Thesis (M.A.)--University of North Carolina at Wilmington, 2006. / In English and Spanish. Includes bibliographical references (p. 35-40)

Several definitions exist that offer to identify the boundaries between languages and dialects, yet these distinctions are inconsistent and are often as political as they are linguistic (Chambers & Trudgill, 1998). A different perspective is offered in this thesis, by investigating how closely related linguistic varieties are represented in the brain and whether they engender similar cognitive effects as is often reported for bilingual speakers of recognised independent languages, based on the principles of Green’s (1998) model of bilingual language control. Study 1 investigated whether bidialectal speakers exhibit similar benefits in non-linguistic inhibitory control as a result of the maintenance and use of two dialects, as has been proposed for bilinguals who regularly employ inhibitory control mechanisms, in order to suppress one language while speaking the other. The results revealed virtually identical performance across all monolingual, bidialectal and bilingual participant groups, thereby not just failing to find a cognitive control advantage in bidialectal speakers over monodialectals/monolinguals, but also in bilinguals; adding to a growing body of evidence which challenges this bilingual advantage in non-linguistic inhibitory control. Study 2 investigated the cognitive representation of dialects using an adaptation of a Language Switching Paradigm to determine if the effort required to switch between dialects is similar to the effort required to switch between languages. The results closely replicated what is typically shown for bilinguals: Bidialectal speakers exhibited a symmetrical switch cost like balanced bilinguals while monodialectal speakers, who were taught to use the dialect words before the experiment, showed the asymmetrical switch cost typically displayed by second language learners. These findings augment Green’s (1998) model by suggesting that words from different dialects are also tagged in the mental lexicon, just like words from different languages, and as a consequence, it takes cognitive effort to switch between these mental settings. Study 3 explored an additional explanation for language switching costs by investigating whether changes in articulatory settings when switching between different linguistic varieties could - at least in part – be responsible for these previously reported switching costs. Using a paradigm which required participants to switch between using different articulatory settings, e.g. glottal stops/aspirated /t/ and whispers/normal phonation, the results also demonstrated the presence of switch costs, suggesting that switching between linguistic varieties has a motor task-switching component which is independent of representations in the mental lexicon. Finally, Study 4 investigated how much exposure is needed to be able to distinguish between different varieties using two novel language categorisation tasks which compared German vs Russian cognates, and Standard Scottish English vs Dundonian Scots cognates. The results showed that even a small amount of exposure (i.e. a couple of days’ worth) is required to enable listeners to distinguish between different languages, dialects or accents based on general phonetic and phonological characteristics, suggesting that the general sound template of a language variety can be represented before exact lexical representations have been formed. Overall, these results show that bidialectal use of typologically closely related linguistic varieties employs similar cognitive mechanisms as bilingual language use. This thesis is the first to explore the cognitive representations and mechanisms that underpin the use of typologically closely related varieties. It offers a few novel insights and serves as the starting point for a research agenda that can yield a more fine-grained understanding of the cognitive mechanisms that may operate when speakers use closely related varieties. In doing so, it urges caution when making assumptions about differences in the mechanisms used by individuals commonly categorised as monolinguals, to avoid potentially confounding any comparisons made with bilinguals.

The overt teaching of the Monitor, or conscious rule awareness, to native Spanish-speaking ESL students was examined to note possible benefits to the students' oral English production. Native Spanish-speaking students of English (the experimental group) were taught an awareness of their ability to self-correct their spoken English. They were then compared to another group of native Spanish-speaking ESL students (the control group) in four areas: Ilyin Oral Interview score, total words produced, errors produced, and interference errors produced. The results of the study lend support to the theory that overt Monitor teaching could be beneficial to native Spanish-speaking students of English. The experimental group showed a significant gain in Ilyin scores and a significant reduction in the number of errors produced.

The thesis tests the hypothesis that certain aspects of linguistic variation in Attic prose are related to the type of oral performance, private or public, which the author envisaged for his text. This hypothesis rests on the assumption that authors more or less consciously optimized their texts for their intended communicative situation. A crucial feature of texts optimized for public delivery was clarity, which figures as an essential component of the 'virtue of speech' in the Greek rhetorical thought. In private situations the audience itself could alter the pace of reading or recitation. Clarifications could be sought, and pauses and repetitions would be possible. The case was different with public situations, where the text itself coincided with its performance and it was entirely up to the speaker to determine the way in which the audience would access it. Especially in political and judicial contexts, where important decisions were to be made, public speakers could not afford being unclear. In order to test whether public texts were clearer than private texts, 'clarity' must be defined in a linguistically thorough way. Modern psycholinguistics studies human language comprehension, and experimental research has revealed language-independent mechanisms which can be confidently applied to dead languages. In the thesis, clarity is measured by the number of syntactic, semantic, and referential reanalyses which linguistics structures induce in a given amount of text. This methodology is tested on a corpus of Attic speeches, which includes both texts that were devised exclusively for written circulation and private delivery, and texts that were at least conceived for public delivery, although we do not know to what extent they correspond to the versions which were actually delivered. The difference between the average score of 'public texts' and that of 'private texts' is statistically significant and supports the hypothesis that 'public texts' were generally clearer than 'private texts' for audiences of native speakers.

