Search results for "language and linguistics"
showing 10 items of 3275 documents
Minimality as vacuous distinctness: Evidence from cross-linguistic sentence comprehension
2009
Abstract Psycholinguistic theorising has long been shaped by the assumption that the processing system endeavours to minimise structures/relations during online comprehension. Within the scope of a recent cross-linguistic, neurocognitive model of sentence comprehension (Bornkessel and Schlesewsky, 2006), we also proposed that the assumption of a very general ‘Minimality’ principle can account for a variety of psycholinguistic findings from a range of languages. In the present paper, we review empirical evidence for this notion of Minimality, before going on to discuss its limitations. On the basis of this discussion, we propose that, rather than constituting an independent processing princi…
ANALISI PROSODICO DELL’ITALIANO PARLATO PER SPAGNOLI: IL CASO DELLE INTERROGATIVE POLARI
2011
[EN] In this work we propose to present the prosodic features characteristic of the interrogatives yes/no of the spanish who learned italian as a foreign language. The two varieties considered for evaluation are the Italian variety of Venice, Madrid and the Spanish variety. Both have already been studied in the past, however, as far as I know, this is the first study that systematically puts compared in a comprehensive way. This description of the transfer is strongest fundamental in education for the teachers involved in teaching Italian as a foreign language are aware of the fact that the L1 prosodic features are very strong and difficult subject to conscious control of the speaker. In th…
The neural basis of sublexical speech and corresponding nonspeech processing: a combined EEG-MEG study.
2014
Abstract We addressed the neural organization of speech versus nonspeech sound processing by investigating preattentive cortical auditory processing of changes in five features of a consonant–vowel syllable (consonant, vowel, sound duration, frequency, and intensity) and their acoustically matched nonspeech counterparts in a simultaneous EEG–MEG recording of mismatch negativity (MMN/MMNm). Overall, speech–sound processing was enhanced compared to nonspeech sound processing. This effect was strongest for changes which affect word meaning (consonant, vowel, and vowel duration) in the left and for the vowel identity change in the right hemisphere also. Furthermore, in the right hemisphere, spe…
Beyond alphabetic orthographies: The role of form and phonology in transposition effects in Katakana
2008
In the past years, there has been growing interest in how the order of letters is attained in visual word recognition. Two critical issues are: (1) whether the front-end of the recently proposed models of letter position encoding can be generalised to non-alphabetic scripts, and (2) whether phonology plays an important role in the process of letter position encoding. In the present masked priming lexical decision experiments, we employed a syllabic/moraic script (Katakana), which allows disentangling form and phonology. In Experiment 1, we found a robust masked transposed-mora priming effect: the prime a.ri.me.ka facilitates the processing of the word a.me.ri.ka relative to a double-substit…
Jalapeno or jalapeño: Do diacritics in consonant letters modulate visual similarity effects during word recognition?
2020
AbstractPrior research has shown that word identification times to DENTIST are faster when briefly preceded by a visually similar prime (dentjst; i↔j) than when preceded by a visually dissimilar prime (dentgst). However, these effects of visual similarity do not occur in the Arabic alphabet when the critical letter differs in the diacritical signs: for the target the visually similar one-letter replaced prime (compare and is no more effective than the visually dissimilar one-letter replaced prime Here we examined whether this dissociative pattern is due to the special role of diacritics during word processing. We conducted a masked priming lexical decision experiment in Spanish using target…
Do orthotactics and phonology constrain the transposed-letter effect?
2008
Transposing two internal letters of a word produces a perceptually similar item (as in cholocate). To determine the precise nature of the encoding of letter position within a word, it is important to examine the role of orthography and phonology in the transposed-letter effect. Experiment 1 examined whether transposed-letter effects are affected by the legality of the letter transposition in a masked priming paradigm (e.g., comsos-COSMOS vs. vebral-VERBAL; ‘ms’ is an illegal bigram in Spanish). Results showed a greater transposed-letter priming effect when the transposed bigram was illegal than when it was legal. In Experiment 2, we examine the role of phonology by exploiting the context-de…
Can CANISO activate CASINO? Transposed-letter similarity effects with nonadjacent letter positions
2004
Nonwords created by transposing two adjacent letters (i.e., transposed-letter (TL) nonwords like jugde) are very effective at activating the lexical representation of their base words. This fact poses problems for most computational models of word recognition (e.g., the interactive-activation model and its extensions), which assume that exact letter positions are rapidly coded during the word recognition process. To examine the scope of TL similarity effects further, we asked whether TL similarity effects occur for nonwords created by exchanging two nonadjacent letters (e.g., canisoCASINO) in three masked form priming experiments using the lexical decision task. The two nonadjacent transpos…
The representation of segmental information: an fMRI investigation of the consonant-vowel distinction
2004
Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USAAvailable online 23 July 2004IntroductionRecent studies suggest that consonants and vowels are repre-sented separately in cognitive/neural space. Much of the evidencecomes from research on dysgraphia (for review, see Miceli & Cap-asso, submitted). In the first place, letter substitution errors preservethe consonant/vowel (CV) status of the target (e.g., cinema fi ciremaor cinoma, but not cintma). Second, there are reports of selectiveimpairment for consonants or vowels. Additional evidence comesfrom disorders of phonology, demonstrating the dissociability be-tween consonants and vowels (Caramazza, Chialant, Capasso, Mthe ISI was variable (mean 6.75 s). Th…
Does consonant–vowel skeletal structure play a role early in lexical processing? Evidence from masked priming
2017
Published online: 02 November 2017 Is the specific consonant–vowel (CV) letter combination of a word a basic source of information for lexical access in the early stages of processing? We designed two masked priming lexical decision experiments to respond to this question by directly examining the role of CV skeletal structure in written-word recognition. To that aim, each target word was preceded by a one-letter different nonword prime that kept the same CV skeletal structure or not. We also included an identity prime as a control. Results showed faster word identification times in the CV congruent condition than in the CV incongruent condition when a consonant was replaced from the target…
La lengua materna y la traducción en el aula de lenguas extranjeras: ¿dos recursos perjudiciales?
2020
Mother tongue (MT) and translation have been two undervalued resources in foreign language (FL) classrooms since the rise of monolingual methods. However, already in the 21st century, the Council of Europe promotes the adoption of plural approaches to language teaching (see Candelier et al., 2013), in which the teacher may work with the entire linguistic repertoire found within the classroom, including the MT. Therefore, our aim in this article is to review and reassess the criticisms that claim that MT and translation slow down the learning of the new language with the aim of moving away from this position and defending the importance of these two resources in today’s classrooms, in which …