Browsing by Author "Sedivy, Julie"
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- ItemOpen AccessChildren’s Attention to Emotional Prosody: Pragmatic Adjustment in Response to Speaker Conventionality(2018-11-19) Thacker, Justine Marie; Graham, Susan A.; Chambers, Craig G.; Pexman, Penny M.; Sedivy, JulieIn this dissertation, I examined whether children will pragmatically adjust their expectations about a speaker’s referential intent, depending on whether the speaker provided conventional or unconventional descriptions. In Chapter 2, 4- and 5-year-old children were introduced to one of two possible speakers: (1) conventional speaker who demonstrated congruent use of linguistic and affective cues; or (2) unconventional speaker who demonstrated incongruent use of these cues and who was described as saying “things in a strange way”. Test trials consisted of displays containing pairs of objects that belonged to the same category, but that differed in terms of their likelihood of association with negative or positive emotional prosody (broken doll/intact doll), accompanied by referentially ambiguous instructions (“Look at the doll”) spoken in either a positive- or negative-sounding voice. Results indicated that children in the conventional speaker condition directed a greater proportion of looks to the negative object during negative emotional prosody trials, compared to positive emotional prosody trials. In contrast, there was no effect of emotional prosody in the unconventional speaker condition. In Chapter 3, I further examined the extent to which children will suspend their use of emotional prosody for an unconventional speaker. In Experiment 2, the experimenter's description of the speaker's trait was replaced with a neutral statement, but examples of the speaker’s incongruent use of linguistic and affective cues were retained. Again, children suspended their use of emotional prosody as a cue to referential intent. In Experiments 3 and 4, children were introduced to two different versions of an unconventional speaker that varied in terms of how related their unconventionality was to their use of emotional prosody. Results demonstrated that speaker unconventionality that was closely related to emotional expression had an effect on children’s use of emotional prosody. However, when speaker unconventionality was unrelated to emotional expression, 5-year-old, but not 4-year-old, children returned to their original pattern of looking whereby the used emotional prosody to resolve referential intent. This selectivity in response to different speakers provides compelling evidence that social-pragmatic reasoning underlies preschoolers’ interpretation of emotional prosody. Chapter 4 summarizes and explores the aforementioned findings in greater detail.
- ItemOpen AccessCross-linguistic Differences and The Role Of Working Memory in Processing Double-embedded Relative Clausesed relative clauses(2016) Lisanik, Martin; O'Brien, Mary; Sedivy, Julie; Pexman, PennyEnglish double-embedded clauses, from which the middle verb is omitted, are often perceived as grammatically correct and processed faster than clauses with all mandatory verbs. This phenomenon is called Grammaticality Illusion (GI). It has been hypothesised that this effect occurs as a result of a failing working memory. This is because such sentences require the reader to keep several incomplete dependencies in working memory (WM). GI has been consistently found in languages like French and English, but not in German. This led to the assumptions that if GI is caused by failing WM: German native speakers and potentially proficient speakers of German might therefore have a more robust WM. This thesis examines the role of WM in the processing of the double-embedded clauses. It also focuses on the differences in the processing of these clauses among participants in three groups: English-German bilinguals, English monolinguals and German native speakers.
- ItemOpen AccessPreschoolers’ Emotional and Cognitive Perspective-taking During Online Language Processing(2016) Khu, Melanie; Graham, Susan; Sedivy, Julie; Hala, Suzanne; Wilcox, Gabrielle; Matthews, DanielleSuccessful communication often depends on the ability to take the perspective of one’s conversational partner. In this dissertation, I investigated 4-year-olds’ perspective-taking during online spoken language processing. Using two novel communication tasks, I addressed the question of when, during real-time processing, preschoolers integrate perspective information with linguistic input – a question central to an on-going theoretical debate within the psycholinguistic literature. Further, I examined how individual differences in communicative perspective-taking relate to individual differences in mental and emotional representational skills, executive function, and receptive vocabulary. In Chapter 2, I examined preschoolers’ use of two communicative partners’ perspectives to guide their online language processing. Children participated in a visual perspective-taking task during which two speakers alternated providing the child referential instructions. Eye-tracking results demonstrated that preschoolers reliably took the active speaker’s perspective into account, using this information within the earliest moments of language processing. Preschoolers’ explicit referential decisions (i.e., pointing) also demonstrated consistent sensitivity to the active speaker’s perspective. Children with better mental representational skills demonstrated less egocentricity in their online processing. In Chapter 3, I investigated preschoolers’ communicative perspective-taking using an affectively-evocative, emotional perspective-taking task. Eye gaze measures indicated that children used the speaker’s vocal affect to make inferences about her emotional state and correspondingly, her communicative intent. However, children’s online sensitivity to the speaker’s emotional perspective was only weakly reflected in their overt responses, suggesting their ability to integrate emotional perspective cues with linguistic information is at an emergent state. Children’s emotional perspective-taking during online processing was related to their emotional, but not mental, representational skills, as well as the size of their receptive vocabulary. Together, these findings demonstrate that 4-year-olds use information about speakers’ perspectives to guide their real-time language comprehension in a range of communicative contexts. The question of when preschoolers integrated perspective information with linguistic input depended on the nature of the perspective representations involved. Examination of individual differences revealed an important role for children’s representational skills in supporting perspective-taking during communication. This dissertation highlights the need for theoretical accounts of language processing to incorporate findings from a wider range of communicative contexts.
