For decades an objective within Linguistics as a study field has been to assess the existence or strength of a link between language and thought. The present study focuses on crosslinguistic...Show moreFor decades an objective within Linguistics as a study field has been to assess the existence or strength of a link between language and thought. The present study focuses on crosslinguistic differences of intrusion of the spatial domain within the temporal domain by comparing Native English speakers to Mandarin-English bilinguals. With deviation in linguistic construction of space = time metaphors between the two languages, the main question subject to this study is whether linguistic differences bear influence on the conceptualization of the abstract domain of time. Furthermore, an insight is given in the manner abstract concepts are concreted by the human mind with an emphasis on bilingual processing. As the processing within the bilingual mind has been subjected to much debate over recent year, an attempt to reconcile various views has been laid bare. The present study exists of two replicated tasks which yielded different conclusions in their original state. While the results of the present study remain inconclusive, one task hints at a global difference between Mandarin-English bilinguals' conception of time and English native speakers' conception of time. The other task has not revealed any implication on linguistic processing due to crosslinguistic differences.Show less
For decades an objective for linguistics as a study field has been to assess the existence and/or strength of a link between language and thought. The present study focuses on crosslinguistic...Show moreFor decades an objective for linguistics as a study field has been to assess the existence and/or strength of a link between language and thought. The present study focuses on crosslinguistic differences in observed intrusion of the spatial domain on the temporal domain by comparing English monolinguals toMan darin-English bilinguals. The main question in this study is whether the observed linguistic differences in the temporal domain between Mandarin and English bear influence on the conceptualization of this domain by the human mind. The present study comprises of two replicated experiments. When the two presently replicated experiments were conducted originally they drew deviating conclusions from one another regarding a similar question. While the results of the present study remain inconclusive, results hint at a global difference between Mandarin-English bilinguals’ conception of time and English native speakers’ conception of time based on language. This hint implicates that there might be an underlying effect of language on the mental representation of time. The second experiment has not revealed any implication on linguistic processing due to observed crosslinguistic differences.Show less
This study examines the predictive properties of Dutch prepositions. In a self-paced reading experiment, native speakers of Dutch were presented with verb-final sentences containing five different...Show moreThis study examines the predictive properties of Dutch prepositions. In a self-paced reading experiment, native speakers of Dutch were presented with verb-final sentences containing five different spatial prepositions, combined with both predictable and unpredictable argument nouns and verbs. Results revealed that the unpredictable nouns and verbs caused processing difficulty, indicating that the parser can use information activated at the preposition to form expectations about upcoming material. These results provide support for the theory that sentence processing is incremental and occurs on the basis of constraint accrual.Show less
In linguistics, coming up with a certain continuation in a sentence before even reading or hearing that sentence is called prediction. People pre-activate upcoming possibilities when reading...Show moreIn linguistics, coming up with a certain continuation in a sentence before even reading or hearing that sentence is called prediction. People pre-activate upcoming possibilities when reading earlier words in a sentence. In this study a sentence completion study, a likelihood scale questionnaire and a reading time experiment are conducted to test this effect called prediction in a semantically constrained context. That participants can be lead to a certain semantic expected word is found in the sentence completion task. The likelihood scale questionnaire gave us insight in how likely the most frequent and less frequent given instrumental noun continuations were and provided us with the sentences for the reading time experiment. In this reading time experiment, there is found a significant effect, given a same specific constrained semantic contexts, that expected logical semantic instrumental nouns are read faster than unexpected illogical instrumental nouns in Dutch.Show less
