Language, Linguistics

A sequence for materials in English beginning reading lessons is proposed
for native speakers of Mikasuki. This sequence utilizes to the greatest
possible extent the native linguistic background of Mikasuki-speaking
students while including most of the skills taught to native English
speakers in traditional materials. The presentation is based on two
criteria: 1) an analysis of the phonological similarities and differences
between Mikasuki and English, and 2) a linguistic approach to beginning
reading instruction, which emphasizes the gradual and systematic introduction
of regular sound-spelling patterns. Using these criteria it is
possible to order the presentation of English phonemes and graphemes in
terms of their predicted difficulty for the Mikasuki-speaking student.
These are systematically presented to improve the Mikasuki-speaker's
chances of establishing a, positive achievement base at each stage of
the learning process.

When adults attempt to learn new speech sounds, they do so in the context of the phonology of their native language. The purpose of the present work is to investigate the nature of the learning process; that is, to examine, in individuals, (1) the process of acquiring a new phonetic category, (2) the impact of learning a new phonetic category on a similar, existing category, and (3) transfer of learning to a novel phonetic context. Monolingual American English speakers were required to learn the Hindi voiced, unaspirated, dental stop consonant. Two synthetic speech continua (one voiced, the other voiceless) were created, spanning a range from Hindi dental to American English alveolar stop consonants. Subjects underwent a perceptual mapping procedure that included identification, judged goodness, and difference-rating tasks in order to establish how they perceived the stimuli initially. Then they participated in a two-alternative, forced-choice training program using only voiced, natural speech stimuli. Progress was monitored throughout training. Following training, the mapping procedure was repeated with both the voiced and voiceless continua. After at least a two-week delay with no further training, subjects participated in a follow-up test. Results indicate that the nature of change during the learning process depends on how the individual listener perceives the stimuli prior to training and on the order of presentation of stimuli.

The search for all sources of The Romaunt of the Rose, the fourteenth-century English version of Le roman de la Rose, focuses on Geoffrey Chaucer. The authorship controversy is so divisive that prominent medievalists like Huot, Hult, Robertson, and Badel write long volumes on the Roman's influence without mentioning the Romaunt. Comparing Geissman's list of rime-borrowings with both poems' concordances is the only way to end the debate, because Chaucer is the likeliest author and one must start with the most compatible French and English texts. At present, the best way to test Geoffrey Chaucer's authorship of the Middle English Romaunt is through close examination of the French rime-borrowings most orthoepically comparable in both languages that the Middle English writer occasionally chose to translate rather than borrow. This selective borrowing suggests the translator's attempt to bring each term slowly into the English mainstream, by using it at first only in its literal sense.

This thesis investigates the acqusition of certain negative and interrogative structures by adolescent Spanish-speaking ESL students in a bilingual community. These ESL learners demonstrated two unexpected negating strategies using not plus the verb and never plus the verb. They likewise used does/did as an overgeneralized question marker. Age of first exposure to English did not appear to be a significant factor in the acquisition of the English auxiliary, and the students' acquisition of negative and interrogative structures appeared to be delayed in this bilingual environment, despite ESL instruction.

This study attempts to discover and quantify the extent to
which selected Black English features are present in the English of
a group of United States Hispanic Children in south Florida. The
five features are /r,l/ simplification, consonant cluster simplification,
past tense verb marker reduction, copula deletion, and inverted
embedded questions. The best indicators of Black English influence in the young
Hispanic children's English are found to be regular past tense verb
endings, third person singular present tense forms of be, words containing
a preconsonantal l, present tense plural forms of be, and an
words containing voiced consonant clusters, respectively. A hierarchy
of factors contributing to the overall Black English influence is
constructed. Relevant literature is reviewed.

The present study offers a series of observations
based on extensive research into the phonology of the
Spanish spoken in the province of Havana, Cuba.
The phonemes for the province are determined,
and special attention is given to allophonic variants
peculiar to and/or characteristic of Havana.
The allophonic variants are described in detail on
articulatory and distributional criteria.
There is a great deal of emphasis placed on the
description of consonants. The vowels are also discussed.
There is no reference to suprasegmental phonological
data.
After the phonological studied is completed, the
differences in the speech of socioeconomic groups are
explained.

