College of Arts & Humanities
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The collections in this community comprise faculty research works, as well as graduate theses and dissertations.
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Item Grammatical Gender Representation and Processing in Advanced Second Language Learners of French(2009) Vatz, Karen L.; DeKeyser, Robert; Michael, Erica B; Second Language Acquisition and Application; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)One of the most difficult challenges of learning French as a foreign language is mastering the gender system. Although there are theories that account for how French native speakers (NSs) master their gender system, it is not fully understood why second language (L2) learners are unable to do the same. The goal of the present study was to investigate this difference in ability between French NSs and non-native speakers (NNSs), specifically, how L2 learners of French store grammatical gender knowledge, and how their storage system relates to processing of grammatical gender in terms of the ability to realize accurate gender agreement throughout a sentence. First, a gender priming task investigated whether advanced L2 learners have developed a gender-nodal system in which gender information is stored as an inherent property of a noun. Second, an online grammaticality judgment task addressed L2 learners' gender agreement ability during processing, while taking into account (a) the role of gender cues available to the participant, and (b) non-linguistic processing constraints such as working memory (WM) through manipulating the distance of an adjective from the noun with which it must agree. In order to investigate the role of a learner's native language (L1) in gender representation and processing, participants included learners of French from three L1 groups: Spanish, whose gender system is congruent to that of French; Dutch, whose gender system is incongruent to that of French; and English, whose gender system is minimal, relative to French. A group of NS controls also participated. Results from the gender priming task indicate that the NNSs in the current study have not developed a native-like gender-nodal system, regardless of L1-L2 gender-system similarity. At-chance accuracy on the grammaticality judgment task indicates L2 gender agreement is far from native-like, even for advanced learners. Whereas the presence of gender cues was beneficial, neither WM nor L1-L2 similarity facilitated performance. The results from this study confirm previous findings on the difficulty of L2 gender agreement, and shed light on the nature of L2 gender representation as a possible explanation for this processing difficulty.Item On The Way To Linguistic Representation: Neuromagnetic Evidence of Early Auditory Abstraction in the Perception of Speech and Pitch(2009) Monahan, Philip Joseph; Idsardi, William J; Poeppel, David E; Linguistics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The goal of this dissertation is to show that even at the earliest (non-invasive) recordable stages of auditory cortical processing, we find evidence that cortex is calculating abstract representations from the acoustic signal. Looking across two distinct domains (inferential pitch perception and vowel normalization), I present evidence demonstrating that the M100, an automatic evoked neuromagnetic component that localizes to primary auditory cortex is sensitive to abstract computations. The M100 typically responds to physical properties of the stimulus in auditory and speech perception and integrates only over the first 25 to 40 ms of stimulus onset, providing a reliable dependent measure that allows us to tap into early stages of auditory cortical processing. In Chapter 2, I briefly present the episodicist position on speech perception and discuss research indicating that the strongest episodicist position is untenable. I then review findings from the mismatch negativity literature, where proposals have been made that the MMN allows access into linguistic representations supported by auditory cortex. Finally, I conclude the Chapter with a discussion of the previous findings on the M100/N1. In Chapter 3, I present neuromagnetic data showing that the re-sponse properties of the M100 are sensitive to the missing fundamental component using well-controlled stimuli. These findings suggest that listeners are reconstructing the inferred pitch by 100 ms after stimulus onset. In Chapter 4, I propose a novel formant ratio algorithm in which the third formant (F3) is the normalizing factor. The goal of formant ratio proposals is to provide an explicit algorithm that successfully "eliminates" speaker-dependent acoustic variation of auditory vowel tokens. Results from two MEG experiments suggest that auditory cortex is sensitive to formant ratios and that the perceptual system shows heightened sensitivity to tokens located in more densely populated regions of the vowel space. In Chapter 5, I report MEG results that suggest early auditory cortical processing is sensitive to violations of a phonological constraint on sound sequencing, suggesting that listeners make highly specific, knowledge-based predictions about rather abstract anticipated properties of the upcoming speech signal and violations of these predictions are evident in early cortical processing.Item The predictive nature of language comprehension(2009) Lau, Ellen Frances; Phillips, Colin; Linguistics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation explores the hypothesis that predictive processing--the access and construction of internal representations in advance of the external input that supports