In this dissertation, the traditional dichotic listening paradigm was integrated with the notion of working memory capacity (WMC) to explore the cognitive mechanism of bilingual speech comprehension at the passage level. A bilingual dichotic listening (BDL) task was developed and administered to investigate characteristics of bilingual listening comprehension, which include semantic relatedness, unattended language, ear preference, auditory attentional control, executive control, voluntary note-taking, and language switching. The central concept of the BDL paradigm is that the auditory stimuli are presented in the bilinguals’ two languages and their attention is directed to one of their ears while they have to overcome cognitive and linguistic conflicts caused by information in the other ear. Different experimental manipulations were employed in the BDL task to examine the characteristics of bilingual listening comprehension. The bilingual population examined was Japanese- English bilinguals with relatively high second language (L2) proficiency and WMC. Seven experiments and seven cross-experimental comparisons are reported. Experiment 1 employed the BDL task with pairs of passages that had different semantic relationships (i.e., related or unrelated) and were heard in different languages (i.e., L1 or L2). The semantically related passages were found to interfere with comprehension of the attended passage more than the semantically unrelated passages, whether the attended and unattended languages were the same or different. Contrary to the theories of bilingual language control, unattended L1 was found to enhance comprehension of the attended passage, regardless of semantic relationships and language it was heard in. L2 proficiency and WMC served as good predictors of resolution of the cognitive and linguistic conflicts. The BDL task is suggested to serve as an experimental paradigm to explore executive control and language control in bilingual speech comprehension. Experiment 2 was conducted to investigate language lateralisation (i.e., ear preference) on bilingual speech comprehension, hence, the participants in Experiment 1 used their preferred ear, whereas participants in Experiment 2 used their non-preferred ear, whether it was left or right, in the BDL task. Comprehension was better through the preferred ear, indicating that there is a favourable ear-to-hemisphere route for understanding bilinguals’ two languages. Most of the participants were found to be left-lateralised (i.e., right-eared) and some to be right-lateralised (i.e., left-eared) presumably depending on their L2 proficiency and WMC. Experiment 3 was concerned with auditory attentional control, and explored whether there would be a right-ear advantage (REA). The participants indicated an REA whether the attended and unattended languages were L1 or L2. When they listened to Japanese in the left ear, they found it more difficult to suppress Japanese in the right ear than English. WMC was not required as much as expected for auditory attentional control probably because the passages in Experiment 3 did not yield as much semantic competition as those in Experiment 1. L2 proficiency was crucial for resolving within- and between-language competition in each ear. Experiments 4, 5, and 6 were replications of Experiments 1, 2 and 3, but these latter experiments considered the effect of note-taking that is commonly performed in everyday listening situations. Note-taking contributed to better performance and clearer understanding of the role of WMC in bilingual speech comprehension. A cross-experimental analysis between Experiments 1, 2, 4, and 5 revealed not only a facilitatory role of note-taking in bilingual listening comprehension in general, but also a hampering role when listening through the preferred ear. Experiment 7 addressed the effect of predictability of language switching by presenting L1 and L2 in a systematic order while switching attention between ears and comparing the result with that of Experiment 6 where language switching was unpredictable. The effect of predictability of language switching was different between ears. When language switches were predictable, higher comprehension was observed in the left ear than the right ear, and when language switches were unpredictable, higher comprehension was observed in the right ear than the left ear, thereby suggesting a mechanism of asymmetrical language control. WMC was more related to processing of predictable language switches than that of unpredictable language switches. The dissertation ends with discussions of the implications from the seven BDL experiments and possible applications, along with experimental techniques from other relevant disciplines that might be used in future research to yield additional insight into how bilingual listeners sustain their listening performance in their two languages in the real-life situations.

