Publications

Displaying 1 - 75 of 75
  • Altvater-Mackensen, N. (2010). Do manners matter? Asymmetries in the acquisition of manner of articulation features. PhD Thesis, Radboud University of Nijmegen, Nijmegen.
  • Bardhan, N. P. (2010). Adults’ self-directed learning of an artificial lexicon: The dynamics of neighborhood reorganization. PhD Thesis, University of Rochester, Rochester, New York.

    Abstract

    Artificial lexicons have previously been used to examine the time course of the learning and recognition of spoken words, the role of segment type in word learning, and the integration of context during spoken word recognition. However, in all of these studies the experimenter determined the frequency and order of the words to be learned. In three experiments, we asked whether adult learners choose to listen to novel words in a particular order based on their acoustic similarity. We use a new paradigm for learning an artificial lexicon in which the learner, rather than the experimenter, determines the order and frequency of exposure to items. We analyze both the proportions of selections and the temporal clustering of subjects' sampling of lexical neighborhoods during training as well as their performance during repeated testing phases (accuracy and reaction time) to determine the time course of learning these neighborhoods. In the first experiment, subjects sampled the high and low density neighborhoods randomly in early learning, and then over-sampled the high density neighborhood until test performance on both neighborhoods reached asymptote. A second experiment involved items similar to the first, but also neighborhoods that are not fully revealed at the start of the experiment. Subjects adjusted their training patterns to focus their selections on neighborhoods of increasing density was revealed; evidence of learning in the test phase was slower to emerge than in the first experiment, impaired by the presence of additional sets of items of varying density. Crucially, in both the first and second experiments there was no effect of dense vs. sparse neighborhood in the accuracy results, which is accounted for by subjects’ over-sampling of items from the dense neighborhood. The third experiment was identical in design to the second except for a second day of further training and testing on the same items. Testing at the beginning of the second day showed impaired, not improved, accuracy, except for the consistently dense items. Further training, however, improved accuracy for some items to above Day 1 levels. Overall, these results provide a new window on the time-course of learning an artificial lexicon and the role that learners’ implicit preferences, stemming from their self-selected experience with the entire lexicon, play in learning highly confusable words.
  • Becker, M. (2016). On the identification of FOXP2 gene enhancers and their role in brain development. PhD Thesis, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen.
  • Brand, S. (2017). The processing of reduced word pronunciation variants by natives and learners: Evidence from French casual speech. PhD Thesis, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen.
  • Brouwer, S. (2010). Processing strongly reduced forms in casual speech. PhD Thesis, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen.
  • Bruggeman, L. (2016). Nativeness, dominance, and the flexibility of listening to spoken language. PhD Thesis, Western Sydney University, Sydney.
  • Carrion Castillo, A. (2016). Deciphering common and rare genetic effects on reading ability. PhD Thesis, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen.
  • Defina, R. (2010). Aspect and modality in Avatime. Master Thesis, Leiden University.
  • Defina, R. (2016). Events in language and thought: The case of serial verb constructions in Avatime. PhD Thesis, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen.
  • Drude, S. (1997). Wörterbücher, integrativ interpretiert, am Beispiel des Guaraní. Magister Thesis, Freie Universität Berlin.
  • Essegbey, J. (1999). Inherent complement verbs revisited: Towards an understanding of argument structure in Ewe. PhD Thesis, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen. doi:10.17617/2.2057668.
  • Flecken, M. (2010). Event conceptualization in language production of early bilinguals. PhD Thesis, Heidelberg University and Radboud University Nijmegen. LOT dissertation series; 256.
  • Floyd, S. (2010). Discourse forms and social categorization in Cha'palaa. PhD Thesis, University of Texas, Austin, TX.

