A Computational Model Of Cognitive Constraints In Syntactic Locality

This dissertation is broadly concerned with the question: how do human cognitive limitations influence difficult sentences? The focus is a class of grammatical restrictions, locality constraints. The majority of relations between words are local; the relations between question words and their governors are not. Locality constraints restrict the formation of these non-local dependencies. Though necessary, the origin, operation, and scope of locality constraints is a controversial topic in the literature. The dissertation describes the implementation of a computational model that clarifies these issues. The model tests, against behavioral data, a series of cognitive constraints argued to account for locality. The result is an explanatory model predictive of a variety of cross-linguistic locality data. The model distinguishes those cognitive limitations that affect locality processing, and addresses the competence-performance debate by determining how and when cognitive constraints explain human behavior. The results provide insight into the nature of locality constraints, and promote language models sensitive to human cognitive limitations

Marketing health and nutrition claims; Their subjective importance, attitudinal influences and cognitive representation

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.This thesis analyses the subjective importance, attitudinal influences and cognitive representation of marketing health and nutrition claims. Examining the importance of claims to choices of members of the public revealed that claims were accorded the highest subjective importance, despite low visual attention. This finding was replicated with students and staff of a Food Science department, an indication that relatively higher knowledge does not alter their perceived importance. The attitudinal influence of claim information was measured by ratings on attributes, previously generated specifically for the study, for packages shown with and without claims on computer. Packages with-claims were perceived as significantly more informative, easier to purchase and influenced participants to believe that others, whose opinion is important to them, would think that they should buy them. Data reduction of the attribute scores produced three factors; enjoyment, nutrition and surface appearance. Enjoyment was twice as important to participants' attitude to purchase than nutrition. With French participants, the results showed that the claims only influenced the perception of flavour, which was thought to be worse in the with-claims condition. There was no replication of the finding that others would be significantly more likely to think they should buy the products that displayed claims. Both population samples thought the provision of information on food labels to be highly important. The cognitive representation of claims was explored using recognition and recollection tests. The first experiments revealed that British consumers have an expectation that claims will be worded in implication form to avoid legal infringements. Food and vocabulary related knowledge differences did not alter this finding. Testing long term memory showed an increased effect with British participants, but no effect with the French owing to their lack of experience of such claims. Finally, no distinction between the meaning of the implied and asserted forms of the claims were shown in a test conducted using only British participants

Graph Theory and Universal Grammar

Tese arquivada ao abrigo da Portaria nº 227/2017 de 25 de Julho-Registo de Grau EstrangeiroIn the last few years, Noam Chomsky (1994; 1995; 2000; 2001) has gone quite far in the direction of simplifying syntax, including eliminating X-bar theory and the levels of D-structure and S-structure entirely, as well as reducing movement rules to a combination of the more primitive operations of Copy and Merge. What remain in the Minimalist Program are the operations Merge and Agree and the levels of LF (Logical Form) and PF (Phonological form). My doctoral thesis attempts to offer an economical theory of syntactic structure from a graph-theoretic point of view (cf. Diestel, 2005), with special emphases on the elimination of category and projection labels and the Inclusiveness Condition (Chomsky 1994). The major influences for the development of such a theory have been Chris Collins’ (2002) seminal paper “Eliminating labels”, John Bowers (2001) unpublished manuscript “Syntactic Relations” and the Cartographic Paradigm (see Belletti, Cinque and Rizzi’s volumes on OUP for a starting point regarding this paradigm). A syntactic structure will be regarded here as a graph consisting of the set of lexical items, the set of relations among them and nothing more

