What Relationships Exist Between Words In The Lexical-Semantic Systems Of Toddlers?

Investigating how infants first establish relationships between words is a necessary step towards understanding the qualitative shift children make to an organised and complex interconnected network of semantic relationships which characterises a mature, adult lexical-semantic system. Since little is known about the word-word associations in infants that establish this network of meanings (Arias-Trejo & Plunkett, 2009), this thesis sought to, first, document the word associations (WA)s that young monolingual and bilingual children produce and then compare these to adult WAs. A concurrent aim was to establish a database of child-specific WAs as a resource for future studies. Second, to understand how a network of meaning establishes in different groups during infancy, an online semantic priming paradigm was developed due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The aim was to see how words are organised in the emergent lexical-semantic system by replicating in-lab findings and extending these to explore different infant groups. In parallel, this paradigm was used to validate the WAs found in monolingual and bilingual children. Findings from Chapter 1 revealed that children share some of the WAs that adults exhibit in a mature lexical-semantic system. However, a large number of WAs shared by children were not represented in the WA norms of adults. This could indicate that adult norms under-represent the associations of children, as they might not capture the unique developmental stage and life experience of 3-year-olds. This research presents a resource of child-specific associated word pair stimuli for future studies. Findings from Chapter 2 indicate that lexical-semantic links might be more robust in the lexical-semantic system of a 3-year-old when they capture associative meaning compared to taxonomic meaning. Furthermore, running infant studies online can replicate in-lab findings, though it remains unclear if this is only true of certain paradigms

Bilingual first language acquisition in Malay and English : a morphological and suprasegmental study in the development of plural expressions in a bilingual child

This thesis investigates the development of plural marking in a child raised in Malay and English simultaneously, from the morphological and prosodic perspective. For the morphological plural development, the child’s plural acquisition is analysed within the Processability Theory (PT) framework de Bot (1992) de Bot (1992) thus widening PT’s typological range of application to a language such as Malay, which belongs to the Austronesian family (Dryer & Haspelmath, 2013). PT has been tested for morphological development in L2 English (Di Biase, Kawaguchi, & Yamaguchi, 2015; Johnston, 2000) and several typologically different languages as well as bilingual first language acquisition (BFLA) such as Japanese-English (Itani-Adams, 2013). However, PT has not been empirically tested for any language of the Austronesian family nor in a Bilingual First Language Acquisition (BFLA) constellation involving Malay and English. The Malay-English language pair is interesting because of the remarkably different linguistic mechanisms used for encoding plurality in the two languages; morphologically, Malay marks plurality through distinct forms of reduplication such as rumah-rumah ‘houses’, buah-buahan’ (plural form of buah ‘fruit’) and bukit-bukau ‘hills’ (Sew, 2007). In contrast, English uses morphological inflections -s suffixed to the stem, e.g., cat/cats, dog/dogs, book/books (Carstairs-McCarthy, 2002). Malay reduplication, as previously shown, involves more than a single word, however, functionally speaking it is equivalent to one word plus a marker of plurality. Thus, prosodic mechanisms play a crucial role in distinguishing between mere repetition and grammatical reduplication in Malay (Gil, 2005). Since plurality is expressed very differently in each language, this study investigates how a bilingual child develops simultaneously two grammatical systems. The participant in this research is a female child named Rina, who was raised in Malay-English environment from birth. This investigation comprises of two parts; first is the longitudinal investigation of her plural acquisition from age 2;10 to 3;10. During this period, Rina was living in Australia, where the environmentally predominant language was English. The second complementary part is an investigation of Rina’s plural marking systems at age 4;8 when she had returned to Malaysia, where the predominant environmental language was Malay. For the longitudinal study, the database for the analyses was obtained from separate Malay and English recording sessions, which were conducted weekly from age 2;10 to 3;10. Likewise, the data for Rina’s plural expression at 4;8 was also obtained from separate Malay and English environment recordings. For the morphological plural development, results indicate that Rina developed two different systems to mark plurality in Malay and English. Her plural marking developed in the sequence predicted by PT. However, though she clearly distinguished the two languages, bidirectional influences from English to Malay and Malay to English were found in the corpus, both in the longitudinal study as well as at age 4;8. In the longitudinal study, it was found that in expressing plurals in Malay and English, Rina used various linguistic devices: one of the predominant strategies she employed in both languages was iteration, a strategy in which Rina expressed more than one objects by repeating the lexical item according to the number of individuated entities (hence four cats would be expressed as cat cat cat cat). Reduplication, the target grammatical Malay plural, only emerged at 3;8. Thus, we examine the prosodic development of the child’s iteration up till the emergence of reduplication. Findings indicate that the development from iteration to reduplication is gradual; the main acoustic correlate that she employed during the longitudinal study was final-syllable lengthening. She only began differentiating various prosodic mechanisms (such as pausing, duration and pitch) to distinguish repetition and reduplication in her plural marking at age 4;8. This study offers a new perspective on the interplay between the two languages in the early stages of grammatical development in a bilingual child. The specific features of plurality in Malay and English and how they develop in the bilingual child may shed light on the applicability of PT to BFLA. Also, the link between the child’s morphological development and prosodic mechanisms show that in acquiring the prosodic structures of reduplication, Rina creates partial and increasingly specific analyses of the grammatical forms, gradually approaching the conventional adult form

