Can children with speech difficulties process an unfamiliar accent?

This study explores the hypothesis that children identified as having phonological processing problems may have particular difficulty in processing a different accent. Children with speech difficulties (n = 18) were compared with matched controls on four measures of auditory processing. First, an accent auditory lexical decision task was administered. In one condition, the children made lexical decisions about stimuli presented in their own accent (London). In the second condition, the stimuli were spoken in an unfamiliar accent (Glaswegian). The results showed that the children with speech difficulties had a specific deficit on the unfamiliar accent. Performance on the other auditory discrimination tasks revealed additional deficits at lower levels of input processing. The wider clinical implications of the findings are considered

The brain is a prediction machine that cares about good and bad - Any implications for neuropragmatics?

Experimental pragmatics asks how people construct contextualized meaning in communication. So what does it mean for this field to add neuroas a prefix to its name? After analyzing the options for any subfield of cognitive science, I argue that neuropragmatics can and occasionally should go beyond the instrumental use of EEG or fMRI and beyond mapping classic theoretical distinctions onto Brodmann areas. In particular, if experimental pragmatics ‘goes neuro’, it should take into account that the brain evolved as a control system that helps its bearer negotiate a highly complex, rapidly changing and often not so friendly environment. In this context, the ability to predict current unknowns, and to rapidly tell good from bad, are essential ingredients of processing. Using insights from non-linguistic areas of cognitive neuroscience as well as from EEG research on utterance comprehension, I argue that for a balanced development of experimental pragmatics, these two characteristics of the brain cannot be ignored

Sound Scholarship: Scope, Purpose, Function and Potential of Phonorecord Archives

published or submitted for publicatio

Production and processing asymmetries in the acquisition of tense morphology by sequential bilingual children

This study investigates the production and on-line processing of English tense morphemes by sequential bilingual (L2) Turkish-speaking children with more than three years of exposure to English. Thirty nine 6-9-year-old L2 children and 28 typically developing age-matched monolingual (L1) children were administered the production component for third person –s and past tense of the Test for Early Grammatical Impairment (Rice & Wexler, 1996) and participated in an on-line word-monitoring task involving grammatical and ungrammatical sentences with presence/omission of tense (third person –s, past tense -ed) and non-tense (progressive –ing, possessive ‘s) morphemes. The L2 children’s performance on the on-line task was compared to that of children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) in Montgomery & Leonard (1998, 2006) to ascertain similarities and differences between the two populations. Results showed that the L2 children were sensitive to the ungrammaticality induced by the omission of tense morphemes, despite variable production. This reinforces the claim about intact underlying syntactic representations in child L2 acquisition despite non target-like production (Haznedar & Schwartz, 1997)

Aiming for Cognitive Equivalence – Mental Models as a Tertium Comparationis for Translation and Empirical Semantics

This paper introduces my concept of cognitive equivalence (cf. Mandelblit, 1997), an attempt to reconcile elements of Nida’s dynamic equivalence with recent innovations in cognitive linguistics and cognitive psychology, and building on the current focus on translators’ mental processes in translation studies (see e.g. Göpferich et al., 2009, Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk, 2010; Halverson, 2014). My approach shares its general impetus with Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk’s concept of re-conceptualization, but is independently derived from findings in cognitive linguistics and simulation theory (see e.g. Langacker, 2008; Feldman, 2006; Barsalou, 1999; Zwaan, 2004). Against this background, I propose a model of translation processing focused on the internal simulation of reader reception and the calibration of these simulations to achieve similarity between ST and TT impact. The concept of cognitive equivalence is exemplarily tested by exploring a conceptual / lexical field (MALE BALDNESS) through the way that English, German and Japanese lexical items in this field are linked to matching visual-conceptual representations by native speaker informants. The visual data gathered via this empirical method can be used to effectively triangulate the linguistic items involved, enabling an extra-linguistic comparison across languages. Results show that there is a reassuring level of interinformant agreement within languages, but that the conceptual domain for BALDNESS is linguistically structured in systematically different ways across languages. The findings are interpreted as strengthening the call for a cognition-focused, embodied approach to translation