them--plays a central role in language comprehension. Linguistic input is frequently noisy, variable, and rapid, but it is also subject to numerous constraints. Predictive processing could be a particularly useful approach in language comprehension, as predictions based on the constraints imposed by the prior context could allow computation to be speeded and noisy input to be disambiguated. Decades of previous research have demonstrated that the broader sentence context has an effect on how new input is processed, but less progress has been made in determining the mechanisms underlying such contextual effects. This dissertation is aimed at advancing this second goal, by using both behavioral and neurophysiological methods to motivate predictive or top-down interpretations of contextual effects and to test particular hypotheses about the nature of the predictive mechanisms in question. The first part of the dissertation focuses on the lexical-semantic predictions made possible by word and sentence contexts. MEG and fMRI experiments, in conjunction with a meta-analysis of the previous neuroimaging literature, support the claim that an ERP effect classically observed in response to contextual manipulations--the N400 effect--reflects facilitation in processing due to lexical-semantic predictions, and that these predictions are realized at least in part through top-down changes in activity in left posterior middle temporal cortex, the cortical region thought to represent lexical-semantic information in long-term memory,. The second part of the dissertation focuses on syntactic predictions. ERP and reaction time data suggest that the syntactic requirements of the prior context impacts processing of the current input very early, and that predicting the syntactic position in which the requirements can be fulfilled may allow the processor to avoid a retrieval mechanism that is prone to similarity-based interference errors. In sum, the results described here are consistent with the hypothesis that a significant amount of language comprehension takes place in advance of the external input, and suggest future avenues of investigation towards understanding the mechanisms that make this possible.Item PUBLIC RELATIONS AND SENSEMAKING DURING ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGE IN MULTINATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS IN CHINA(2009) Luo, Yi; Toth, Elizabeth L.; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study explored the role public relations plays in the sensemaking process during planned organizational change within multinational organizations in China. Three areas were examined. First, this study examined the sensemaking process during change within the participating multinationals. Second, this study explored how the multinationals used public relations to communicate about change with their employees. Third, the influence of uncertainty avoidance upon sensemaking during change within the multinationals was probed. Weick's (1995) sensemaking framework was used to explain the individual differences in the way events are understood and how those differences are translated into sensible collective behaviors. A total of 60 face-to-face interviews were conducted with managerial and non-managerial employees from nine multinational corporations. Several significant findings emerged from the study. First, change management can be viewed as management of meanings. This view helped explain why some change programs are accepted over others. The acceptance of change is both facilitated and constrained by the extent to which management is able to impose a plausible sense of change on events. Second, power plays a major role in creating an environment ready for change as well as resolving disparities of meanings. Top management sort out information and highlight it to employees so that their mental frameworks are framed to see the environment in certain ways. Third, negative expressions or behaviors by employees need not be perceived as acts of rebellion against change. Rather, these negative expressions reflect the difficulty that organizational members have while switching rapidly their sense of the organization during change. This study also found that the public relations function can facilitate sensemaking during change. Poorly planned communication programs during change can result in confusions from employees regarding change as well as distrust of management. Findings also suggested that cultivating dialogic communication with employees during change can help managers develop a shared understanding with front-line employees about change. Findings also showed that when employees could not reduce their uncertainties, they stopped processing information from the organizations. This study demonstrated the value of public relations to change management. It illustrated how public relations can help members of an organization understand the meaning of change.Item Form, meaning and context in lexical access: MEG and behavioral evidence(2009) Almeida, Diogo; Poeppel, David; Linguistics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)One of the main challenges in the study of cognition is how to connect brain activity to cognitive processes. In the domain of language, this requires coordination between two different lines of research: theoretical models of linguistic knowledge and language processing on the one side and brain sciences on the other. The work reported in this dissertation attempts to link these two lines of research by focusing on one particular aspect of linguistic processing, namely lexical access. The rationale for this focus is that access to the lexicon is a mandatory step