Anthropology of Color

The field of color categorization has always been intrinsically multi- and inter-disciplinary, since its beginnings in the nineteenth century. The main contribution of this book is to foster a new level of integration among different approaches to the anthropological study of color. The editors have put great effort into bringing together research from anthropology, linguistics, psychology, semiotics, and a variety of other fields, by promoting the exploration of the different but interacting and complementary ways in which these various perspectives model the domain of color experience. By so doing, they significantly promote the emergence of a coherent field of the anthropology of color

Referential metonymy: Cognitive bases and communicative functions

Referential metonymy is a variety of figurative usage wherein our apprehension of relations of contiguity (e.g. the ‘distinctive property-individual’ relation) is exploited in order to pick out a specific target referent in the communicative context: The green trousers (= man wearing green trousers) is doing the Macarena with gusto. This thesis begins by providing an in-depth theoretical treatment of referential metonymy, exploring (i) the conceptual basis of the phenomenon, and how ‘contiguity’ may best be understood; (ii) the relationship between referential metonymy and other ‘contiguity-based’ usages of language (e.g. noun-noun compounds and conversions); (iii) current theoretical approaches to metonymy, namely Bowerman’s (2019) ‘repurposing’ account and Wilson and Falkum’s (2015, 2020, forthcoming) ‘neologism’ account; (iv) both metonymically-derived nicknames (e.g. ‘Red Shirt’) and the metonymic usage of established proper names (e.g. ‘a Picasso’ = a painting by Picasso); and (v) the relationship between metonymy and ellipsis. The theoretical claims I develop are then empirically examined, with an acquisition focus. First, I present a corpus study of two young children’s spontaneous production, in a naturalistic setting, of referential metonymy and other related phenomena (noun-noun compounds, conversions, metaphor, etc.) (Eleanor: 2;6-2;12, Thomas: 2;6-3;12). Key findings include: examples of referential metonymy and contiguity-based naming from 2;6, and striking evidence of metalinguistic awareness before age four. Second, I report a series of experiments into metonymy comprehension and production in Japanese adult learners of English as an additional language. Key findings include: support for the claim that metonym is a useful ‘gap-filling’ strategy during acquisition. Finally, directions for future research are indicated; in particular, examining metonymy comprehension and production in atypical development (e.g. ASD), and systematically comparing referential metonymy with referential metaphor (e.g. ‘the helmet’ = metonymy: woman wearing a cycle helmet/metaphor: woman with a lacquered bouffant resembling a military helmet)

Semantic radical consistency and character transparency effects in Chinese: an ERP study

BACKGROUND: This event-related potential (ERP) study aims to investigate the representation and temporal dynamics of Chinese orthography-to-semantics mappings by simultaneously manipulating character transparency and semantic radical consistency. Character components, referred to as radicals, make up the building blocks used dur...postprin

