Publications

Displaying 1 - 36 of 36
  • Altvater-Mackensen, N. (2010). Do manners matter? Asymmetries in the acquisition of manner of articulation features. PhD Thesis, Radboud University of Nijmegen, Nijmegen.
  • Ameka, F. K. (1991). Ewe: Its grammatical constructions and illocutionary devices. PhD Thesis, Australian National University, Canberra.
  • 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.
  • Basnakova, J. (2019). Beyond the language given: The neurobiological infrastructure for pragmatic inferencing. PhD Thesis, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen.
  • Brouwer, S. (2010). Processing strongly reduced forms in casual speech. PhD Thesis, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen.
  • Defina, R. (2010). Aspect and modality in Avatime. Master Thesis, Leiden University.
  • Doherty, M., & Klein, W. (Eds.). (1991). Übersetzung [Special Issue]. Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik, (84).
  • Drijvers, L. (2019). On the oscillatory dynamics underlying speech-gesture integration in clear and adverse listening conditions. PhD Thesis, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen.
  • Fairs, A. (2019). Linguistic dual-tasking: Understanding temporal overlap between production and comprehension. PhD Thesis, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen.
  • Fisher, S. E., & Tilot, A. K. (Eds.). (2019). Bridging senses: Novel insights from synaesthesia [Special Issue]. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Series B: Biological Sciences, 374.
  • 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.
  • Gebre, B. G. (2010). Part of speech tagging for Amharic. Master Thesis, University of Wolverhampton, Wolverhampton.
  • Goriot, C. (2019). Early-English education works no miracles: Cognitive and linguistic development in mainstream, early-English, and bilingual primary-school pupils in the Netherlands. 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).
  • 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.
  • Hömke, P. (2019). The face in face-to-face communication: Signals of understanding and non-understanding. PhD Thesis, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen.
  • Klein, W., & Winkler, S. (Eds.). (2010). Ambiguität [Special Issue]. Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik, 40(158).
  • Klein, W. (Ed.). (1983). Intonation [Special Issue]. Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik, (49).
  • 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.
  • Maslowski, M. (2019). Fast speech can sound slow: Effects of contextual speech rate on word recognition. PhD Thesis, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen.
  • Menenti, L. (2010). The right language: Differential hemispheric contributions to language production and comprehension in context. PhD Thesis, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen.
  • Nijveld, A. (2019). The role of exemplars in speech comprehension. PhD Thesis, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen.
  • Pijnacker, J. (2010). Defeasible inference in autism: A behavioral and electrophysiological approach. PhD Thesis, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen.
  • Poort, E. D. (2019). The representation of cognates and interlingual homographs in the bilingual lexicon. PhD Thesis, University College London, London, UK.

    Abstract

    Cognates and interlingual homographs are words that exist in multiple languages. Cognates, like “wolf” in Dutch and English, also carry the same meaning. Interlingual homographs do not: the word “angel” in English refers to a spiritual being, but in Dutch to the sting of a bee. The six experiments included in this thesis examined how these words are represented in the bilingual mental lexicon. Experiment 1 and 2 investigated the issue of task effects on the processing of cognates. Bilinguals often process cognates more quickly than single-language control words (like “carrot”, which exists in English but not Dutch). These experiments showed that the size of this cognate facilitation effect depends on the other types of stimuli included in the task. These task effects were most likely due to response competition, indicating that cognates are subject to processes of facilitation and inhibition both within the lexicon and at the level of decision making. Experiment 3 and 4 examined whether seeing a cognate or interlingual homograph in one’s native language affects subsequent processing in one’s second language. This method was used to determine whether non-identical cognates share a form representation. These experiments were inconclusive: they revealed no effect of cross-lingual long-term priming. Most likely this was because a lexical decision task was used to probe an effect that is largely semantic in nature. Given these caveats to using lexical decision tasks, two final experiments used a semantic relatedness task instead. Both experiments revealed evidence for an interlingual homograph inhibition effect but no cognate facilitation effect. Furthermore, the second experiment found evidence for a small effect of cross-lingual long-term priming. After comparing these findings to the monolingual literature on semantic ambiguity resolution, this thesis concludes that it is necessary to explore the viability of a distributed connectionist account of the bilingual mental lexicon.

    Additional information

    full text via UCL
  • Reinisch, E. (2010). Processing the fine temporal structure of spoken words. PhD Thesis, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen.
  • Rojas-Berscia, L. M. (2019). From Kawapanan to Shawi: Topics in language variation and change. PhD Thesis, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen.
  • De Ruiter, L. E. (2010). Studies on intonation and information structure in child and adult German. PhD Thesis, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen.
  • Snijders, T. M. (2010). More than words: Neural and genetic dynamics of syntactic unification. PhD Thesis, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen.
  • Sollis, E. (2019). A network of interacting proteins disrupted in language-related disorders. 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.
  • Van Rhijn, J. R. (2019). The role of FoxP2 in striatal circuitry. PhD Thesis, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen.
  • Van Dijk, H. (2010). The state of the brain: How alpha oscillations shape behavior and event-related responses. PhD Thesis, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen.
  • De Vos, J. (2019). Naturalistic word learning in a second language. PhD Thesis, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen.

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