Publications

Displaying 1 - 81 of 81
  • Alday, P. M. (2015). Quantity and Quality:Not a Zero-Sum Game: A computational and neurocognitive examination of human language processing. PhD Thesis, Philipps-Universität Marburg, Marburg.
  • Alferink, I. (2015). Dimensions of convergence in bilingual speech and gesture. PhD Thesis, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen.
  • Asaridou, S. S. (2015). An ear for pitch: On the effects of experience and aptitude in processing pitch in language and music. PhD Thesis, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen.
  • Bank, R. (2015). The ubiquity of mouthings in NGT: A corpus study. PhD Thesis, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen.
  • Barendse, M. T. (2015). Dimensionality assessment with factor analysis methods. PhD Thesis, University of Groningen, Groningen.
  • Bauer, B. L. M. (1992). Du latin au français: Le passage d'une langue SOV à une langue SVO. PhD Thesis, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen.
  • Bauer, B. L. M. (2000). Archaic syntax in Indo-European: The spread of transitivity in Latin and French. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

    Abstract

    Several grammatical features in early Indo-European traditionally have not been understood. Although Latin, for example, was a nominative language, a number of its inherited characteristics do not fit that typology and are difficult to account for, such as stative mihi est constructions to express possession, impersonal verbs, or absolute constructions. With time these archaic features have been replaced by transitive structures (e.g. possessive ‘have’). This book presents an extensive comparative and historical analysis of archaic features in early Indo-European languages and their gradual replacement in the history of Latin and early Romance, showing that the new structures feature transitive syntax and fit the patterns of a nominative language.
  • Behnke, K. (1998). The acquisition of phonetic categories in young infants: A self-organising artificial neural network approach. PhD Thesis, University of Twente, Enschede. doi:10.17617/2.2057688.
  • Bowerman, M. (1970). Learning to talk: A cross-linguistic study of early syntactic development, with special reference to Finnish. PhD Thesis, Harvard University, Massachusetts.
  • Brown, P., Senft, G., & Wheeldon, L. (Eds.). (1992). Max-Planck-Institute for Psycholinguistics: Annual report 1992. Nijmegen: MPI for Psycholinguistics.
  • Byun, K.-S., & Byun, E.-J. (2015). Becoming Friends with International Sign. Seoul: Sign Language Dandelion.
  • Cholin, J. (2004). Syllables in speech production: Effects of syllable preparation and syllable frequency. PhD Thesis, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen. doi:10.17617/2.60589.

    Abstract

    The fluent production of speech is a very complex human skill. It requires the coordination of several articulatory subsystems. The instructions that lead articulatory movements to execution are the result of the interplay of speech production levels that operate above the articulatory network. During the process of word-form encoding, the groundwork for the articulatory programs is prepared which then serve the articulators as basic units. This thesis investigated whether or not syllables form the basis for the articulatory programs and in particular whether or not these syllable programs are stored, separate from the store of the lexical word-forms. It is assumed that syllable units are stored in a so-called 'mental syllabary'. The main goal of this thesis was to find evidence of the syllable playing a functionally important role in speech production and for the assumption that syllables are stored units. In a variant of the implicit priming paradigm, it was investigated whether information about the syllabic structure of a target word facilitates the preparation (advanced planning) of a to-be-produced utterance. These experiments yielded evidence for the functionally important role of syllables in speech production. In a subsequent row of experiments, it could be demonstrated that the production of syllables is sensitive to frequency. Syllable frequency effects provide strong evidence for the notion of a mental syllabary because only stored units are likely to exhibit frequency effects. In a last study, effects of syllable preparation and syllable frequency were investigated in a combined study to disentangle the two effects. The results of this last experiment converged with those reported for the other experiments and added further support to the claim that syllables play a core functional role in speech production and are stored in a mental syllabary.