Characteristics of fathers\u27 speech to young children

Children learn language through social interaction, and those with whom they interact will influence their language development in a variety of ways. Different features of adult speech are likely to be facilitative of children’s language development in different ways. Parents are one group of adults who play a particularly signification role in children’s language acquisitions and development, and the nature and role of their speech to children has been an important research emphasis for the past three decades. Initially mothers\u27 speech was the focus of the studies of parent speech, but since the early 1970s attention has also been given to fathers\u27 speech. Most of the research has investigated fathers\u27 speech by comparing it with mothers\u27 speech. Parents\u27 speech has been found to be very similar in its formal characteristics, but differences are realised in conversational and. functional features. Some of this work also suggests that differences in parents\u27 speech may become more evident as children get older. The present study investigates qualitatively some of the characteristics of parental speech. In particular it seeks to identify characteristics which may predominate in fathers\u27 speech, and thus differentiate it from mothers\u27 speech. The data on which the study is based were collected from five Australian families interacting in a variety of contexts in their own homes. The children were all firstborn, and aged between 2;6 and 3;8 years. Because of its exploratory nature, this study has used various formal conversational and functional measures in the analysis. The analysis of formal features showed fathers’ and mothers’ speech to be very similar, but difference between parents were evident at the conversational and functional levels. These outcomes were consistent with those of comparable overseas research. The conversational and functional analyses included investigation of interactional styles, discourse patterns, Locus of Reference, and use of Linking References. Fathers were found to be more oriented to directiveness than the conversation-elicitation when interacting with their young children. Compared with mothers, fathers were also less likely to employ amelioration strategies in using imperatives, or to use linking references when reading books or playing with puzzles with their young children. Several discourse patterns were identified in the book reading and puzzle play contexts. The patterns appear to be associated more with interactional styles than with gender. The outcomes of the study support the hypothesis that fathers and mothers play complementary roles in children\u27s language development. The differences between fathers and mothers can be seen as assisting in the development of children\u27s communicative competence. Through the experience of interacting with different types of speakers in a variety of contexts children learn how to cope with different conversational demands, how to utilise their conversational resources appropriately and how to encode meaning in different ways. The outcomes of this study indicate many possibilities for future research. In particular,- it is recommended that future studies include data from wider variety of interactional contexts and from more diverse participant groups

Noun and verb processing in aphasia and healthy aging: Online behavioural and ERP investigations

Nouns, verbs and function words are reported to be differentially impaired in individuals with aphasia. However, the behavioural evidence of selective word class impairments relies heavily on observations from single word production or offline comprehension studies. This thesis applied online measures to probe noun and verb input processing in individuals with aphasia and in healthy aging. Experiments 1, 2 and 3 employed an online reaction time task (word-monitoring) to investigate differential processing of noun (NP) and verb phrases (VP) in three different conditions, 1) phrase structure violations (much/*many milk), 2) premodification (Tom kicked vs Tom should have kicked) and 3) phrase frequency (high: asked for directions; low: looked for directions). Experiment 1 was conducted with neurotypical younger and older adults to explore age effects in language processing using a word-monitoring task (WMT), and to establish normative performance. The results showed that both groups were equally sensitive to NP and VP manipulations, although older adults were more disrupted by phrase structure violations. Experiment 2 employed the WMT with a group of individuals with aphasia, while Experiment 3 followed up on the group findings by examining single case evidence for NP/VP dissociations in two individuals with severe impairments, two agrammatic and one anomic individual. Together, the findings from the group and individual case analyses indicated that noun/verb dissociations are absent in input processing, while also showing residual sensitivity to function words in the form of verb premodifiers. However, there is some evidence at the individual level, that more severely impaired individuals have greater difficulties processing nouns relative to verbs. In the final experiment with neurotypical younger and older adults, event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded in responses to verbs in facilitatory contexts and ungrammatical sentences. The findings revealed no age-related changes in electrophysiological responses to verbs in both contexts

Colour Processing in Autism Spectrum Disorders

The research described in this thesis investigated colour processing in children and adolescents with autism spectrum disorders. Although idiosyncratic responses to colour have been widely reported in autism (William, 1999; White & White, 1991), and therapeutic interventions involving colour are frequently used with individuals with this disorder (Howlin, 1996; Irlen, 1991), few controlled colour processing investigations have been carried out. The experiments reported in the thesis have two main points of focus. Firstly, the therapeutic effects of colour overlays on different aspects of cognition were tested, and secondly, studies into colour discrimination, memory, naming and categorisation were carried out in order to evaluate the role of language and perceptual processing in colour processing. In experiments one and two it was established that significantly more children with autism than age and intelligence matched controls improved their reading speed when using a colour overlay. In experiments three and four, these effects were further investigated using visual change detection and reading comprehension tasks with and without colour overlays. Again, a significant improvement in performance was noted in the autism group when using colour overlays. The results from experiments four to eleven, testing colour discrimination, memory and naming failed to confirm atypical colour processing in autism, although the findings did suggest that cognitively unimpaired children with autism showed sharper category boundaries than those with autism and cognitive impairment and typically developing controls. Finally data from a case study of a boy with Asperger Syndrome who showed highly idiosyncratic colour responses were presented. The findings from the studies are discussed within the context of current theories of visual cognition in autism and theories of colour perception