- ItemOpen AccessThat's not what you said earlier: preschoolers expect partners to be referentially consistent(Cambridge University Press, 2013-02) Graham, Susan; Sedivy, Julie; Khu, MelanieIn a conversation, adults expect speakers to be consistent in their use of a particular expression. We examine whether four-year-olds expect speakers to use consistent referential descriptions and whether these expectations are partner-specific. Using an eye-tracking paradigm, we presented four-year-olds with arrays of objects on a screen. During training, Experimenter 1 (E1) used a target expression to identify one object (i.e. "the spotted dog" to identify a dog that is both spotted and fluffy). Following training, either E1 or a new conversational partner (E2) presented children with test trials. Here, the target objects were referred to using either the original expression (e.g. "the spotted dog") or a new expression (e.g. "the fluffy dog"). Eye-movements indicated that preschoolers were quicker to identify the target referent when the original expression was used by the same speaker. This suggests that four-year-olds, like adults, expect communicative partners to adhere to referential pacts.
- ItemOpen AccessThe Nominal Inflectional Suffix -e(t) in Damascus Arabic: A Network Morphology Account(2017) Allihibi, Sameera Atiya; Flynn, Darin; Pounder, Amanda; Sedivy, JulieThis thesis is concerned with the nominal (noun and adjective) inflections in Damascus Arabic (DA). In particular, the focus is on the so-called feminine suffix -at ~ -et. Several phenomena associated with this suffix are examined: a) allomorphy, b) syncretism, and c) optional agreement. The thesis offers a default-based account within the framework of Network Morphology. It demonstrates that different notions of default (e.g. default inheritance, overriding default, global inheritance, and exceptional case) provide a unified and elegant account for the multiple phenomena under study. The vocalic alternation between -[a]t and -[e]t represents a case of the dissociation between morphology and phonology, where a single morpheme corresponds to two phonological realizations. I propose a declarative morphological account as opposed to the traditional procedural phonological one that relies on the notion of the underlying form. I argue that -[e]t is the default allomorph, contrary to the widely assumed belief that -[a]t is the underlying vowel which raises to -[e]t. The notion of “default inheritance” allows us to treat the shared inflection among nominals (noun and adjective) as a main generalization that is positioned at the top of the inheritance hierarchy. This generalization is inherited by all classes of nominal, thus, -[e]t is represented as the “elsewhere” allomorph. The limited distribution of -[a]t to nominals with stem-final pharyngeals is treated as an “overriding default” specific to this class of nominals that overrides the main default. The syncretism between plural and -et agreement with the plural of the human class manifests a dissociation between morphology and syntax, whereby morphology fails to make a distinction that is required by syntax. For this language-specific syncretism, rules of referral are necessary to predict that the plural and feminine singular share a cell in the adjectival inflectional paradigm. With the benefit of the notion of “global inheritance”, this sharing of the cell is generalizable to all agreeing categories (i.e. verbs, demonstratives, pronouns, and possessive markers) that have the same pattern of syncretism. The global inheritance principle is superior in its simplicity and predictability power, by which a simple rule of referral makes it possible for a single cell (i.e. plural) in one paradigm (i.e. adjectives) to predict other cells (i.e. plurals) in multiple paradigms (i.e. verbs, demonstratives, etc.). Finally, the alternation between the plural and -et agreement with human nouns is handled by the notion of the “exceptional case default”. The regular behaviour of plurals in human nouns is to have strict plural agreement. However, for non-concatenative plural nouns, alternations occur. The irregularity of the non-concatenative plural is still manageable and predictable if we assume that the -et agreement is an “exceptional” default that applies only when plural nouns have non-concatenative morphology. Then, the alternation can be explained based on whether speakers resort to the “normal” default (i.e. plural agreement) which is positioned at the top of the hierarchy or to the “exceptional” default (i.e. -et agreement) as an overriding default positioned lower at the level of the non-concatenative subclass of human nouns.