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  • Cutler, A., McQueen, J. M., & Zondervan, R. (2000). Proceedings of SWAP (Workshop on Spoken Word Access Processes). Nijmegen: MPI for Psycholinguistics.
  • Dediu, D. (2015). An introduction to genetics for language scientists: Current concepts, methods, and findings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  • Dietrich, R., & Klein, W. (1974). Einführung in die Computerlinguistik. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer.
  • Dimroth, C. (2004). Fokuspartikeln und Informationsgliederung im Deutschen. Tübingen: Stauffenburg.
  • Drude, S. (2004). Wörterbuchinterpretation: Integrative Lexikographie am Beispiel des Guaraní. Tübingen: Niemeyer.

    Abstract

    This study provides an answer to the question of how dictionaries should be read. For this purpose, articles taken from an outline for a Guaraní-German dictionary geared to established lexicographic practice are provided with standardized interpretations. Each article is systematically assigned a formal sentence making its meaning explicit both for content words (including polysemes) and functional words or affixes. Integrative Linguistics proves its theoretical and practical value both for the description of Guaraní (indigenous Indian language spoken in Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil) and in metalexicographic terms.
  • Enfield, N., Kelly, A., & Sprenger, S. (2004). Max-Planck-Institute for Psycholinguistics: Annual Report 2004. Nijmegen: MPI for Psycholinguistics.
  • Enfield, N. J. (2015). The utility of meaning: What words mean and why. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Abstract

    This book argues that the complex, anthropocentric, and often culture-specific meanings of words have been shaped directly by their history of 'utility' for communication in social life. N. J. Enfield draws on semantic and pragmatic case studies from his extensive fieldwork in Laos to investigate a range of semantic fields including emotion terms, culinary terms, landscape terminology, and honorific pronouns, among many others. These studies form the building blocks of a conceptual framework for understanding meaning in language. The book argues that the goals and relevancies of human communication are what bridge the gap between the private representation of language in the mind and its public processes of usage, acquisition, and conventionalization in society. Professor Enfield argues that in order to understand this process, we first need to understand the ways in which linguistic meaning is layered, multiple, anthropocentric, cultural, distributed, and above all, useful. This wide-ranging account brings together several key strands of research across disciplines including semantics, pragmatics, cognitive linguistics, and sociology of language, and provides a rich account of what linguistic meaning is like and why.
  • Flores d'Arcais, G. B., & Levelt, W. J. M. (Eds.). (1970). Advances in psycholinguistics. Amsterdam: North-Holland.

    Abstract

    Research papers, Bressanone conference on psycholinguistics, summer courses of the University of Padova, July 1969
  • Frank, S. L. (2004). Computational modeling of discourse comprehension. PhD Thesis, Tilburg University, Tilburg.
  • Gebre, B. G. (2015). Machine learning for gesture recognition from videos. PhD Thesis, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen.
  • Gialluisi, A. (2015). Investigating the genetic basis of reading and language skills. PhD Thesis, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen.
  • Gisladottir, R. S. (2015). Conversation electrified: The electrophysiology of spoken speech act recognition. PhD Thesis, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen.
  • Grabe, E. (1998). Comparative intonational phonology: English and German. PhD Thesis, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen. doi:10.17617/2.2057683.
  • Gullberg, M. (1998). Gesture as a communication strategy in second language discourse: A study of learners of French and Swedish. Lund: Lund University Press.

    Abstract

    Gestures are often regarded as the most typical compensatory device used by language learners in communicative trouble. Yet gestural solutions to communicative problems have rarely been studied within any theory of second language use. The work pre­sented in this volume aims to account for second language learners’ strategic use of speech-associated gestures by combining a process-oriented framework for communi­cation strategies with a cognitive theory of gesture. Two empirical studies are presented. The production study investigates Swedish lear­ners of French and French learners of Swedish and their use of strategic gestures. The results, which are based on analyses of both individual and group behaviour, contradict popular opinion as well as theoretical assumptions from both fields. Gestures are not primarily used to replace speech, nor are they chiefly mimetic. Instead, learners use gestures with speech, and although they do exploit mimetic gestures to solve lexical problems, they also use more abstract gestures to handle discourse-related difficulties and metalinguistic commentary. The influence of factors such as proficiency, task, culture, and strategic competence on gesture use is discussed, and the oral and gestural strategic modes are compared. In the evaluation study, native speakers’ assessments of learners’ gestures, and the potential effect of gestures on evaluations of proficiency are analysed and discussed in terms of individual communicative style. Compensatory gestures function at multiple communicative levels. This has implica­tions for theories of communication strategies, and an expansion of the existing frameworks is discussed taking both cognitive and interactive aspects into account.
  • Hagoort, P. (2000). De toekomstige eeuw der cognitieve neurowetenschap [inaugural lecture]. Katholieke Universiteit Nijmegen.

