Browsing by Subject "Recall"

Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
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    Linguistic, cognitive, and social constraints on lexical entrenchment.
    (2011-08) Chesley, Paula
    How do new words become established in a speech community? This dissertation documents linguistic, cognitive, and social factors that are hypothesized to affect lexical entrenchment, the extent to which a new word becomes part of the lexicon of a speech community. First, in a longitudinal corpus study, I find that linguistic properties such as the range of a word's meaning and the donor language of a borrowing affect lexical entrenchment. Contextual factors such as frequency, dispersion, and a borrowing's cultural context also play a role in lexical entrenchment. Second, a psycholinguistic study examines the extent to which speakers remember previously unseen words. Through eye-tracking, lexical decision, and free recall tasks, I determine that, again, linguistic and contextual information plays a role in the memorability of a new word. Speakers are more likely to remember words used in particular contexts, and they are also more likely to remember certain word types than others. In a third study, I find that musical preferences, knowledge of popular culture, and social ties influence comprehension of African-American English vocabulary. Together, these studies suggest that lexical entrenchment is predictable to an extent previously undocumented. Results indicate that information relating to dynamical, non-linear systems could be profitable in further studies on lexical entrenchment.
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    Trade flow of U.S. recalled consumer products: a gravity model analysis
    (2014-09) Lindgren, Brian James Swanson
    This paper examines the hypothesis that the trade flow of recalled products and harm caused by recalled products will conform to economic theory in a similar way as the flow of goods in general. A Bergstrand-based gravity model is used in the analysis. My application uses a novel data set that includes measures of U.S. consumer product recalls from 2006 and 2007. The results of the analysis show that the flow of recalled goods corresponds to theory. The type of consumer products imported into the U.S., as well as those later recalled, are found to tend to be labor intensive. Better exporting country institutions corresponded to a relatively greater amount of goods later recalled.