This thesis describes basic research into visual word recognition and decision making. Determining the best matching lexical representation for a given stimulus involves interactions between representations. The standard task for studying these processes is the lexical decision task (LDT), but there is still debate regarding the factors that affect how individuals make lexical decisions. The nature of lexical interactions and the processes underlying lexical decision-making were addressed here by testing response congruency effects in the masked priming variant of the LDT. The results of seven masked priming experiments showed a robust response congruency effect that depends on the difficulty of the word-nonword discrimination. This finding resolved apparent inconsistencies in previous research. The experiments were simulated using the Bayesian Reader and the Spatial Coding Model (SCM). The probability based Bayesian Reader model failed to accommodate the findings. However, a good fit to the data was provided by a modified version of the SCM in which the assumptions regarding the nature of lexical interactions were changed such that word nodes inhibit only (closely) related competitors. The model also assumes that the difficulty of the word-nonword discrimination affects the degree to which stimulus typicality informs lexical decisions. A critical issue for these experiments involved the definition of orthographic typicality. An algorithm for measuring orthographic typicality and for generating nonwords with a specific level of orthographic typicality (OT3) was developed. An unprimed LDT experiment showed that OT3 affected decision latency even when other standard measures of orthographic typicality were controlled. Two additional masked priming experiments showed that highly typical primes lead to faster word responses and slower nonword responses than less typical primes. Overall, the results of this research enhance our understanding of the processes underlying visual word recognition and lexical decision making, and also have important methodological implications for the field.

This thesis explores the mental representation of subject-verb agreement, and the factors that can affect the determination of agreement in language production. It reports nine experiments that used a task in which participants produced sentence completions for visually presented complex subjects such as “The greyhound which two lively rabbits were tempting”. Such completions typically agree with the head noun (greyhound) as in “A greyhound which two lively rabbits were tempting is jumping” but sometimes agree with the local noun (rabbits) as in “A greyhound which two lively rabbits were tempting are jumping”. The first experiments examined the value of the concept of markedness in subject verb number agreement to see whether it has explanatory power for languages like Slovene with more than two number values. Results from two experiments employing complex sentence preambles including a head noun post modified by a prepositional phrase or a relative clause (e.g., “The nudist(s) near the sand dune(s)”) show that Slovene number agreement differs from number agreement in languages with no dual, but that it is not possible to simply state that the singular is the least marked and the dual the most. I argue that using languages with more complex number systems allows greater insight into the processes of correct and erroneous subject-verb agreement, and shows that it is necessary to dissociate susceptibility to agreement from error-causing status. To conclude, the concept of markedness seems unable to explain my results. Semantic effects in agreement are then examined using two comparison experiments in English. Experiment 3 shows that although English has only a two value system, speakers are sensitive to semantic differences in number. Experiment 4 explores the possible influence of speakers’ native language three-value number system on their two-value second language system. It shows that native speakers of English are more sensitive to semantic number differences in English than Slovene speakers of English. Experiment 5 explores gender agreement in Slovene (which has three genders) and shows that there is a complex pattern of agreement. As with number, there is not just one number value which is problematic: neuter and masculine are most confusable, but masculine errors are also common when feminine agreement would be expected, thus suggesting that speakers revert to two different defaults, masculine and neuter. Finally, the results of four experiments examining number and gender agreement in coordinated phrases are presented. Agreement in such phrases may be resolved (i.e. the verb agrees with the whole subject) but may instead agree with one conjunct. Agreement with one conjunct is affected byword order (agreement with the nearest conjunct is most common), coordinator (e.g., single-conjunct agreement is more common after “or” than “and”) and the gender or number of the conjuncts (e.g., dual number is associated with single-conjunct agreement). Taken together, my results suggest that agreement is affected by a complex interplay of semantic and syntactic factors, and that the effects of a three-valued system are quite distinct from those of a two-valued system.