    Abstract

    Rede uitgesproken op 12 mei 2000 bij de aanvaarding van het ambt van hoogleraar in de neuropsychologie aan de Faculteit Sociale Wetenschappen KUN.
  • Hammond, J. (2015). Switch reference in Whitesands. PhD Thesis, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen.
  • Hintz, F. (2015). Predicting language in different contexts: The nature and limits of mechanisms in anticipatory language processing. PhD Thesis, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen.
  • Holler, J. (2004). Semantic and pragmatic aspects of representational gestures: Towards a unified model of communication in talk. PhD Thesis, University of Manchester, Manchester.
  • Kempen, G. (1970). Memory for word and sentence meanings: A set-feature model. PhD Thesis, Katholieke Universiteit Nijmegen, Nijmegen.
  • Kemps, R. J. J. K. (2004). Morphology in auditory lexical processing: Sensitivity to fine phonetic detail and insensitivity to suffix reduction. PhD Thesis, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen. doi:10.17617/2.59193.

    Abstract

    This dissertation investigates two seemingly contradictory properties of the speech perception system. On the one hand, listeners are extremely sensitive to the fine phonetic details in the speech signal. These subtle acoustic cues can reduce the temporal ambiguity between words that show initial segmental overlap, and can guide lexical activation. On the other hand, comprehension does not seem to be hampered at all by the drastic reductions that typically occur in casual speech. Complete segments, and sometimes even complete syllables, may be missing, but comprehension is seemingly unaffected. This thesis aims at elucidating how words are represented and accessed in the mental lexicon, by investigating these contradictory phenomena for the domain of morphology

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  • Klein, W., & Von Stechow, A. (Eds.). (1974). Functional generative grammar in Prague. Kronberg/Ts: Scriptor.
  • Klein, W., & Perdue, C. (1992). Utterance structure: Developing grammars again. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
  • Klein, W. (1974). Variation in der Sprache. Kronberg/Ts: Scriptor.
  • Klein, W. (2015). Von den Werken der Sprache. Stuttgart: Verlag J.B. Metzler.
  • Krämer, I. (2000). Interpreting indefinites: An experimental study of children's language comprehension. PhD Thesis, University of Utrecht, Utrecht. doi:10.17617/2.2057626.
  • Levelt, W. J. M. (1974). Formal grammars in linguistics and psycholinguistics: Vol.III, Psycholinguistic applications. The Hague: Mouton.
  • Levelt, W. J. M. (1974). Formal grammars in linguistics and psycholinguistics: Vol. I, An introduction to the theory of formal languages and automata. The Hague: Mouton Publishers.
  • Levelt, W. J. M. (1974). Formal grammars in linguistics and psycholinguistics: Vol.II, Applications in linguistic theory. The Hague: Mouton.
  • Levelt, W. J. M. (2000). Met twee woorden spreken [Simon Dik Lezing 2000]. Amsterdam: Vossiuspers AUP.
  • Levinson, S. C. (2004). Significados presumibles [Spanish translation of Presumptive meanings]. Madrid: Bibliotheca Románica Hispánica.
  • Levinson, S. C. (2000). Presumptive meanings: The theory of generalized conversational implicature. Cambridge: MIT press.
  • Liszkowski, U. (2000). A belief about theory of mind: The relation between children's inhibitory control and their common sense psychological knowledge. Master Thesis, University of Essex.
  • Magyari, L. (2015). Timing turns in conversation: A temporal preparation account. PhD Thesis, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen.
  • Majid, A. (Ed.). (2004). Field manual volume 9. Nijmegen: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics.
  • Marslen-Wilsen, W., & Tyler, L. K. (Eds.). (1980). Max-Planck-Institute for Psycholinguistics: Annual Report Nr.1 1980. Nijmegen: MPI for Psycholinguistics.
  • Meeuwissen, M. (2004). Producing complex spoken numerals for time and space. PhD Thesis, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen. doi:10.17617/2.60607.