The on-line processing of unaccusativity in Greek agrammatism

We investigated the on-line processing of unaccusative and unergative sentences in a group of eight Greek-speaking individuals diagnosed with Broca aphasia and a group of language-unimpaired subjects used as the baseline. The processing of unaccusativity refers to the reactivation of the postverbal trace by retrieving the mnemonic representation of the verb’s syntactically defined antecedent provided in the early part of the sentence. Our results demonstrate that the Broca group showed selective reactivation of the antecedent for the unaccusatives. We consider several interpretations for our data, including explanations focusing on the transitivization properties of nonactive and active voice-alternating unaccusatives, the costly procedure claimed to underlie the parsing of active nonvoice-alternating unaccusatives, and the animacy of the antecedent modulating the syntactic choices of the patients

Increasing Vocabulary Through Songs in Sixth Graders

El aprendizaje multifacético mediante métodos didácticos de enseñanza y técnicas metodológicas se convierte en una herramienta útil para aprender vocabulario en inglés como lengua extranjera. Dado que varios estudiantes tienen dificultades para aprender vocabulario en inglés, todo el proyecto de investigación conecta la atención del aprendizaje de vocabulario en un contexto versátil con la estrategia musical. El proyecto tenía muchas medidas que eran esenciales para lograr los resultados, incluido el conocimiento previo de vocabulario en inglés, un test previo y un test posterior; con las pruebas previas se logró obtener toda la interpretación de eficiencia y competencia con la población incurrida en el proyecto; con las pruebas posteriores se logró obtener toda la interpretación de eficiencia y competencia con la población incurrida en el proyecto; y con las pospruebas se logró obtener toda la interpretación de eficiencia y competencia con la población. Asimismo, como señala Murphey, las estrategias musicales pueden ser importantes en la medida en que sirvan como una herramienta eficaz para mejorar este aspecto (1990). Hay muchas palabras en la canción que tienen que ver con un tema o emoción en particular. La música, especialmente las canciones, son excelentes para introducir y aprender vocabulario nuevo, ya que brindan un contexto claro y natural en el que los términos, adjetivos, sustantivos, verbos y otras palabras pueden evolucionar correctamente.Multifaceted learning using didactic teaching methods and methodological techniques becomes a useful tool for learning vocabulary in English as a foreign language. Since several students struggle with learning English vocabulary, the entire research project connects vocabulary learning attention in a versatile context with musical strategy. The project had many measures that were essential in achieving the results, including prior knowledge of English vocabulary, pre-test, and post-test; with the pre-tests, it was possible to obtain all of the interpretation of efficiency and competence with the population incurred in the project; with the post-tests, it was possible to obtain all of the interpretation of efficiency and competence with the population incurred in the project; and with the post-tests, it was possible to obtain all of the interpretation of efficiency and competence with the population. Similarly, as Murphey points out, musical strategies can be important to the degree that they serve as an effective tool for improving this aspect (1990). There are a lot of words in the song that have to do with a particular topic or emotion. Music, especially songs, are excellent for introducing and learning new vocabulary since they provide a clear and natural context in which terms, adjectives, nouns, verbs, and other words can evolve correctly

The linguistics of gender

This chapter explores grammatical gender as a linguistic phenomenon. First, I define gender in terms of agreement, and look at the parts of speech that can take gender agreement. Because it relates to assumptions underlying much psycholinguistic gender research, I also examine the reasons why gender systems are thought to emerge, change, and disappear. Then, I describe the gender system of Dutch. The frequent confusion about the number of genders in Dutch will be resolved by looking at the history of the system, and the role of pronominal reference therein. In addition, I report on three lexical- statistical analyses of the distribution of genders in the language. After having dealt with Dutch, I look at whether the genders of Dutch and other languages are more or less randomly assigned, or whether there is some system to it. In contrast to what many people think, regularities do indeed exist. Native speakers could in principle exploit such regularities to compute rather than memorize gender, at least in part. Although this should be taken into account as a possibility, I will also argue that it is by no means a necessary implication

The role of force dynamics and intentionality in the reconstruction of L2 verb meanings:A Danish-Spanish bidirectional study

This paper examines the role of force dynamics and intentionality in the description of placement events by two groups of native speakers of typologically and genetically different languages, Danish and Spanish, and by two groups of intermediate adult learners, Danish learners of L2 Spanish and Spanish learners of L2 Danish. The results of the study showed that (a) force dynamics and intentionality are important semantic components in both languages, but their distribution and relative focus differed crosslinguistically, and (b) the two learner groups had difficulties in reconstructing the meanings of the L2 verbs involving these two semantic components. Learning difficulties were observed when moving from a less to a more complex L2 system, when moving in the opposite direction, i.e., from a more to a less complex L2 system and when moving to an L2 system that is as complex as the learners native one