Browsing by Subject "Psycholinguistics"

Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Does age of language acquisition affect the relation between American sign language and mental rotation?
    (2009-10) Martin, Amber J.
    Past research has shown a relation between knowledge of American Sign Language (ASL) and mental rotation. The goal of the current study was to examine factors related to American Sign Language use that contribute to mental rotation skills. In particular, the factors examined were age of acquisition of ASL, hearing status, gender, spatial language comprehension, spatial language production and amount of use of ASL. Many studies have examined the role of language on cognition, but few have examined which aspects of language knowledge (comprehension or production) contribute to those effects. Further, this study examines the role of age of acquisition of ASL on mental rotation. Participants were adults who had learned ASL at different ages across development. Participants completed a spatial language production task, spatial language comprehension task and a computerized-nonlinguistic mental rotation task that recorded participants' accuracy and reaction times. Results showed that native male signers were significantly faster on mental rotation compared to other groups based on the slope of change across degrees of rotation. Further, male native signers were also slightly more likely to interpret spatial relations in the comprehension task by rotating the signer's description. There were no overall differences between the age of acquisition groups in mental rotation. Men and women did not differ overall in mental rotation nor did hearing and Deaf participants. These results indicate that age of acquisition of ASL after infancy does not affect mental rotation. Implications are discussed for age of acquisition effects on language-cognition relations, for the effects of practice on male native signers' speed of mental rotation, and implications for findings on the language tasks. Further research should examine the effects of age of acquisition of a first language on general speed of processing.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Vectorial representations of meaning for a computational model of language comprehension.
    (2010-06) Wu, Stephen Tze-Inn
    This thesis aims to define and extend a line of computational models for text comprehension that are humanly plausible. Since natural language is human by nature, computational models of human language will always be just that -- models. To the degree that they miss out on information that humans would tap into, they may be improved by considering the human process of language processing in a linguistic, psychological, and cognitive light. Approaches to constructing vectorial semantic spaces often begin with the distributional hypothesis, i.e., that words can be judged `by the company they keep.' Typically, words that occur in the same documents are similar, and will have similar vectorial meaning representations. However, this does not in itself provide a way for two distinct meanings to be composed, and it ignores syntactic context. Both of these problems are solved in Structured Vectorial Semantics (SVS), a new framework that fully unifies vectorial semantics with syntactic parsing. Most approaches that try to combine syntactic and semantic information will either lack a cohesive semantic component or a full-fledged parser, but SVS integrates both. Thus, in the SVS framework, interpretation is interactive, considering both syntax and semantics simultaneously. Cognitively-plausible language models would also be incremental, support linear-time inference, and operate in only a bounded store of short-term memory. Each of these characteristics is supported by right-corner Hierarchical Hidden Markov Model (HHMM) parsing; therefore, SVS will be transformed into right-corner form and mapped to an HHMM parser. The resulting representation will then encode a psycholinguistically plausible incremental SVS language model.