Constructing concepts and word meanings: the role of context and memory traces

The main aim of this thesis is to develop a new account of concepts and word meaning which provides a fully adequate basis for inferential accounts of linguistic communication, while both respecting philosophical insights into the nature of concepts and cohering with empirical findings in psychology on memory processes. In accord with the ‘action’ tradition in linguistic theorising, I maintain that utterance/speaker meaning is more basic than sentence meaning and that the approach to word meaning that naturally follows from this is ‘contextualism’. Contextualism challenges two assumptions of the traditional ‘minimalist’ approach to semantics: (i) that semantics (rather than pragmatics) is the appropriate locus of propositional content (hence truth-conditions); and, (ii) that words contribute stable, context-independent meanings to the sentences in which they appear. I set out two stages in the development of an adequate contextualist account of utterance content. The first provides an essential reformulation of the early insights of Paul Grice by demonstrating the unavoidability of pragmatic contributions to truth-conditional content. The second argues that the ubiquity of context-dependence justifies a radically different view of word meaning from that employed in all current pragmatic theorising, including relevance theory: rather than words expressing concepts or encoding stable meanings of any sort, both concepts and word meanings are constructed ad hoc in the process of on-line communication/interpretation, that is, in their situations of use. Finally, I show how my account of word meaning is supported by recent research in psychology: context-dependence is also rampant in category and concept formation, and multiple-trace memory models show how information distributed in memory across a multitude of previous occasions of language use can come together to build an occasion-specific word meaning, thereby bypassing the need for fixed word meanings

An Investigation of the Sculpture/Language Homology

Merged with duplicate record 10026.1/691 on 03.04.2017 by CS (TIS)This research is concerned with the implications of reading sculpture as a mode of communication that is indicative of an art/language homology. An investigation of the inter-relationship of the functions of ‘Language’ and 'Conventions of Visual Communication' is viewed against contemporary redefinitions of the role of sculpture, its character of presentation and mode of engagement with respondents. Theoretical investigation examines models of communication and identifies corresponding systems in an art that is exemplified by the sculpture of Tony Cragg. Cragg's significantly organised collections of commonplace objects, presenting the visual assertiveness of the 'ready-made' prompt a reconsideration of the object as a semantic commodity that embodies narrative. The artifact itself is viewed as a visual reference that induces a sequence of complex associations. A reading of the sculpture's multi-layered mimetic, metaphorical and metonymic indices implies the acceptance of paradigmatic conventions of signification within a communication system frequently described as a 'language of sculpture'. The connotative and denotative nature of a materialised, but idealised, presentation of object imagery suggests that Cragg's sculpture is the vehicle of a dialectic process. It is the art of the 'bricoleur' that embodies a readily accessible lexical and semantic content constructed from the readily available signifiers 'to hand'. The exploratory and reflective investigations of the integral studio projects are concerned with the communication values of contiguous object-entities, in a visual process that links associations in the manner of rhetorical tropes. In a polysemic interaction of visual identities this semantic transposition of a sculptural aesthetic aims to expose relationships connecting expressive material form, image semiosis and object/word associations. The sculptural processes of making-to-reading reveal a systematic structuring of meaning, as the mechanisms of perception are directed by the conceptual modelling of cognitive thought patterns.Theoretical exploration of the notions of a `Language' of Sculpture, a Sculpture/Language homology and the relationship of language functions to visual systems of communication. A critical reading of Cragg's work and practice identifying modes of communication that function as language.A reflexive practical exploration of sculptural object-entities pared down to basic elements to expose the homologous `language' functions of a communicative content

Why not model spoken word recognition instead of phoneme monitoring?

Norris, McQueen & Cutler present a detailed account of the decision stage of the phoneme monitoring task. However, we question whether this contributes to our understanding of the speech recognition process itself, and we fail to see why phonotactic knowledge is playing a role in phoneme recognition.

The Effects of Teaching a Specific Top-Level Structure on the Organization of Written Texts

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of teaching a specific top-level structure on students\u27 recall and organization of expository text. The hypothesis to be investigated was that students explicitly taught the scientific report text structure schema would show improved recall and organization of written report text protocols. The report text structure utilized in this study was derived from Sloan and Latham\u27s top-level structure of text organization devised from schema theory and semantic memory models