Oppositions in News Discourse: the ideological construction of us and them in the British press

This thesis seeks to explore textually instantiated oppositions and their contribution to the construction of ‘us’ and ‘them’ in specific news texts. The data consists of reports of two major protest marches taken from news articles in UK national daily newspapers. The aim of the thesis is to review and contribute to the development of existing theories of oppositions (often known as ‘antonyms’), in order to investigate the potential effects of their systematic usage in news texts and add an additional method of analysis to the linguistic toolkit utilised by critical discourse analysts. The thesis reviews a number of traditional theories of opposition and questions the assumption that oppositions are mainly lexical phenomena i.e. that only those codified in lexical authorities such as thesauruses can be classed as true opposites. The hypothesis draws on Murphy (2003) to argue that opposition is primarily conceptual, evidence being that new ones can be derived from principles on which opposition is based. The dialectic between ‘canonical’ and ‘noncanonical’ oppositions allows addressees to process and understand a potentially infinite number of new oppositions via cognitive reference to existing ones. Fundamental to the discovery of co-occurring textually-constructed oppositions are the syntactic frames commonly used to house canonical oppositions, which, this thesis argues, can trigger new instances of oppositions when used in these frames. I conduct a detailed qualitative analysis of textually constructed oppositions in three news articles, and show how they are used by journalists to positively and negatively represent groups and individuals as mutually exclusive binaries, in order to perpetuate a particular ideological point of view. The final section is an examination of how critical discourse analysis studies into the construction of ‘us’ and ‘them’ in news texts can be enhanced by a consideration of constructed oppositions like those explored in the thesis

Children’s development of Quantity, Relevance and Manner implicature understanding and the role of the speaker’s epistemic state

In learning language, children have to acquire not only words and constructions, but also the ability to make inferences about a speaker’s intended meaning. For instance, if in answer to the question, ‘what did you put in the bag?’, the speaker says, ‘I put in a book’, then the hearer infers that the speaker put in only a book, by assuming that the speaker is informative. On a Gricean approach to pragmatics, this implicated meaning – a quantity implicature – involves reasoning about the speaker’s epistemic state. This thesis examines children’s development of implicature understanding. It seeks to address the question of what the relationship is in development between quantity, relevance and manner implicatures; whether word learning by exclusion is a pragmatic forerunner to implicature, or based on a lexical heuristic; and whether reasoning about the speaker’s epistemic state is part of children’s pragmatic competence. This thesis contributes to research in experimental and developmental pragmatics by broadening the focus of investigation to include different types of implicatures, the relationship between them, and the contribution of other aspects of children’s development, including structural language knowledge. It makes the novel comparison of word learning by exclusion with a clearly pragmatic skill – implicatures – and opens an investigation of manner implicatures in development. It also presents new findings suggesting that children’s early competence with quantity implicatures in simple communicative situations belies their ongoing development in more complex ones, particularly where the speaker’s epistemic state is at stake. I present a series of experiments based on a sentence-to-picture-matching task, with children aged 3 to 7 years. In the first study, I identify a developmental trajectory whereby word learning by exclusion inferences emerge first, followed by ad hoc quantity and relevance, and finally scalar quantity inferences, which reflects their increasing complexity in a Gricean model. Then, I explore cognitive and environmental factors that might be associated with children’s pragmatic skills, and show that structural language knowledge – and, associated with it, socioeconomic status – is a main predictor of their implicature understanding. In the second study, I lay out some predictions for the development of manner implicatures, find similar patterns of understanding in children and adults, and highlight the particular challenges of studying manner implicatures experimentally. Finally, I focus on children’s ability to take into account the speaker’s epistemic state in pragmatic inferencing. While adults do not derive a quantity implicature appropriately when the speaker is ignorant, children tend to persist in deriving implicatures regardless of speaker ignorance, suggesting a continuing challenge of integrating contextual with linguistic information in utterance interpretation.ESRC studentshi