UMD Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/3
New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a given thesis/dissertation in DRUM.
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Item Precedence and the Lack Thereof: Precedence-Relation-Oriented Phonology(2020) Papillon, Maxime; idsardi, Bill J.; Linguistics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The study of representations, their limits and capacities, is an indispensable part of the formal study of language. The representations are the limits of what can be stored and computed upon, and the details of a representation have a major influence on the form of any analysis. Broadly, the goal of this thesis is to explore a lower bound of complexity for the phonological module. By exploring the capacities of a representation that I will argue requires fewer stipulations than anything offered before it, I will defend the claim that the freedom of this more powerful representation matches the power of morphology. More specifically I will argue that the representation of phonology is not strings, but directed graphs, and that this representation is simpler and more powerful and that its power exactly matches the set of attested phenomena of word-formation and phonology. The goal of this dissertation is to expand on the theory of Multiprecedence, which is both promising and under-explored.Item The Explanatory Role of Intentional Content in Cognitive Science(2015) Knoll, Andrew Charles; Rey, Georges; Philosophy; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This work argues that intentional content plays at least two explanatory roles in cognitive science. First, it allows cognitive states to be type-individuated independently of their relations to one another and to mind external phenomena. Secondly, it allows for counterfactual preserving generalizations over states so individuated. Thus, intentional content does not play this explanatory role in highly encapsulated cognitive processes. By contrast, it is necessary to type individuate states that partake in isotropic cognitive processes. This work thus cuts a middle path between those who would eliminate intentional content from cognition altogether, and those who take it to be the ‘mark of the mental.’ Chapter 1 argues that there is no good reason to eliminate intentional content from cognitive science. But, it also argues that there is a coherent notion of computation without representation on offer as well. So, many cognitive processes could be explained as computations over states without intentional content. Chapter 2 argues that many extant accounts of the explanatory role of intentional content end up being otiose. Too often, such accounts are concerned with capturing our intuitions about the proper way to talk about cognitive processes. But, in many cases, this talk can be eliminated from our explanations without loss of explanatory power. Chapter 3 lays out the main argument. Many encapsulated cognitive processes—including early perceptual processes-- can be explained in terms of computation without intentional content. In contrast, processes that are open to isotropic revision require their states to be individuated in terms of intentional content. Chapter 4 surveys some objections to this view. One worry is that if cognition is massively modular, then all cognition must be non-intentional. On the contrary, modular processes can also be open to isotropic revision, and thus be amenable to intentional explanation. Chapter 5 provides an example of such a modular process: the phonological system. It argues that states of the phonological system must be individuated in terms of intentional content. Phonological processing thus provides a case study for intentional explanation more generally.Item Similarity in L2 Phonology(2013) Barrios, Shannon L.; Idsardi, William J.; Linguistics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Adult second language (L2) learners often experience difficulty producing and perceiving non-native phonological contrasts. Even highly proficient bilinguals, who have been exposed to an L2 for long periods of time, struggle with difficult contrasts, such as /r/-/l/ for Japanese learners of English. To account for the relative ease or difficulty with which L2 learners perceive and acquire non-native contrasts, theories of (L2) speech perception often appeal to notions of similarity. But how is similarity best determined? In this dissertation I explored the predictions of two theoretical approaches to similarity comparison in the second language, and asked: [1] How should L2 sound similarity be measured? [2] What is the nature of the representations that guide sound similarity? [3] To what extent can the influence of the native language be overcome? In Chapter 2, I tested a `legos' (featural) approach to sound similarity. Given a distinctive feature analysis of Spanish and English vowels, I investigated the hypothesis that feature availability in the L1 grammar constrains which target language segments will be accurately perceived and acquired by L2 learners (Brown [1998], Brown [2000]). Our results suggest that second language acquisition of phonology is not limited by the phonological features used by the native language grammar, nor is the presence/use of a particular phonological feature in the native language grammar sufficient to trigger redeployment. I take these findings to imply that feature availability is neither a necessary, nor a sufficient condition to predict learning outcomes. In Chapter 3, I extended a computational model proposed by Feldman et al. [2009] to nonnative speech perception, in order to investigate whether a sophisticated `rulers' (spatial) approach to sound similarity can better explain existing interlingual identification and discrimination data from Spanish monolinguals and advanced L1 Spanish late-learners of English, respectively. The model assumes that acoustic distributions of sounds control listeners' ability to discriminate a given contrast. I found that, while the model succeeded in emulating certain aspects of human behavior, the model at present is incomplete and would have to be extended in various ways to capture several aspects of nonnative and L2 speech perception. In Chapter 4 I explored whether the phonological relatedness among sounds in the listeners native language impacts the perceived similarity of those sounds in the target language. Listeners were expected to be more sensitive to the contrast between sound pairs which are allophones of different phonemes than to sound pairs which are allophones of the same phoneme in their native language. Moreover, I hypothesized that L2 learners would experience difficulty perceiving and acquiring target language contrasts between sound pairs which are allophones of the same phoneme in their native language. Our results suggest that phonological relatedness may influence perceived similarity on some tasks, but does not seem to cause long- lasting perceptual difficulty in advanced L2 learners. On the basis of those findings, I argue that existing models have not been adequately explicit about the nature of the representations and processes involved in similarity-based comparisons of L1 and L2 sounds. More generally, I describe what I see as a desirable target for an explanatorily adequate theory of cross-language influence in L2 phonology.