The Processing of Emotional Sentences by Young and Older Adults: A Visual World Eye-movement Study

Carminati MN, Knoeferle P. The Processing of Emotional Sentences by Young and Older Adults: A Visual World Eye-movement Study. Presented at the Architectures and Mechanisms of Language and Processing (AMLaP), Riva del Garda, Italy

The Influence of Conceptual Number in Coreference Establishing: An ERP Study on Brazilian and European Portuguese

Number agreement depends on two kinds of information: grammatical and conceptual information. And, generally, they converge. However, for collective nouns, syntactic and conceptual number do not match. When collective nouns are involved in coreference establishing, the pronoun agrees with the noun’s conceptual number, thus creating a number disagreement (e.g. the bandSG played last night. TheyPL were great). This PhD Thesis aims to investigate how conceptual number affects coreference establishing and we explore such linguistic phenomena in both Brazilian (partial pro-drop) and European Portuguese (pro-drop). We also investigate whether intra and inter-sentential processing affects the way conceptual number influences coreference establishing

Exploring the adaptive structure of the mental lexicon

The mental lexicon is a complex structure organised in terms of phonology, semantics and syntax, among other levels. In this thesis I propose that this structure can be explained in terms of the pressures acting on it: every aspect of the organisation of the lexicon is an adaptation ultimately related to the function of language as a tool for human communication, or to the fact that language has to be learned by subsequent generations of people. A collection of methods, most of which are applied to a Spanish speech corpus, reveal structure at different levels of the lexicon.• The patterns of intra-word distribution of phonological information may be a consequence of pressures for optimal representation of the lexicon in the brain, and of the pressure to facilitate speech segmentation.• An analysis of perceived phonological similarity between words shows that the sharing of different aspects of phonological similarity is related to different functions. Phonological similarity perception sometimes relates to morphology (the stressed final vowel determines verb tense and person) and at other times shows processing biases (similarity in the word initial and final segments is more readily perceived than in word-internal segments).• Another similarity analysis focuses on cooccurrence in speech to create a representation of the lexicon where the position of a word is determined by the words that tend to occur in its close vicinity. Variations of context-based lexical space naturally categorise words syntactically and semantically.• A higher level of lexicon structure is revealed by examining the relationships between the phonological and the cooccurrence similarity spaces. A study in Spanish supports the universality of the small but significant correlation between these two spaces found in English by Shillcock, Kirby, McDonald and Brew (2001). This systematicity across levels of representation adds an extra layer of structure that may help lexical acquisition and recognition. I apply it to a new paradigm to determine the function of parameters of phonological similarity based on their relationships with the syntacticsemantic level. I find that while some aspects of a language's phonology maintain systematicity, others work against it, perhaps responding to the opposed pressure for word identification.This thesis is an exploratory approach to the study of the mental lexicon structure that uses existing and new methodology to deepen our understanding of the relationships between language use and language structure

Understanding semantic competition in complex phrase comprehension and production

This thesis investigated the relationship between complex phrase comprehension and production. The work aimed to identify whether parallel competition effects exist between the two tasks; and importantly, the extent to which these effects drive from common processes and knowledge bases. In three studies, participants viewed pictures of various entities doing different actions. For each picture, they comprehended a recorded description (e.g. the teddy bear/man that the girl is hugging) about the entity being acted upon, and were asked to describe it in a production task. They also completed a number of cognitive assessments measuring vocabulary, inhibition, etc. Study 1 found that phrases containing highly similar and reversible nouns are more difficult to comprehend and produce in adults. Importantly, this difficulty varied as a function of individual inhibition skills over above vocabulary in both tasks, and production additionally recruited task-specific motor inhibition processes. Study 2 replicated the reversibility-based effects with children and adolescents. But young children differed from older participants as they experienced greater production interference and are less skilled in using certain production options to alleviate interference. Unlike adults, their language performance was predicted by variance on working memory capacity. Study 3 used eye-tracking to examine the time course of production competition. The results showed reversibility-based competition manifest at verb position, and is particularly relevant to individual’s semantic inhibition skill. This parallels previous comprehension findings, thus suggests shared competition resolution processes across tasks. Together, these findings suggest common reversibility-based competition processes underlying comprehension and production, and across development. Current models arguing for shared prediction processes in adults can potentially incorporate common inhibition mechanisms; however, our data imply that non-shared processes should also be considered. On the other hand, unlike adults, our children’s data supports the capacity-constraint account in language processing, thus suggesting a discontinuity of cognitive functioning in language development

Mechanisms of harmony and the ordering of word order: consistencies and inconsistencies in language change and acquisition

The thesis is based on the learning of word-orders in a cross-lingUistic and historic perspective. In linguistics, a certain hannony is expected in word order. X-bars of a language are supposed to be right-branched or left-branched.. So, a language, which is right-branched has its head usually first, and a language, which is left-branched has its head usually last. In the generative framework, linguists argue that when a child encounters a structure where the head is to the right, she will assume that the whole language is constructed this way. Cognitive scientists like Christiansen argue that inconsistencies, that means a mixture of right- and left- branching are more difficult to learn because of recursive embeddings, and thus inconsistencies should simply die out or never come into existence in the first place. Greenberg established language universals after having considered forty languages. These universals would show consistencies in an X-bar branching, but Greenberg also cited exceptions and spoke of statistical universals. We are interested in these inconsistencies. If they are really more difficult to learn, why do they evolve in the first place and why are they often quite consistent in language evolution, i.e. they do not die out. Historical linguistics often argue that languages tend to develop from one consistent language via a transitional one and then develop again towards a consistent language. Inconsistent structures exist in most languages although there is a statistical trend towards consistencies. So, how do languages change and what makes persons learn at one stage a language differently and what are the mechanisms involved in learning that we can see as an end-result in language change. We will examine some of these phenomena, when we discuss�· language change in Romance, the introduction of postpositions in Gennan, and the role of the infinite verb in Gennan and in Old English. Experimental work has been done for the frontability of Gennan particles, which is closely linked to the introduction of postpositions. We did an experiment in English language for the role of the infinite verb in verb-final languages such as Gennan and replicated this experiment in French because of its richer verb morphology because this gives us a greater distinction between finite and infinite verbs. An SRN-simulation on the role of the infinite verb supports the experiments