a need to incorporate theories of incremental learning into theories of bilingual language control.

The purpose of this study was to compare language performance on three subtests of the Illinois Test of Psycholinguistic Abilities (ITPA) of a Black population of children ages three years six months through six years in Portland, Oregon, with the standardizing population of the ITPA. These subtests are Auditory Reception, Grammatic Closure, and Verbal Expression. The null hypotheses tested were: There is no difference in scores on the Auditory Reception subtest of the ITPA between the standardizing test population and that of Black children ages three years six months through six years in Portland, Oregon. There is no difference in scores on the Grammatic Closure subtest of the ITPA between the standardizing test population and that of black children ages three years six months through six years in Portland, Oregon There is no difference in scores on the Verbal Expression subtest of the ITPA between the standardizing test population and that of Black children ages three years six months through six years in Portland, Oregon.