Two experiments are reported, both dealing with syllable affiliation of a consonant. The first experiment extends the work of Tuller and Kelso (1990) and was designed to capture the signatures of loss of stability in a dynamical system (enhanced fluctuations and critical slowing). An Articulograph device (Carstens Medizinelektronik GmbH.) was used to track the movements of the tongue tip, the lower lip, and the jaw in the midsagittal plane while the subjects spoke a VCC word in time to an auditory metronome at a slowly increasing rate. A clear transition occurred in the phonetics (VCC -> CVC) as judged by a phonetically trained listener, and the transition in phonetics corresponded to a change in the relative phase between the tongue tip and the lower lip and between the tongue tip and jaw. The transition was accompanied by both enhanced fluctuations and critical slowing for subjects who complied with the metronome. The second experiment examined syllable affiliation in natural English phrases with contrasting metrical structures. The phonemes /s/, /t/ and /k/, were used, and the tongue tip, tongue blade, and jaw were recorded by the Articulograph device. Consistent relative timing of the consonant movement in relation to vowel movement was observed, thus supporting the position that syllable affiliation is expressed as distinct phase values in natural speech as well as reiterated speech. In addition, the evidence supports the view that the syllable is an organizational unit of speech in English.

Contextual impenetrability is the measurable consequence of informational encapsulation, which is a key feature of input systems hypothesized to be modular. The data from the current psycholinguistic literature do not clearly converge on support for or refutation of the modularity hypothesis with regard to the existence of contextual impenetrability for lexical access and gap-filling. Most previous research has focused on the influence of global context on lexical access. The experiments in this dissertation explore a more local context imposed by the argument structure and lexical conceptual structure of a verb on its direct object. The primary goal for this dissertation was to develop a set of test sentences appropriate for study with both cross-modal lexical priming and word-by-word reading to connect key experiments in the lexical access and gap-filling literature, then to determine if the outcomes supported or failed to support the existence of contextual impenetrability for lexical access and gap-filling. The outcomes of these experiments supported the hypothesis of contextual impenetrability for these linguistic operations. A secondary goal of this dissertation was to address recent criticisms of studies that have used cross-modal lexical priming to study the contextual impenetrability of gap-filling. The cross-modal lexical priming experiments in this dissertation demonstrated that it is unreasonable to attribute priming effects at hypothesized gap locations to artifacts such as hypothesized "continuation priming." The dissertation concludes with discussions of the implications of these results for two competing theories of mental structure (the modularity hypothesis and interactionist hypotheses) and recommendations for the appropriate interpretation of various experimental tasks and additional experiments.

This work examines contextual influences on processing of linguistic stimuli. The traditional (symbolic) models of context influences are reviewed and their shortcomings pointed out. The dynamical approach, recently emerging in the area of behavioral sciences, is suggested as a viable alternative. Two studies follow. In the first one we use the case of perception of ambiguous sentences to show that perception of linguistic stimuli is the outcome of an underlying dynamical process. Thus it may be better described in dynamical terms, employing notions such as multistability and differential coherence of patterns, than in the traditional, symbolic framework. The second study is an on-line investigation of contextual adaptation. We studied general category names embedded in neutral or biasing sentential contexts. The results obtained indicate that the initial lexical access is context independent. The relative availability of particular members of category suggests that the initial state is best captured by a multistable representation, which may be essential for the flexibility of linguistic processing. Contextual adaptation seems to occur later in the unfolding sentence. A more detailed investigation into the timing and nature of contextual adaptation suggests that this adaptation takes the form of rapid reorganization of conceptual information rather than just facilitation of relevant category members. The results of the studies presented have implications both for dynamical and psycholinguistic approaches. The main implication for the dynamical approach is the importance of using on-line methods in studies of perception. Dynamical studies that use off-line methods perhaps miss an important stage of processing: a transition from locally invariant to contextually congruent organization of information. For psycholinguistics the characterization of language processing as pattern formation has at least three major advantages: (1) capturing the timing of the processes allows for including distinctions between fast/slow, linear/nonlinear processing, (2) conceptualization of the initially available lexical information as a constraint on possible meanings rather than meaning itself allows for accounting for apparently contradictory psycholinguistic data, (3) adding the dimension of stability of the patterns generated during language processing makes possible new predictions regarding speed and variability of performance on various psycholinguistic tasks.

This project comprises a series of experiments investigating the role of prosody--the timing and intonation of an utterance--in syntactic disambiguation. Acoustic analyses isolated two parameters--main-clause verb segment and pause durations, and the pitch contour over the verb and the following phrase--that reliably predicted syntactic structure in two sets of temporarily ambiguous sentences. The manipulation of one of these parameters--verb and pause duration--resulted in increased processing load over the disambiguating region of sentences temporarily ambiguous between a direct object and an embedded clause syntactic structure (e.g., "John knew the answer by heart" vs. "John knew the answer was correct"). Also, differences in the prosodic contours associated with temporarily ambiguous "filler-gap" sentences determined whether or not a gap was posited during on-line sentence processing. These findings suggest that prosodic information is used early, perhaps immediately, to make informed on-line parsing decisions and support a model of sentence processing in which both lexical and prosodic information interact on-line to generate the syntactic representation of an utterance.