    Abstract

    This thesis addressed the spoken production of complex numerals for time and space. The production of complex numerical expressions like those involved in telling time (e.g., 'quarter to four') or producing house numbers (e.g., 'two hundred forty-five') has been almost completely ignored. Yet, adult speakers produce such expressions on a regular basis in everyday communication. Thus, no theory on numerical cognition or speech production is complete without an account of the production of multi-morphemic utterances such as complex numeral expressions. The main question of this thesis is which particular speech planning levels are involved in the naming and reading of complex numerals for time and space. More specifically, this issue was investigated by examining different modes of response (clock times versus house numbers), alternative input formats (Arabic digit versus alphabetic format; analog versus digital clock displays), and different expression types (relative 'quarter to four' versus absolute 'three forty-five' time expressions).

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  • Miedema, J., & Reesink, G. (2004). One head, many faces: New perspectives on the bird's head Peninsula of New Guinea. Leiden: KITLV Press.

    Abstract

    Wider knowledge of New Guinea's Bird's Head Peninsula, home to an indigenous population of 114,000 people who share more than twenty languages, was recently gained through an extensive interdisciplinary research project involving anthropologists, archaeologists, botanists, demographers, geologists, linguists, and specialists in public administration. Analyzing the findings of the project, this book provides a systematic comparison with earlier studies, addressing the geological past, the latest archaeological evidence of early human habitation (dating back at least 26,000 years), and the region's diversity of languages and cultures. The peninsula is an important transitional area between Southeast Asia and Oceania, and this book provides valuable new insights for specialists in both the social and natural sciences into processes of state formation and globalization in the Asia-Pacific zone.
  • Mishra, R., Srinivasan, N., & Huettig, F. (Eds.). (2015). Attention and vision in language processing. Berlin: Springer. doi:10.1007/978-81-322-2443-3.
  • O'Connor, L. (2004). Motion, transfer, and transformation: The grammar of change in Lowland Chontal. PhD Thesis, University of California at Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara.

    Abstract

    Typologies are critical tools for linguists, but typologies, like grammars, are known to leak. This book addresses the question of typological overlap from the perspective of a single language. In Lowland Chontal of Oaxaca, a language of southern Mexico, change events are expressed with three types of predicates, and each predicate type corresponds to a different language type in the well-known typology of lexicalization patterns established by Talmy and elaborated by others. O’Connor evaluates the predictive powers of the typology by examining the consequences of each predicate type in a variety of contexts, using data from narrative discourse, stimulus response, and elicitation. This is the first de­tailed look at the lexical and grammatical resources of the verbal system in Chontal and their relation to semantics of change. The analysis of how and why Chontal speakers choose among these verbal resources to achieve particular communicative and social goals serves both as a documentation of an endangered language and a theoretical contribution towards a typology of language use.
  • Peeters, D. (2015). A social and neurobiological approach to pointing in speech and gesture. PhD Thesis, Radboud University, Nijmegen.
  • Rossano, F. (2004). Per una semiotica dell'interazione: Analisi del rapporto tra sguardo, corpo e parola in alcune interazione faccia a faccia. Master Thesis, Università di Bologna, Bologna, Italy.
  • Rossi, G. (2015). The request system in Italian interaction. PhD Thesis, Radboud University, Nijmegen.