in any theory of linguistic computation, and therefore findings about lexical access procedures have consequences for language processing models in general. Moreover, in the domain of brain electrophysiology, past research on event-related brain potentials (ERPs) - electrophysiological responses taken to reflect processing of certain specific kinds of stimuli or specific cognitive processes - has uncovered different ERPs that have been connected to linguistic stimuli and processes. One particular ERP, peaking at around 400 ms post-stimulus onset (N400) has been linked to lexico-semantic processing, but its precise functional interpretation remains controversial: The N400 has been proposed to reflect lexical access procedures as well as higher order semantic/pragmatic processing. In a series of three MEG experiments, we show that access to the lexicon from print occurs much earlier than previously thought, at around 200 ms, but more research is needed before the same conclusion can be reached about lexical access based on auditory or sign language input. The cognitive activity indexed by the N400 and its MEG analogue is argued to constitute predictive processing that integrates information from linguistic and non-linguistic sources at a later, post-lexical stage.Item A Roles Approach to Conflict Strategies: Modeling the Effects of Self- and Other-Role Enactment on Conflict Strategies Through Goals and Emotion(2008) Xie, Xiaoying; Cai, Deborah A.; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation addresses how, in a conflict situation, individuals enact different roles and how their responses to the other party's role enactment affect the strategies they choose to handle the conflict. A model is proposed to delineate the cognitive and emotional process through which the focal individual and the other party's role enactment affect the focal individual's conflict strategies. The model was first examined using the data based on participants' recall of a past conflict and their answers to questions that assessed behaviors (N = 265). Next, a laboratory experiment was used to test a model in which a conflict was induced and each participant interacted with a confederate to complete a decision making task (N = 261). The focal person's obligation to his or her general role and the other party's expectation violations were manipulated. Participants' embracement of their situated roles, perceived goal importance, emotion, and the use of four types of conflict strategies were measured. Results indicated that obligation predicted the use of relational-protective strategies through the mediating effect of relational goal importance. Embracement of the situated role was found to directly predict the use of a relational-protective confronting strategy but indirectly predict the use of a relational-disruptive confronting strategy through situated goal importance. The other's expectation violation changed the perceived goal importance and the emotion of the focal individual, which predicted the use of relational-disruptive strategies. However, the main reason for the effect of expectation violation on relational-disruptive strategies was individuals' direct reaction to the other's behavior rather than anger. Interpretations and implications of the results, the limitations of the study, theoretical and methodological contributions of the study, and future directions were discussed.Item How Many Minds? Individuating Mental Tokens in the Split-Brain Subject(2009) Schechter, Elizabeth; Carruthers, Peter; Philosophy; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The "split-brain" cases raise numerous difficult and fascinating questions: questions about our own self-knowledge, about the limits of introspection and phenomenology, about personal identity, and about the nature of consciousness and of mind. While the phenomenon is therefore of relevance to many areas of psychological inquiry, my dissertation explores the split-brain studies from the perspective of theoretical psychology. The dissertation uses the split-brain cases to develop criteria for individuating mental tokens, and then applies those criteria back to the split-brain subjects themselves, ultimately arguing that split-brain subjects have two minds and two streams of consciousness apiece. Because the dissertation defends a particular account of the constitutive conditions for mental tokens against competing functionalist accounts, it also ends up being about the proper form for functionalist theories of the mental to take. I argue throughout that psychofunctionalists who are realists about mental phenomena should accept that the constitutive conditions for mental tokens are partly neural. In particular I argue that, within an organism, multiple neural events that sustain mental phenomena causally independently of each other in some relevant sense cannot be identified with a unique mental token, regardless of how unified that organism's behavior may seem.Item The structure of memory meets memory for structure in linguistic cognition(2008-08-19) Wagers, Matthew; Phillips, Colin; Linguistics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation is concerned with the problem of how structured linguistic representations interact with the architecture of human memory. Much recent work has attempted to unify real-time linguistic memory with a general content-addressable architecture (Lewis & Vasishth, 2005; McElree, 2006). Because grammatical principles and constraints are strongly relational in nature, and linguistic representation hierarchical, this kind of architecture is not well suited to restricting the search of memory to grammatically-licensed constituents alone. This