On the relationship between Theory of Mind and language

In der Theory of Mind-Forschung der letzten 20 Jahre prägten Jill de Villiers und Kollegen den Begriff des "sprachlichen Determinismus" (linguistic determinism) für ihre Hypothese, dass die Fähigkeit zum Verständnis von sogenannten "falschen Überzeugungen" (false beliefs) kausal vom erfolgreichen Erwerb und vom aktiven Beherrschen einer gewissen syntaktischen Struktur abhängt und bedingt wird: der eingebetteten Komplementsatzstruktur. Diese Hypothese basiert vor allem auf empirischen Daten von Studien mit Kleinkindern und Kindern im Vorschulalter und im weiteren Studien mit sprachverzögerten tauben Testpersonen, Trainingsstudien u.v.m., in denen statistisch und temporal signifikante Korrelationen zwischen dem Meistern von Komplementsatzstrukturen und Tests mit falschen Überzeugungen nachgewiesen werden konnten. Seit einiger Zeit erfährt diese Hypothese des sprachlichen Determinismus auch Kritik und muss mit Gegenevidenz umgehen, doch nur wenige Aspekte der Kritik und problematischen Gegenentwürfe werden tatsächlich von den Vertretern des sprachlichen Determinismus aufgegriffen und innerhalb der Theorie behandelt. In dieser Arbeit wurden zwei Aspekte erfüllt: zum einen bietet sie einen ausführlichen und erschöpfenden Überblick über die Theorie des sprachlichen Determinismus, seinen Anfängen, der Evidenz, die zur Argumentation herangezogen wird und der Entwicklung über die mehr als 15 Jahre seines Bestehens. Das Hauptaugenmerk dieser Arbeit lag allerdings auf dem Bemühen, den sprachlichen Determinismus erstmals auch von einer linguistisch-theoretischen Seite sorgfältig zu durchleuchten, die losen Enden der mannigfaltigen Kritik zusammenzufassen und eine umfassende Analyse der kritischen Punkte und problematischen Evidenz zu liefern und auf neue Einsichten vor allem auf der Ebene der linguistischen Argumentation und Beweisführung erstmals hinzuweisen. Die Kritik am sprachlichen Determinismus setzt hierbei an drei Hauptpunkten an: an der dem sprachlichen Determinismus widersprechenden Evidenz, die sich in verschiedenen Studien und Abhandlungen der letzten 10 Jahre finden lässt, am Experimentdesign sowohl von Testaufgaben im Bereich der falschen Überzeugungen als auch von Testaufgaben, die die Kompetenz in Komplementsyntax messen sollen und letztlich an den linguistischen Annahmen und Grundlagen, die der sprachliche Determinismus annimmt und behauptet. Die Analyse zeigte in allen drei Punkten, dass der sprachliche Determinismus in der bisherigen Form eine nicht haltbare Hypothese darstellt: Das Verständnis für falsche Überzeugungen ist erwiesenermaßen bereits in Säuglingen vorhanden und kann auch von Kindern mit SSES (sprachspezifische Entwicklungsstörung) trotz syntaktischen Unzulänglichkeiten erlangt werden. Die hohen linguistischen Anforderungen von Testaufgaben für falsche Überzeugungen und der hohe mentale Gehalt von Testaufgaben für syntaktische Kompetenz verfälschen die Ergebnisse und bewirken die "stabilen" Korrelationen zwischen den beiden Kompetenzen, auf denen die Theorie des sprachlichen Determinismus fußt. Schließlich werden theoretische Grundpfeiler der Theorie ebenfalls enthebelt: der "Perspektivenmarker" (point of view marker), den de Villiers als entscheidendes Element der Komplementationssyntax angibt, ist an sich ein fragwürdiges und in linguistischer Theorie nicht haltbares Konzept; die Behauptung, dass falsche Überzeugungen ausschließlich in syntaktischen Konfigurationen mit eingebetteten Komplementsätzen ausgedrückt werden können, wurde als falsch identifiziert und die Folgen, die diese Feststellung mit sich bringt, bedeuten auch das theoretische "Aus" für den sprachlichen Determinismus. Es bleiben vor allem die Testergebnisse mit tauben Testpersonen, die es noch zu erklären und näher zu erforschen gilt, da diese eine besonders robuste Korrelation aufwiesen

