Blocking as a Function of the Nature of Linguistic Representations: Where Psycholinguistics and Morphology Meet

2019 ◽  
pp. 145-166 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arjen P. Versloot ◽  
Eric Hoekstra
Keyword(s):  
Linguistic Representations

Cognitive dominants of the conceptual sphere in the novel “of human bondage” by W. S. Maugham

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 48-61
Author(s):  
Olga B. Ponomareva ◽  
Valeriya I. Orlova
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Linguistics ◽  
Meaning Of Life ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Thought Processes ◽  
New Paradigm ◽  
Comprehensive Description ◽  
Semantic Fields ◽  
Linguistic Representations ◽  
Basic Concepts ◽  
Linguistic Methods

This article presents a comprehensive analysis of the basic concepts that make up the conceptual sphere of the novel “Of Human Bondage” by W. S. Maugham. These concepts act as cognitive dominants of the linguistic consciousness of the protagonist’s linguistic personality in the work under study. The novelty of this research lies in the fact that it is performed within the framework of a new paradigm of linguistics — the cognitive linguistics, which involves the study of mental and linguistic representations of thought processes that occur during the perception of information. Moreover, the novel “Of Human Bondage” by W. S. Maugham has not attracted the attention of linguists-cognitologists previously, which adds to the novelty of this article. In addition, the present study provides a comprehensive description of the basic concepts making up the conceptual sphere of the novel. The linguistic methods of representing various concepts in the analyzed work are determined by the national, personal, cultural, and psychological aspects of Maugham’s thinking. The authors employ a communicative-cognitive methodological analysis proposed by N. S. Bolotnova involving the modeling of textual and intertextual semantic fields of artistic concepts and the analysis of the conceptual sphere of a literary text. The universal concepts RELIGION, LOVE, PASSION, THE MEANING OF LIFE, which constitute the conceptual sphere of the novel by W. S. Maugham “Of Human Bondage”, are analyzed. The main result of the study is that THE MEANING OF LIFE concept is universal, not individual, and it includes other universal concepts, such as RELIGION, LOVE, PASSION, THE MEANING OF LIFE, conceptual metaphors and metonyms, symbols, and other words-associates, which constitute the broad figurative and evaluative periphery of the conceptual sphere of the novel.

Why is this happened? Passive morphology and unaccusativity

1997 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-9 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patricia Balcom
Keyword(s):  
Argument Structure ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Control Group ◽  
Past Participle ◽  
Production Task ◽  
Syntactic Rule ◽  
English Writing ◽  
The Past ◽  
Linguistic Representations ◽  
Unaccusative Verbs

Zobl discussed inappropriate passive morphology (‘be’ and the past participle) in the English writing of L2 learners, linking its occurrence to the class of unaccusative verbs and proposing that learners subsume unaccusatives under the syntactic rule for passive formation. The research reported here supports and amplifies Zobl' proposal, based on a grammaticality judgement task and a controlled production task containing verbs from a variety of subclasses of unaccusatives. The tasks were administered to Chinese L1 learners of English and a control group of English native speakers. Results show that subjects both used and judged as grammatical inappropriate passive morphology with all verbs falling under the rubric of unaccusativity. The article concludes with linguistic representations which maintain Zobl’s insights but are consistent with current theories of argument structure.

Effect of Bilingualism on Multitasking: A Pilot Study

2015 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 94-101 ◽  
Author(s):  
Li Hsieh
Keyword(s):  
Executive Control ◽  
Positive Impact ◽  
Reaction Times ◽  
Language Experience ◽  
Bilingual Advantage ◽  
Bilingual Speakers ◽  
Proficiency Level ◽  
Linguistic Representations ◽  
A Cell ◽  
The Difference

Bilingual speakers rely on attentional and executive control to continuously inhibit or activate linguistic representations of competing languages, which leads to an increased efficiency known as “bilingual advantage”. Both monolingual and bilingual speakers were asked to perform multiple tasks of talking on a cell phone while simultaneously attending to simulated driving events. This study examined the effect of bilingualism on participants' performance during a dual-task experiment based on 20 monolingual and 13 bilingual healthy adults. The within-subject and between-subject comparisons were conducted on reaction times of a visual event detection task for (a) only driving and (b) driving while simultaneously engaged in a phone conversation. Results of this study showed that bilingual speakers performed significantly faster than monolingual speakers during the multitasking condition, but not during the driving only condition. Further, bilingual speakers consistently showed a bilingual advantage in reaction times during the multitasking condition, despite varying degrees on a bilingual dominance scale. Overall, experiences in more than one language yield bilingual advantage in better performance than monolingual speakers during a multitasking condition, but not during a single task condition. Regardless of the difference in bilingual proficiency level, such language experience reveals a positive impact on bilingual speakers for multitasking.