    Abstract

    This dissertation is an ethnographic study of race and other forms of social categorization as approached through the discourse of the indigenous Chachi people of northwestern lowland Ecuador and their Afro-descendant neighbors. It combines the ethnographic methods of social anthropology with the methods of descriptive linguistics, letting social questions about racial formation guide linguistic inquiry. It provides new information about the largely unstudied indigenous South American language Cha’palaa, and connects that information about linguistic form to problems of the study of race and ethnicity in Latin America. Individual descriptive chapters address how the Cha’palaa number system is based on collectivity rather than plurality according to an animacy hierarchy that codes only human and human-like social collectivities, how a nominal set of ethnonyms linked to Chachi oral history become the recipients of collective marking as human collectivities, how those collectivities are co-referentially linked to speech participants through the deployment of the pronominal system, and how the multi-modal resource of gesture adds to these rich resources supplied by the spoken language for the expression of social realities like race. The final chapters address Chachi and Afrodescendant discourses in dialogue with each other and examine naturally occurring speech data to show how the linguistic forms described in previous chapters are used in social interaction. The central argument advances a position that takes the socially constructed status of race seriously and considers that for such constructions to exist as more abstract macro-categories they must be constituted by instances of social interaction, where elements of the social order are observable at the micro-level. In this way localized articulations of social categories become vehicles for the broader circulation of discourses structured by a history of racialized social inequality, revealing the extreme depth of racialization in human social conditioning. This dissertation represents a contribution to the field of linguistic anthropology as well as to descriptive linguistics of South American languages and to critical approaches to race and ethnicity in Latin America.
  • Francken, J. C. (2016). Viewing the world through language-tinted glasses: Elucidating the neural mechanisms of language-perception interactions. PhD Thesis, Radboud University, Nijmegen.
  • Gebre, B. G. (2010). Part of speech tagging for Amharic. Master Thesis, University of Wolverhampton, Wolverhampton.
  • Guadalupe, T. (2017). The biology of variation in anatomical brain asymmetries. PhD Thesis, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen.
  • Gullberg, M., & Indefrey, P. (Eds.). (2010). The earliest stages of language learning [Special Issue]. Language Learning, 60(Supplement s2).
  • Hartung, F. (2017). Getting under your skin: The role of perspective and simulation of experience in narrative comprehension. PhD Thesis, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen.
  • Haveman, A. (1997). The open-/closed-class distinction in spoken-word recognition. PhD Thesis, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen. doi:10.17617/2.2057704.
  • Heyselaar, E. (2017). Influences on the magnitude of syntactic priming. PhD Thesis, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen.
  • Hintz, F. (2010). Speech and speaker recognition in dyslexic individuals. Bachelor Thesis, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences (Leipzig)/University of Leipzig.
  • Hoey, E. (2017). Lapse organization in interaction. PhD Thesis, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen.
  • Irizarri van Suchtelen, P. (2016). Spanish as a heritage language in the Netherlands. A cognitive linguistic exploration. PhD Thesis, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen.
  • Janssen, D. (1999). Producing past and plural inflections. PhD Thesis, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen. doi:10.17617/2.2057667.
  • St. John-Saaltink, E. (2016). When the past influences the present: Modulations of the sensory response by prior knowledge and task set. PhD Thesis, Radboud University, Nijmegen.