An analysis of hinneh as a discourse marker in Genesis - 2 Kings

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Children and adults' understanding and use of sound-symbolism in novel words

Sound-symbolism is the inherent link between the sound of a word and its meaning. The aim of this thesis is to gain an insight into the nature of sound-symbolism. There are five empirical chapters, each of which aims to uncover children and adults’ understanding of sound-symbolic words. Chapter 1 is a literature review of sound-symbolism. Chapter 2 is a cross-linguistic developmental study looking at the acquisition of sound-symbolism. Chapter 3 looks at childrens use of sound-symbolism in a verb-learning task. Chapter 4 looks at childrens use of sound-symbolism when learning and memorising novel verbs. Chapter 5 consists of two experiments looking at what exact part of a word is sound-symbolic. This study compared different types of consonants and vowels, across a number of domains in an attempt to gain an understanding of the nature of sound-symbolism. Chapter 6 looks at the potential mechanisms by which sound-symbolism is understood. This study is a replication of previous research, which found that sound-symbolic sensitivity is increased when the word is said and not just heard. There are therefore a total of five empirical chapters each of which attempts to look at the nature of sound-symbolic meaning from a slightly different angle

The pragmatics and evolution of the utterance-final particles -ketun and -canha in Modern Spoken Korean

The pragmatics and evolution of the utterance-final particles -ketun and -canha in Modern Spoken Korea

Enhancing FunGramKB: Further Verbs of Feeling in English

The present dissertation aims at analyzing some linguistic aspects related to the lexical, semantic and syntactic behaviour of a number of verbs of FEELING in English whose lexical, grammatical and idiosyncratic properties have been entered into the FunGramKB Editor in application of study of the theoretical assumptions propounded by the Lexical-Constructional Model. Analysis and subsequent input of data have been assessed against the background of some of the 20th-century trends in linguistics which find their expression in the first decade of this century, and the role of semantics in a world in which increasing priority is given to probabilistic, machine-learned output in lexicographic work. From this stance, the generic features contained in the FunGramKB meaning postulates and thematic frames as outlined in the Lexical-Constructional Model bring hope for a more faithful rendering of the semantic relationships established within human expression, while making provisions for a semanticist‟s contribution to refinement and storage of both thorough and extensive knowledge

Dimensions of social meaning in post-classical Greek towards an integrated approach

Especially in the first half of the twentieth century, language was viewed as a vehicle for the transmission of facts and ideas. Later on, scholars working in linguistic frameworks such as Functional and Cognitive Linguistics, (Historical) Sociolinguistics and Functional Sociolinguistics, have emphasized the social relevance of language, focusing, for example, on linguistic concepts such as deixis, modality, or honorific language, or embedding larger linguistic patterns in their social contexts, through notions such as register, sociolect, genre, etc. The main aim of this article is to systematize these observations, through an investigation of how the central, though ill-understood notion of “social meaning” can be captured. The starting point for the discussion is the work that has been done in the framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics. This framework distinguishes “social” (“interpersonal”) meaning from two other types of meaning, and offers a typology of different types of contexts with which these different meanings resonate. In order to achieve a more satisfactory account of social meaning, however, I argue that we need to connect to a theory of how signs convey meaning. The discussion is relevant for Ancient Greek in its entirety, but focuses specifically on Post-classical Greek: as a case study, I discuss five private letters from the so-called Theophanes archive

A reliable past or a reliable pest? Testing canonical stimuli in speech perception research