The influence of discourse context on children's provision of auxiliary BE

2008 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 129-158 ◽  
Author(s):  
ANNA L. THEAKSTON ◽  
ELENA V. M. LIEVEN
Keyword(s):  
Language Acquisition ◽  
Word Order ◽  
Current Paper ◽  
Discourse Context ◽  
Linguistic Representations ◽  
Prior Use ◽  
Single Child ◽  
Pass Through ◽  
Children's Speech

ABSTRACTChildren pass through a stage in development when they produce utterances that contain auxiliary BE (he's playing) and utterances where auxiliary BE is omitted (he playing). One explanation that has been put forward to explain this phenomenon is the presence of questions in the input that model S-V word order (Theakston, Lieven & Tomasello, 2003). The current paper reports two studies that investigate the role of the input in children's use and non-use of auxiliary BE in declaratives. In Study 1, 96 children aged from 2 ; 5 to 2 ; 10 were exposed to known and novel verbs modelled in questions only or declaratives only. In Study 2, naturalistic data from a dense database from a single child between the ages of 2 ; 8 to 3 ; 2 were examined to investigate the influence of (1) declaratives and questions in the input in prior discourse, and (2) the child's immediately previous use of declaratives where auxiliary BE was produced or omitted, on his subsequent use or non-use of auxiliary BE. The results show that in both the experimental and naturalistic contexts, the presence of questions in the input resulted in lower levels of auxiliary provision in the children's speech than in utterances following declaratives in the input. In addition, the children's prior use or non-use of auxiliary BE influenced subsequent use. The findings are discussed in the context of usage-based theories of language acquisition and the role of the language children hear in their developing linguistic representations.

Intersoggettività e origine del pensiero nell'incontro tra psicoanalisi e neuroscienze

SETTING ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 119-122
Author(s):  
Ciro Elia
Keyword(s):  
Development Process ◽  
Reflective Thinking ◽  
Therapeutic Process ◽  
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy ◽  
General Level ◽  
Positive Relationships ◽  
Linguistic Representations ◽  
Linguistic Structures

The reflective thinking does not originate simply from the repression of drive and motor pulls in order to achieve reality, so that, following Freud's conceptualizations; it would come to be an acting without action. The thinking development process is much more complex. The psychoanalytic psychotherapy of the most serious schizophrenic diseases, characterized by fragmentation and undifferentiation features, without any forms of noetic and self-noetic thought (see Tulving, 2002), as well as Solms' and Panksepp's Tertiary Process, give us important contributions to understand the beginning of thought not only at the therapeutic but also at the ontogenetic general level. The therapeutic process does not emphasize Gaetano Benedetti's symbolic symmetry, but the embodied one. That expresses itself by the metaphorizing iconicity of the therapist's wish, arises or builds the patient's imagine-cinetic-spatial schematas (Lakoff and Johnson, Mandler, 2004), that show a "metaphorical" correspondence with conceptual and later linguistic structures. Thinking itself is relational as constituted by post-oedipal linguistic representations organized in a triadic form in Matte Blanco's meaning. They are also, always and necessarily, invested by Id affects, shaped by early positive relationships. The paper contributes to the understanding of the reflective thinking development, generally speaking (not only in these patients), by an approach very different from the Freudian one.

scholarly journals Modularity and derivation in Functional Discourse Grammar

2017 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
Daniel GARCÍA VELASCO
Keyword(s):  
Central Issue ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Basic Principles ◽  
External Constraints ◽  
Language Structure ◽  
Maximal Depth ◽  
Linguistic Representations ◽  
Discourse Grammar ◽  
Theory Of Language ◽  
Different Levels

ABSTRACT Functional Discourse Grammar (FDG) is a typologically-based theory of language structure which is organized in levels, layers and components. In this paper, I will claim that FDG is modular in Sadock’s sense, as it presents four independent levels of representation with their own linguistic primitives each. For modular grammars, the relation between the different levels (more technically, the nature of the interfaces) is a central issue. It will be shown that FDG is a top-down grammar which follows two basic principles in its dynamic implementation: Depth-first and Maximal depth. Together with external constraints, these principles conspire to create linguistic representations which are psychologically adequate and which allow levels to be circumvented if necessary, thus simplifying representations and creating mismatches among them.

scholarly journals Neural markers of speech comprehension: measuring EEG tracking of linguistic speech representations, controlling the speech acoustics

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marlies Gillis ◽  
Jonas Vanthornhout ◽  
Jonathan Z Simon ◽  
Tom Francart ◽  
Christian Brodbeck
Keyword(s):  
Word Frequency ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Speech Intelligibility ◽  
Acoustic Properties ◽  
Speech Comprehension ◽  
Speech Acoustics ◽  
Brain Responses ◽  
Cortical Responses ◽  
Linguistic Representations ◽  
Acoustic Processing