Highly structured for efficient communication, natural languages are complex systems. Unlike in their computational cousins, functions and meanings in natural languages are relative, frequently prescribed to symbols through unexpected social processes. Despite grammar and definition, the presence of metaphor can leave unwitting language users "in the dark," so to speak. This is not problematic, but rather an important operational feature of languages, since the lifting of meaning onto higher-order structures allows individuals to compress descriptions of regularly-conveyed information. This compressed terminology, often only appropriate when taken locally (in context), is beneficial in an enormous world of novel experience. However, what is natural for a human to process can be tremendously difficult for a computer. When a sequence of words (a phrase) is to be taken as a unit, suppose the choice of words in the phrase is subordinate to the choice of the phrase, i.e., there exists an inter-word dependence owed to membership within a common phrase. This word selection process is not one of independent selection, and so is capable of generating word-frequency distributions that are not accessible via independent selection processes. We have shown in Ch. 2 through analysis of thousands of English texts that empirical word-frequency distributions possess these word-dependence anomalies, while phrase-frequency distributions do not. In doing so, this study has also led to the development of a novel, general, and mathematical framework for the generation of frequency data for phrases, opening up the field of mass-preserving mesoscopic lexical analyses. A common oversight in many studies of the generation and interpretation of language is the assumption that separate discourses are independent. However, even when separate texts are each produced by means of independent word selection, it is possible for their composite distribution of words to exhibit dependence. Succinctly, different texts may use a common word or phrase for different meanings, and so exhibit disproportionate usages when juxtaposed. To support this theory, we have shown in Ch. 3 that the act of combining distinct texts to form large 'corpora' results in word-dependence irregularities. This not only settles a 15-year discussion, challenging the current major theory, but also highlights an important practice necessary for successful computational analysis---the retention of meaningful separations in language. We must also consider how language speakers and listeners navigate such a combinatorially vast space for meaning. Dictionaries (or, the collective editorial communities behind them) are smart. They know all about the lexical objects they define, but we ask about the latent information they hold, or should hold, about related, undefined objects. Based solely on the text as data, in Ch. 4 we build on our result in Ch. 2 and develop a model of context defined by the structural similarities of phrases. We then apply this model to define measures of meaning in a corpus-guided experiment, computationally detecting entries missing from a massive, collaborative online dictionary known as the Wiktionary.

TITLE: The Generic Masculine in Educational Communication ABSTRACT: The thesis deals with the use of generic masculine in educational communication. The use of masculine nouns to refer to a group of people of both sexes is a target of frequent criticism from proponents of gender-neutral language. The theoretical part of my paper discusses and explains in general the importance of language for cognitive development of an individual and the principle of gender-sensitive expression. The empirical part of my paper is based on qualitative research that was conducted at a selected secondary school in order to verify the influence of language attributions of the generic masculine form on the mental representation of reality. The main technique of data collection was a survey inspired by the psycholinguistics association experiments. Attitudes and opinions of students on the subject of research were identified during group discussions. The results of my study among respondents points at the generic masculine to be significantly more often associated with mental representation of a male than to be perceived as gender-neutral. These findings thus correspond with some of the current theses of gender linguistics.

Suivant la proposition de Tarski (1936), la sémantique vériconditionnelle associeà une phrase déclarative des conditions de vérité. Ainsi, comprendre le sens dela phrase “Il pleut”, c’est pouvoir dire après avoir regardé par la fenêtre si elle estvraie ou fausse. Toutefois, ceci ne permet de rendre compte que des phrases déclaratives,et pas des questions puisqu’aucune situation ne rendra jamais la question“Qui a appelé ce matin ?” vraie ou fausse. Hamblin (1973) propose la premièrethéorie des questions dans le cadre de la sémantique véri-conditionnelle, et proposede leur associer des conditions de résolutions, c’est-à-dire des ensembles deréponses. Comprendre le sens de la question “Qui a appelé ce matin ?” c’est alorssavoir que “Jean a appelé” est une réponse possible, tandis que “il pleuvait” n’enest pas une.Très rapidement, l’étude de la sémantique des questions s’est tournée versles questions enchâssées dans des phrases déclaratives (questions indirectes). Eneffet, il est beaucoup plus aisé de juger des conditions de vérité d’une phrasesdéclarative que des conditions de résolution d’une question. Or moyennant deshypothèses sur la sémantique des verbes enchâssant des questions (‘savoir’, ‘oublier’.. . ), on peut relier les conditions de vérité d’une phrase déclarative au sensde la question qu’elle enchâsse. Cette approche, proposée par Karttunen (1977), adonné lieu à une littérature théorique très riche. / Two important questions arise from the recent literature on embedded questions.First, Heim (1994) proposed that embedded questions are ambiguous betweena weakly and strongly exhaustive reading. Spector (2005) recently proposedan intermediate exhaustive reading as well. Second, adverbs of quantity such as’mostly’ can quantify over answers to an embedded questions (Berman, 1991). Ananalysis of this phenomena reveals an analogy between embedded questions andplural determiner phrases, and suggests a fine-grained structures for the denotationof questions (Lahiri, 2002).The first part of the dissertation consist of three psycholinguistic studies on theexhaustive readings of questions under ‘know’ in English, the acquisition of thesereadings under ‘savoir’ by French 5-to-6-ear-olds, and the properties of emotivefactivepredicates such as ‘surprise’. The second part presents a theory of embeddedquestions built on Klinedinst and Rothschild’s (2011) proposal to derive exhaustivereadings as implicatures, although it differs in the fine-grained structureit adopts for questions denotations in order to account for plurality effects as well.The theory solves problem raised by B. R. George (2013) and makes predictions fora larger range of sentences.