    Abstract

    People across the world make requests every day. We constantly rely on others to get by in the small and big practicalities of everyday life, be it getting the salt, moving a sofa, or cooking a meal. It has long been noticed that when we ask others for help we use a wide range of forms drawing on various resources afforded by our language and body. To get another to pass the salt, for example, we may say ‘Pass the salt’, or ask ‘Can you pass me the salt?’, or simply point to the salt. What do different forms of requesting give us? The short answer is that they allow us to manage different social relations. But what kind of relations? While prior research has mostly emphasised the role of long-term asymmetries like people’s social distance and relative power, this thesis puts at centre stage social relations and dimensions emerging in the moment-by-moment flow of everyday interaction. These include how easy or hard the action requested is to anticipate for the requestee, whether the action requested contributes to a joint project or serves an individual one, whether the requestee may be unwilling to do it, and how obvious or equivocal it is that a certain person or another should be involved in the action. The study focuses on requests made in everyday informal interactions among speakers of Italian. It involves over 500 instances of requests sampled from a diverse corpus of video recordings, and draws on methods from conversation analysis, linguistics and multimodal analysis. A qualitative analysis of the data is supported by quantitative measures of the distribution of linguistic and interactional features, and by the use of inferential statistics to test the generalizability of some of the patterns observed. The thesis aims to contribute to our understanding of both language and social interaction by showing that forms of requesting constitute a system, organised by a set of recurrent social-interactional concerns.

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  • Rowland, C. F. (2000). The grammatical acquisition of wh-questions in early English multi-word speech. PhD Thesis, University of Nottingham, UK.

    Abstract

    Recent studies of wh-question acquisition have tended to come from the nativist side of the language acquisition debate with little input from a constructivist perspective. The present work was designed to redress the balance, first by presenting a detailed description of young children's wh-question acquisition data, second, by providing detailed critiques of two nativist theories of wh- question acquisition, and third, by presenting a preliminary account of young children's wh-question development from a constructivist perspective. Analyses of the data from twelve 2 to 3 year old children collected over a year and of data from an older child (Adam from the Brown corpus, 1973) are described and three conclusions are drawn. First it is argued that the data suggest that children's knowledge of how to form wh-questions builds up gradually as they learn how to combine lexical items such as wh-words and auxiliaries in specific ways. Second, it is concluded that two nativist theories of grammatical development (Radford, 1990, 1992, 1995, 1996, Valian, Lasser & Mandelbaum, 1992) fail to account successfully for the wh-question data produced by the children. Third, it is asserted that the lexically-specific nature of children's early wh-questions is compatible with a lexical constructivist view of development, which proposes that the language learning mechanism learns by picking up high frequency lexical patterns from the input. The implications of these conclusions for theories of language development and future research are discussed.
  • De Ruiter, J. P. (1998). Gesture and speech production. PhD Thesis, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen. doi:10.17617/2.2057686.
  • Schepens, J. (2015). Bridging linguistic gaps: The effects of linguistic distance on adult learnability of Dutch as an additional language. PhD Thesis, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen.
  • Schmiedtová, B. (2004). At the same time.. The expression of simultaneity in learner varieties. PhD Thesis, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen. doi:10.17617/2.59569.
  • Schmiedtová, B. (2004). At the same time.. The expression of simultaneity in learner varieties. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

    Abstract

    The study endeavors a detailed and systematic classification of linguistic simultaneity expressions. Further, it aims at a well described survey of how simultaneity is expressed by native speakers in their own language. On the basis of real production data the book answers the questions of how native speakers express temporal simultaneity in general, and how learners at different levels of proficiency deal with this situation under experimental test conditions. Furthermore, the results of this study shed new light on our understanding of aspect in general, and on its acquisition by adult learners.
  • Schultze-Berndt, E. (2000). Simple and complex verbs in Jaminjung: A study of event categorisation in an Australian language. PhD Thesis, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen. doi:10.17617/2.2057716.
  • Senft, G. (1992). Das System der Klassifikationspartikeln im Kilivila: Habilitationsschrift vorgelegt für die Habilitation (Allgemeine Linguistik) im Fachbereich I - Kommunikations- und Geschichtswissenschaften der Technischen Universität Berlin. Mimeo: Berlin.