A growing body of research is exploring second language (L2) learners’ listening perception of vowel contrasts. Conventionally, researchers have estimated how well listeners differentiate between L2 vowels with isolated words (or syllables) in a fixed consonantal frame, such as b-vowel-t (e.g., beat-bit). However, there is a dearth of research that systematically examines how well results generalise beyond isolated frames or the suitability of employing more phonologically and sententially diverse listening prompt types for assessing L2 vowel perception. To address this gap, two studies investigated the effects of using b-vowel-t and more diverse prompt types for assessing intermediate-advanced adult L2 perception of English /i/-/ɪ/ and /ɛ/-/æ/ vowel pairs. Prompt performance was measured for internal consistency, congruence with the Perceptual Assimilation Model for L2 speech learning (Best & Tyler, 2007), and listeners’ subjective experiences with each prompt type. Mixed effects modelling investigated the predictive power of b-vowel-t performance on more diverse prompt types. Study 1 explored prompt performance using closed-set, forced choice tasks with first language (L1) Mandarin and Korean listeners. Study 2 investigated the effect of Mandarin and Spanish L1 listeners’ target word familiarity and associations with sentence prompts using transcription-response tasks and self-report surveys. Both studies found that diverse prompts had adequate internal consistency and aligned with PAM-L2 predictions. B-vowel-t prompts poorly generalised to diverse prompts and accorded less with PAM-L2 predictions. Survey results showed increased demands from more diverse prompt types based on participants’ ratings; however, this did not always correspond to lower performance. Collectively, results indicate utility in employing prompts beyond isolated words in a fixed consonantal frame for laboratory and at-home administrations. These findings contribute to the vowel perception literature by evaluating and extending the scope of prompts which may be used

Event Structure In Vision And Language

Our visual experience is surprisingly rich: We do not only see low-level properties such as colors or contours; we also see events, or what is happening. Within linguistics, the examination of how we talk about events suggests that relatively abstract elements exist in the mind which pertain to the relational structure of events, including general thematic roles (e.g., Agent), Causation, Motion, and Transfer. For example, “Alex gave Jesse flowers” and “Jesse gave Alex flowers” both refer to an event of transfer, with the directionality of the transfer having different social consequences. The goal of the present research is to examine the extent to which abstract event information of this sort (event structure) is generated in visual perceptual processing. Do we perceive this information, just as we do with more ‘traditional’ visual properties like color and shape? In the first study (Chapter 2), I used a novel behavioral paradigm to show that event roles – who is acting on whom – are rapidly and automatically extracted from visual scenes, even when participants are engaged in an orthogonal task, such as color or gender identification. In the second study (Chapter 3), I provided functional magnetic resonance (fMRI) evidence for commonality in content between neural representations elicited by static snapshots of actions and by full, dynamic action sequences. These two studies suggest that relatively abstract representations of events are spontaneously extracted from sparse visual information. In the final study (Chapter 4), I return to language, the initial inspiration for my investigations of events in vision. Here I test the hypothesis that the human brain represents verbs in part via their associated event structures. Using a model of verbs based on event-structure semantic features (e.g., Cause, Motion, Transfer), it was possible to successfully predict fMRI responses in language-selective brain regions as people engaged in real-time comprehension of naturalistic speech. Taken together, my research reveals that in both perception and language, the mind rapidly constructs a representation of the world that includes events with relational structure

Intonation development from five to thirteen

Research undertaken to date suggests that important developments in the understanding and use of intonation may take place after the age of 5;0. The present study aims to provide a more comprehensive account of these developments. A specially designed battery of prosodic tasks was administered to four groups of thirty children, from London (U.K.), with mean ages of 5;6, 8;7, 10;10 and 13;9. The tasks tap comprehension and production of functional aspects of intonation, in four communicative areas: CHUNKING (i.e. prosodic phrasing), AFFECT, INTERACTION and FOCUS. Results indicate that there is considerable variability among children within each age band on most tasks. The ability to produce intonation functionally is largely established in five-year-olds, though some specific functional contrasts are not mastered until C.A. 8;7. Aspects of intonation comprehension continue to develop up to C.A. 10;10, correlating with measures of expressive and receptive language development