  • Jongman, S. R. (2016). Sustained attention in language production. PhD Thesis, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen.
  • Klein, W., & Musan, R. (Eds.). (1999). Das deutsche Perfekt [Special Issue]. Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik, (113).
  • Klein, W., & Winkler, S. (Eds.). (2010). Ambiguität [Special Issue]. Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik, 40(158).
  • Klein, W. (Ed.). (1997). Technologischer Wandel in den Philologien [Special Issue]. Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik, (106).
  • Klein, W. (Ed.). (2000). Sprache des Rechts [Special Issue]. Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik, (118).
  • Klein, W. (Ed.). (1982). Zweitspracherwerb [Special Issue]. Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik, (45).
  • Kouwenhoven, H. (2016). Situational variation in non-native communication: Studies into register variation, discourse management and pronunciation in Spanish English. PhD Thesis, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen.
  • Krämer, I. (2000). Interpreting indefinites: An experimental study of children's language comprehension. PhD Thesis, University of Utrecht, Utrecht. doi:10.17617/2.2057626.
  • Kunert, R. (2017). Music and language comprehension in the brain. PhD Thesis, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen.
  • Lam, N. H. L. (2017). Comprehending comprehension: Insights from neuronal oscillations on the neuronal basis of language. PhD Thesis, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen.
  • Lam, K. J. Y. (2016). Understanding action-related language: Sensorimotor contributions to meaning. PhD Thesis, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen.
  • Lartseva, A. (2016). Reading emotions: How people with Autism Spectrum Disorders process emotional language. PhD Thesis, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen.
  • Lasser, I. (1997). Finiteness in adult and child German. PhD Thesis, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen. doi:10.17617/2.2057674.
  • Lecumberri, M. L. G., Cooke, M., & Cutler, A. (Eds.). (2010). Non-native speech perception in adverse conditions [Special Issue]. Speech Communication, 52(11/12).
  • Levy, J. (2010). In cerebro unveiling unconscious mechanisms during reading. PhD Thesis, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen.
  • Lewis, A. G. (2017). Explorations of beta-band neural oscillations during language comprehension: Sentence processing and beyond. PhD Thesis, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen.
  • 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.
  • Little, H. (Ed.). (2017). Special Issue on the Emergence of Sound Systems [Special Issue]. The Journal of Language Evolution, 2(1).
  • Lockwood, G. (2017). Talking sense: The behavioural and neural correlates of sound symbolism. PhD Thesis, Radboud University, Nijmegen.
  • Manrique, E. (2017). Achieving mutual understanding in Argentine Sign Language (LSA). PhD Thesis, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen.
  • Margetts, A. (1999). Valence and transitivity in Saliba: An Oceanic language of Papua New Guinea. PhD Thesis, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen. doi:10.17617/2.2057646.
  • Menenti, L. (2010). The right language: Differential hemispheric contributions to language production and comprehension in context. PhD Thesis, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen.
  • Meyer, A. S., & Huettig, F. (Eds.). (2016). Speaking and Listening: Relationships Between Language Production and Comprehension [Special Issue]. Journal of Memory and Language, 89.
  • Moers, C. (2017). The neighbors will tell you what to expect: Effects of aging and predictability on language processing. PhD Thesis, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen.
  • Montero-Melis, G. (2017). Thoughts in Motion: The Role of Long-Term L1 and Short-Term L2 Experience when Talking and Thinking of Caused Motion. PhD Thesis, Stockholm University, Centre for Research on Bilingualism, Stockholm.