    Abstract

    German Version of (1996) Classificatory particles in Kilivila. New York: Oxford University Press
  • Senft, G. (Ed.). (2004). Deixis and Demonstratives in Oceanic Languages. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics.

    Abstract

    When we communicate, we communicate in a certain context, and this context shapes our utterances. Natural languages are context-bound and deixis 'concerns the ways in which languages encode or grammaticalise features of the context of utterance or speech event, and thus also concerns ways in which the interpretation of utterances depends on the analysis of that context of utterance' (Stephen Levinson). The systems of deixis and demonstratives in the Oceanic languages represented in the contributions to this volume illustrate the fascinating complexity of spatial reference in these languages. Some of the studies presented here highlight social aspects of deictic reference illustrating de Leon's point that 'reference is a collaborative task' . It is hoped that this anthology will contribute to a better understanding of this area and provoke further studies in this extremely interesting, though still rather underdeveloped, research area.
  • Senft, G., & Smits, R. (Eds.). (2000). Max-Planck-Institute for Psycholinguistics: Annual report 2000. Nijmegen: MPI for Psycholinguistics.
  • Senft, G. (2015). Tales from the Trobriand Islands of Papua New Guinea: Psycholinguistic and anthropological linguistic analyses of tales told by Trobriand children and adults. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

    Abstract

    This volume presents 22 tales from the Trobriand Islands told by children (boys between the age of 5 and 9 years) and adults. The monograph is motivated not only by the anthropological linguistic aim to present a broad and quite unique collection of tales with the thematic approach to illustrate which topics and themes constitute the content of the stories, but also by the psycholinguistic and textlinguistic questions of how children acquire linearization and other narrative strategies, how they develop them and how they use them to structure these texts in an adult-like way. The tales are presented in morpheme-interlinear transcriptions with first textlinguistic analyses and cultural background information necessary to fully understand them. A summarizing comparative analysis of the texts from a psycholinguistic, anthropological linguistic and philological point of view discusses the underlying schemata of the stories, the means narrators use to structure them, their structural complexity and their cultural specificity. The e-book is made available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.
  • Senft, G. (Ed.). (2000). Systems of nominal classification. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  • Seuren, P. A. M. (2004). Chomsky's minimalism. New York: Oxford University Press.
  • Seuren, P. A. M. (Ed.). (1974). Semantic syntax. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  • Seuren, P. A. M. (1998). Western linguistics: An historical introduction. Oxford: Blackwell.
  • Skiba, R. (1998). Fachsprachenforschung in wissenschaftstheoretischer Perspektive. Tübingen: Gunter Narr.
  • Smith, A. C. (2015). Modelling multimodal language processing. PhD Thesis, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen.
  • Sotaro, K., & Dickey, L. W. (Eds.). (1998). Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics: Annual report 1998. Nijmegen: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics.
  • Sumer, B. (2015). Acquisition of spatial language by signing and speaking children: A comparison of Turkish Sign Language (TID) and Turkish. PhD Thesis, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen.
  • Terrill, A. (1998). Biri. München: Lincom Europa.

    Abstract

    This work presents a salvage grammar of the Biri language of Eastern Central Queensland, a Pama-Nyungan language belonging to the large Maric subgroup. As the language is no longer used, the grammatical description is based on old written sources and on recordings made by linguists in the 1960s and 1970s. Biri is in many ways typical of the Pama-Nyungan languages of Southern Queensland. It has split case marking systems, marking nouns according to an ergative/absolutive system and pronouns according to a nominative/accusative system. Unusually for its area, Biri also has bound pronouns on its verb, cross-referencing the person, number and case of core participants. As far as it is possible, the grammatical discussion is ‘theory neutral’. The first four chapters deal with the phonology, morphology, and syntax of the language. The last two chapters contain a substantial discussion of Biri’s place in the Pama-Nyungan family. In chapter 6 the numerous dialects of the Biri language are discussed. In chapter 7 the close linguistic relationship between Biri and the surrounding languages is examined.
  • Van Alphen, P. M. (2004). Perceptual relevance of prevoicing in Dutch. PhD Thesis, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen. doi:10.17617/2.58551.