When listening to speech, brain responses time-lock to acoustic events in the stimulus. Recent studies have also reported that cortical responses track linguistic representations of speech. However, tracking of these representations is often described without controlling for acoustic properties. Therefore, the response to these linguistic representations might reflect unaccounted acoustic processing rather than language processing. Here we tested several recently proposed linguistic representations, using audiobook speech, while controlling for acoustic and other linguistic representations. Indeed, some of these linguistic representations were not significantly tracked after controlling for acoustic properties. However, phoneme surprisal, cohort entropy, word surprisal and word frequency were significantly tracked over and beyond acoustic properties. Additionally, these linguistic representations are tracked similarly across different stories, spoken by different readers. Together, this suggests that these representations characterize processing of the linguistic content of speech and might allow a behaviour-free evaluation of the speech intelligibility.

scholarly journals PrEP in the press

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 202-225 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lucy Jones ◽  
Luke Collins
Keyword(s):  
Hiv Prevention ◽  
Critical Discourse Analysis ◽  
Gay Men ◽  
Public Awareness ◽  
Critical Discourse ◽  
Linguistic Representations ◽  
The Press ◽  
Trial Basis ◽  
Sex With Men ◽  
Political Spectrum

Abstract This research reports on newspaper representations of PrEP, a HIV-prevention drug recently made available on a trial basis to at-risk individuals in England. Using corpus-assisted queer critical discourse analysis, we investigate the linguistic representations of the users of PrEP within three leading British newspapers from across the political spectrum between 2014–18. We find that users of PrEP are most frequently positioned as ‘men who have sex with men’ or ‘gay men’, a representation that we argue limits public awareness of HIV itself, and of available HIV prevention. Furthermore, while the most left-leaning newspaper in our corpus focuses on the human benefit of PrEP, the most right-leaning newspaper takes a moralistic stance which frames gay men as risk-taking and therefore less deserving of healthcare funding than other groups. We therefore argue that certain representations of PrEP’s beneficiaries are implicitly homophobic, and that most representations are unhelpfully restrictive.

scholarly journals Sentence first, arguments after: Mechanisms of morphosyntax acquisition

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Heidi Getz
Keyword(s):  
Distributional Analysis ◽  
Grammatical Structure ◽  
Natural Languages ◽  
Syntactic Theory ◽  
Closed Class ◽  
Linguistic Representations ◽  
Small Set ◽  
Adults And Children ◽  
The One ◽  
Open Class

Natural languages contain complex grammatical patterns. For example, in German, finite verbs occur second in main clauses while non-finite verbs occur last, as in 'dein Bruder möchte in den Zoo gehen' (“Your brother wants to go to the zoo”). Children easily acquire this type of morphosyntactic contingency (Poeppel & Wexler, 1993; Deprez & Pierce, 1994). There is extensive debate in the literature over the nature of children’s linguistic representations, but there are considerably fewer mechanistic ideas about how knowledge is actually acquired. Regarding German, one approach might be to learn the position of prosodically prominent open-class words (“verbs go 2nd or last”) and then fill in the morphological details. Alternatively, one could work in the opposite direction, learning the position of closed-class morphemes (“-te goes 2nd and -en goes last”) and fitting open-class items into the resulting structure. This second approach is counter-intuitive, but I will argue that it is the one learners take.Previous research suggests that learners focus distributional analysis on closed-class items because of their distinctive perceptual properties (Braine, 1963; Morgan, Meier, & Newport, 1987; Shi, Werker & Morgan, 1999; Valian & Coulson, 1988). The Anchoring Hypothesis (Valian & Coulson, 1988) posits that, because these items tend to occur at grammatically important points in the sentence (e.g., phrase edges), focusing on them helps learners acquire grammatical structure. Here I ask how learners use closed-class items to acquire complex morphosyntactic patterns such as the verb form/position contingency in German. Experiments 1-4 refute concerns that morphosyntactic contingencies like those in German are too complex to learn distributionally. Experiments 5-8 explore the mechanisms underlying learning, showing that adults and children analyze closed-class items as predictive of the presence and position of open-class items, but not the reverse. In these experiments, subtle mathematical distinctions in learners’ input had significant effects on learning, illuminating the biased computations underlying anchored distributional analysis. Taken together, results suggest that learners organize knowledge of language patterns relative to a small set of closed-class items—just as patterns are represented in modern syntactic theory (Rizzi & Cinque, 2016).

scholarly journals Task-evoked pupil response for accurately-recognized accented speech

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Drew Jordan McLaughlin ◽  
Kristin J. Van Engen
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
Cognitive Load ◽  
Mandarin Chinese ◽  
Recognition Accuracy ◽  
Speech Understanding ◽  
Pupil Response ◽  
Accented Speech ◽  
Linguistic Representations ◽  
Native Speech ◽  
Accented English

Unfamiliar second-language (L2) accents present a common challenge to speech understanding. However, the extent to which accurately-recognized unfamiliar L2-accented speech imposes a greater cognitive load than native speech remains unclear. The current study used pupillometry to assess cognitive load for native English listeners during the perception of intelligible Mandarin Chinese-accented English and American-accented English. Results showed greater pupil response (indicating greater cognitive load) for the unfamiliar L2-accented speech. These findings indicate that the mismatches between unfamiliar L2-accented speech and native listeners’ linguistic representations impose greater cognitive load even when recognition accuracy is at ceiling.

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