dissertation investigates under what conditions real-time language comprehension is grammatically accurate. Two kinds of grammatical dependencies were examined in reading time and speeded grammaticality experiments: subject-verb agreement licensing in agreement attraction configurations ("The runners who the driver wave to ..."; Kimball & Aissen, 1971, Bock & Miller, 1991), and active completion of wh-dependencies. We develop a simple formal model of agreement attraction in an associative memory that makes accurate predictions across different structures. We conclude that dependencies that can only be licensed exclusively retrospectively, by searching the memory to generate candidate analyses, are the most prone to grammatical infidelity. The exception may be retrospective searches with especially strong contextual restrictions, as in reflexive anaphora. However dependencies that can be licensed principally by a prospective search, like wh-dependencies or backwards anaphora, are highly grammatically accurate.Item Literary Joint Attention: Social Cognition and the Puzzles of Modernism(2008-04-07) Tobin, Vera; Turner, Mark; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The fundamental claim of this project is that the mechanics of social cognition--how we think intersubjectively and process social information--are highly relevant to the study of literature. Specifically, it presents a theory of literary discourse as the emergent product of a network of joint activities and joint attention. Research on joint attention frequently focuses on contexts in which this aspect of social cognition is not fully developed, such as in early childhood, or for autistic people. The study of literature, on the other hand, is continually engaged with circumstances in which joint attention is relevant, highly developed, and complex. Here, linguistics and cognitive science provide the basis for specific and particularizing claims about literature, while literary texts are used to support broader theoretical work about language and the mind. The focus is on modern literature in English and its reception. Many of these texts exploit systematic egocentric biases in social cognition and communication to produce effective ironies and narrative surprises. Further, both detective fiction and experimental Modernist fiction frequently dramatize problems of joint attention that can be traced to the ultimate relation between author, reader, and text. Extended analysis, with special attention to Edgar Allan Poe's "Murders in the Rue Morgue" and Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, demonstrates the importance of this joint attentional trope. In these texts, the external and perceptible serve not only as triggers for the events of a single consciousness, but as a locus for the potential for intersubjective experience, both inside and outside the text. A case study of the publication and reception history of Marianne Moore's "Poetry," finally, demonstrates the utility of a cognitively realistic approach to textual criticism. These literary activities also serve as an important proving ground for the claims of cognitive science, demonstrating complexities of and constraints on shared viewpoint phenomena.Item Pre-verbal Structure Building in Romance Languages and Basque(2006-08-04) Pablos, Leticia; Phillips, Colin; Uriagereka, Juan; Linguistics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The main goal of the work in this dissertation is to investigate pre-verbal structure building effects in languages with different configurations such as Spanish, Galician and Basque, by means of using different pre-verbal cues in order to show that syntactic structure can be both interpreted and anticipated before the verbal head. I examine the syntax of Clitic-Left Dislocations (CLLDs) and other kinds of left-dislocations in Spanish and then analyze their processing. I concentrate on the use of clitic pronouns in Spanish and Galician in CLLD constructions that require the presence of the clitic pronoun to interpret the left-dislocated phrase and where I examine if this left-dislocation is interpreted at the clitic pronoun. Experimental results from three self-paced reading experiments provide evidence that the clitic in these constructions is required and used to interpret the thematic features of the topicalized NP before the verb. Thus, I demonstrate that clitic pronouns are used as pre-verbal cues in parsing and that the active search mechanism is also triggered in long-distance dependencies involving clitic pronouns. I conclude that the active search mechanism is a more general architectural mechanism of the parser that is triggered in all kinds of long-distance dependencies, regardless of whether the search is triggered by gaps or pronouns. In Basque, verbal auxiliaries overtly encode agreement information that reflects the number of arguments of the verbal head. In negatives, auxiliaries are obligatorily fronted and split from the verbal head with which they otherwise form a cluster. Thus, verbal auxiliaries in Basque are a pre-verbal morphological cue that can assist the parser in predicting structure. Specifically, I examine how predictions for the upcoming structure of the sentence are determined by agreement information on the number of arguments specified in the auxiliary and by the mismatch of this auxiliary with the case features of the NP that follows it. I provide results from a self-paced reading experiment to argue that the parser uses the information encoded in the auxiliaries and demonstrate that the mismatch of the auxiliary with the following NP can prevent the reader from following a garden-path analysis of the sentence.