    Abstract

    In this dissertation the perceptual relevance of prevoicing in Dutch was investigated. Prevoicing is the presence of vocal fold vibration during the closure of initial voiced plosives (negative voice onset time). The presence or absence of prevoicing is generally used to describe the difference between voiced and voiceless Dutch plosives. The first experiment described in this dissertation showed that prevoicing is frequently absent in Dutch and that several factors affect the production of prevoicing. A detailed acoustic analysis of the voicing distinction identified several acoustic correlates of voicing. Prevoicing appeared to be by far the best predictor. Perceptual classification data revealed that prevoicing was indeed the strongest cue that listeners use when classifying plosives as voiced or voiceless. In the cases where prevoicing was absent, other acoustic cues influenced classification, such that some of these tokens were still perceived as being voiced. In the second part of this dissertation the influence of prevoicing variation on spoken-word recognition was examined. In several cross-modal priming experiments two types of prevoicing variation were contrasted: a difference between the presence and absence of prevoicing (6 versus 0 periods of prevoicing) and a difference in the amount of prevoicing (12 versus 6 periods). All these experiments indicated that primes with 12 and 6 periods of prevoicing had the same effect on lexical decisions to the visual targets. The primes without prevoicing had a different effect, but only when their voiceless counterparts were real words. Phonetic detail appears to influence lexical access only when it is useful: In Dutch, the presence versus absence of prevoicing is informative, while the amount of prevoicing is not.

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  • Van den Brink, D. (2004). Contextual influences on spoken-word processing: An electrophysiological approach. PhD Thesis, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen. doi:10.17617/2.57773.

    Abstract

    The aim of this thesis was to gain more insight into spoken-word comprehension and the influence of sentence-contextual information on these processes using ERPs. By manipulating critical words in semantically constraining sententes, in semantic or syntactic sense, and examining the consequences in the electrophysiological signal (e.g., elicitation of ERP components such as the N400, N200, LAN, and P600), three questions were tackled: I At which moment is context information used in the spoken-word recognition process? II What is the temporal relationship between lexical selection and integration of the meaning of a spoken word into a higher-order level representeation of the preceding sentence? III What is the time course of the processing of different sources of linguistic information obtained from the context, such as phonological, semantic and syntactic information, during spoken-word comprehension? From the results of this thesis it can be concluded that sentential context already exerts an influence on spoken-word processing at approximately 200 ms after word onset. In addition, semantic integration is attempted before a spoken word can be selected on the basis of the acoustic signal, i.e. before lexical selection is completed. Finally, knowledge of the syntactic category of a word is not needed before semantic integration can take place. These findings, therefore, were interpreted as providing evidence for an account of cascaded spoken-word processing that proclaims an optimal use of contextual information during spoken-word identification. Optimal use is accomplished by allowing for semantic and syntactic processing to take place in parallel after bottom-up activation of a set of candidates, and lexical integration to proceed with a limited number of candidates that still match the acoustic input

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  • Van de Velde, M. (2015). Incrementality and flexibility in sentence production. PhD Thesis, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen.
  • Van Leeuwen, E. J. C. (2015). Social learning dynamics in chimpanzees: Reflections on animal culture. PhD Thesis, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen.
  • Verga, L. (2015). Learning together or learning alone: Investigating the role of social interaction in second language word learning. PhD Thesis, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany.
  • Willems, R. M. (Ed.). (2015). Cognitive neuroscience of natural language use. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  • Zeshan, U. (2004). Basic English course taught in Indian Sign Language (Ali Yavar Young National Institute for Hearing Handicapped, Ed.). National Institute for the Hearing Handicapped: Mumbai.
  • Zhou, W. (2015). Assessing birth language memory in young adoptees. PhD Thesis, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen.

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