    Abstract

    This thesis is about whether language affects thinking. It deals with the linguistic relativity hypothesis, which proposes that the language we speak influences the way we think. This hypothesis is investigated in the domain of caused motion (e.g., ‘The man rolled the tyre into the garage’), by looking at Spanish and Swedish, two languages that show striking differences in how motion events are encoded. The thesis consists of four studies. The first two focus on native speakers of Spanish and Swedish. Study I compares how Spanish and Swedish speakers describe the same set of caused motion events, directing the spotlight at how variable the descriptions are in each language. The results confirm earlier findings from semantic typology regarding the dominant ways of expressing the events in each language: Spanish behaves like a verb-framed language and Swedish like a satellite-framed language (Talmy, 2000). Going beyond previous findings, the study demonstrates—using the tools of entropy and Monte Carlo simulations—that there is markedly more variability in Spanish than in Swedish descriptions. Study II tests whether differences in how Spanish and Swedish speakers describe caused motion events are reflected in how they think about such events. Using a novel similarity arrangement task, it is found that Spanish and Swedish speakers partly differ in how they represent caused motion events if they can access language during the task. However, the differences disappear when the possibility to use language is momentarily blocked by an interference task. The last two studies focus on Swedish learners of Spanish as a second language (L2). Study III explores how Swedish learners (compared to native Spanish speakers) adapt their Spanish motion descriptions to recently encountered input. Using insights from the literature on structural priming, we find that Swedish learners initially expect to encounter in their L2, Spanish, those verb types that are typical in Swedish (manner verbs like ‘roll’) but that, with increasing proficiency, their expectations become increasingly attuned to the typical Spanish pattern of using path verbs (like ‘enter’). These expectations are reflected in the way L2 learners adapt their own production to the Spanish input. Study IV asks whether recent linguistic experience in an L2 can affect how L2 learners think about motion events. It is found that encountering motion descriptions in the L2 that emphasize different types of information (path or manner) leads L2 speakers to perceive similarity along different dimensions in a subsequent similarity arrangement task. Taken together, the thesis argues that the study of the relation between language and thought affords more valuable insights when not posed as an either-or question (i.e., does language affect thought or not?). In this spirit, the thesis contributes to the wider aim of investigating the conditions under which language does or does not affect thought and explores what the different outcomes tell us about language, thought, and the intricate mechanisms that relate them.
  • Neger, T. M. (2017). Learning from the (un)expected: Age and individual differences in statistical learning and perceptual learning in speech. PhD Thesis, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen. doi:10.17617/2.2482848.
  • Pijnacker, J. (2010). Defeasible inference in autism: A behavioral and electrophysiological approach. PhD Thesis, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen.
  • Reinisch, E. (2010). Processing the fine temporal structure of spoken words. PhD Thesis, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen.
  • 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, L. E. (2010). Studies on intonation and information structure in child and adult German. PhD Thesis, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen.
  • Sauppe, S. (2017). The role of voice and word order in incremental sentence processing: Studies on sentence production and comprehension in Tagalog and German. PhD Thesis, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen.
  • Schiller, N. O. (1997). The role of the syllable in speech production: Evidence from lexical statistics, metalinguistics, masked priming, and electromagnetic midsagittal articulography. PhD Thesis, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen. doi:10.17617/2.2057707.
  • Schmitt, B. M. (1997). Lexical access in the production of ellipsis and pronouns. PhD Thesis, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen. doi:10.17617/2.2057702.
  • Schoot, L. (2017). Language processing in a conversation context. PhD Thesis, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen.
  • Schuerman, W. L. (2017). Sensorimotor experience in speech perception. PhD Thesis, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen.
  • 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.
  • Snijders, T. M. (2010). More than words: Neural and genetic dynamics of syntactic unification. PhD Thesis, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen.
  • Stivers, T., Enfield, N. J., & Levinson, S. C. (Eds.). (2010). Question-response sequences in conversation across ten languages [Special Issue]. Journal of Pragmatics, 42(10). doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2010.04.001.
  • Tabak, W. (2010). Semantics and (ir)regular inflection in morphological processing. PhD Thesis, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen.
  • Ten Oever, S. (2016). How neuronal oscillations code for temporal statistics. PhD Thesis, Maastricht University, Maastricht, The Netherlands.
  • De Vaan, L. (2017). Mental representations of Dutch regular morphologically complex neologisms. PhD Thesis, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen.
  • Van Turennout, M. (1997). The electrophysiology of speaking: Investigations on the time course of semantic, syntactic, and phonological processing. PhD Thesis, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen. doi:10.17617/2.2057711.
  • Van der Lugt, A. (1999). From speech to words. PhD Thesis, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen. doi:10.17617/2.2057645.
  • Van de Weijer, J. (1999). Language input for word discovery. PhD Thesis, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen. doi:10.17617/2.2057670.
  • Van Dijk, H. (2010). The state of the brain: How alpha oscillations shape behavior and event-related responses. PhD Thesis, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen.
  • Van Rijswijk, R. (2016). The strength of a weaker first language: Language production and comprehension by Turkish heritage speakers in the Netherlands. PhD Thesis, Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
  • Vanlangendonck, F. (2017). Finding common ground: On the neural mechanisms of communicative language production. PhD Thesis, Radboud University, Nijmegen.
  • Viebahn, M. (2016). Acoustic reduction in spoken-word processing: Distributional, syntactic, morphosyntactic, and orthographic effects. PhD Thesis, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen.
  • Wnuk, E. (2016). Semantic specificity of perception verbs in Maniq. PhD Thesis, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen.
  • De Zubicaray, G., & Fisher, S. E. (Eds.). (2017). Genes, brain and language [Special Issue]. Brain and Language, 172.

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