Syllable-based constraints on properties of English sounds

Also issued as Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 1989.Includes bibliographical references (p. 169-174).Work sponsored in part by the Office of Naval Research. N00014-82-K-0727Mark A. Randolph

Modelling the process of reading: A social psychological study of the use children make of fairy tales

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.This thesis tries to answer the question "what does it mean to read?". I have tried to write it from the standpoint of how the work developed; the problems encountered and the solutions that were found form the stylistic theme. Consequently, it is not a neat piece of work delineated into chapters on particular academic areas of the disciplines used, rather topics are discussed as they are relevant to the problems that I had to face. If the thesis is about comprehension, then it is in itself a good example of the processes involved - it is as it were my 'reading' of the question mentioned above

Lexical segmentation and word recognition in fluent aphasia

The current thesis reports a psycholinguistic study of lexical segmentation and word recognition in fluent aphasia.When listening to normal running speech we must identify individual words from a continuous stream before we can extract a linguistic message from it. Normal listeners are able to resolve the segmentation problem without any noticeable difficulty. In this thesis I consider how fluent aphasic listeners perform the process of lexical segmentation and whether any of their impaired comprehension of spoken language has its provenance in the failure to segment speech normally.The investigation was composed of a series of 5 experiments which examined the processing of both explicit acoustic and prosodic cues to word juncture and features which affect listeners' segmentation of the speech stream implicitly, through inter-lexical competition of potential word matchesThe data collected show that lexical segmentation of continuous speech is compromised in fluent aphasia. Word hypotheses do not always accrue appropriate activational information from all of the available sources within the time frame in which segmentation problem is normally resolved. The fluent aphasic performance, although quantitatively impaired compared to normal, reflects an underlying normal competence; their processing seldom displays a totally qualitatively different processing profile to normal. They are able to engage frequency, morphological structure, and imageability as modulators of activation. Word class, a feature found to be influential in the normal resolution of segmentation is not used by the fluent aphasic studied. In those cases of occasional failure to adequately resolve segmentation by automatic frequency mediated activation, fluent aphasics invoke the metalinguistic influence of real world plausibility of alternative parses