The paper seeks to replicate the effects of the three-point distributional training paradigm found by Chládková et al. (2020, under review), while using an acoustic dimension which allows for the...Show moreThe paper seeks to replicate the effects of the three-point distributional training paradigm found by Chládková et al. (2020, under review), while using an acoustic dimension which allows for the direct comparison of two second-language perceptual learning scenarios: category creation and boundary shift (i.e. NEW and SIMILAR sounds under the L2LP framework (Escudero, 2009)). To this end, an EEG-experiment was run using a pre-test – training – post-test design. The pre- and post-tests involved a passive-oddball paradigm, whereby participants (Dutch native speakers without formal English phonetic training) heard a sequence of repetitive synthetic vowel sounds, where the standard was /ɛ/ (which exists in both Dutch and English), and the deviants were /ɪ/ (which also exists in both Dutch and English) and /æ/ (which only exists English). Between the pre- and post-tests, participants underwent distributional training of either the /æ/-/ɛ/ or the /ɪ/-/ɛ/ contrast, following a three-point paradigm, as set out by Chládková et al. (2020, under review). The /æ/-/ɛ/ group therefore constitutes a case of category creation, whereas the /ɪ/-/ɛ/ group constitutes only a case of boundary shift. The electrophysiological data was intended to measure the mismatch negativity (MMN) response – an ERP component which indicates perceived deviation from a repetitive sequence of sounds (Näätänen & Kreegipuu, 2012). It is expected that in the pre-test, the participants will distinguish the /ɪ/-/ɛ/ contrast, but not the /æ/-/ɛ/ contrast, since the latter does not exist in their L1 (Dutch). In the post-test, it is expected that the /ɪ/-/ɛ/ boundary will have shifted as a result of training, although it is to be discovered whether the /æ/ category will be created. It was found that the /ɪ/-/ɛ/ trained group were able to shift their /ɪ/-/ɛ/ boundary as a result of the training. For the category creation scenario, however, no significant effects of training were found. Given the very small sample size in this experiment, however (n per training group = 5), these results must be viewed with caution.Show less
This study aimed to investigate how Dutch natives with a different exposure to English as a second language process Dutch sentences with a preposition stranding structure. It reacts on an earlier...Show moreThis study aimed to investigate how Dutch natives with a different exposure to English as a second language process Dutch sentences with a preposition stranding structure. It reacts on an earlier study by Koopman (2010), who reported that P-stranding is only grammatical with r-pronouns and not with non-r DPs. Preposition stranding with non-r DPs is grammatical in English, and English is becoming more and more present as a second language in the Netherlands. Therefore, the present study tested whether preposition stranding in Dutch could be undergoing a shift towards the English structure, and whether we could see this reflected in the processing strategies of on the one hand, a group of students with a high exposure to English and on the other hand, a group of student with a low exposure to English. Two groups of students were tested in a word-by-word self-paced reading task, and the results showed a clear difference between the two groups. Even if at first the obtained results seemed contradictory with the hypothesized results, as the high proficient group showed a bigger slowdown after the stranded P than the low proficient group, after critical reflection on the stimuli and the data, evidence was found that the high proficient group uses an English processing mode while reading Dutch sentences with a seemingly English structure.Show less
Research master thesis | Linguistics (research) (MA)
open access
While monitoring eye movements during visual world paradigm studies, earlier research showed that the appropriate second noun phrase (NP2) is anticipated as upcoming referent before this NP is...Show moreWhile monitoring eye movements during visual world paradigm studies, earlier research showed that the appropriate second noun phrase (NP2) is anticipated as upcoming referent before this NP is auditorily encountered, when enough information is available to guide the anticipation process. Anticipatory effects are determined in both SVO-languages (e.g. English) and verb-final languages using case-markers (e.g. Japanese). Dutch lacks case- marking but allows verb-second SVO and verb-final SOV sentences. The aim of this study was to determine whether participants anticipate an upcoming NP2 object in Dutch SVO and SOV sentences. As SOV sentences are embedded clauses that cannot occur on their own, they were preceded by a main clause. Since we wanted to compare sentence constructions that were contentwise as equal as possible we did the same for the main SVO clauses. While linguistically encountering the two preceding main clauses, the different structure and prosody indicated already the word order of the upcoming critical sentence, i.e. SVO or SOV. For the SVO sentences, the preceding main clause, the subject NP1 and the verb provided information for object NP2 anticipation. In the SOV case, the information provided by the subject NP1 becomes extra important, as it was the only linguistic element that could be used as a guider of what element was coming next. To investigate whether the NP1 can lead NP2 anticipation, concrete and abstract NP1s preceded the NP2, such as the abstract NP1 ‘girl’ and the concrete NP1 ‘pilot’. It was hypothesized that if the NP2 was concrete, the lexical semantics of the NP provided enough information to come up with an upcoming NP2 object in SOV sentences, without the need of a verb. Overall, results showed that participants primarily preferred to look at the NP1 image during the spoken sentence. After sentence offset, a wrap-up effect of fixations to the NP2 was determined in all conditions, possibly indicating a late interpretation and integration of the NP2 with the previous constituents. Across all conditions, the NP2 image received proportionally as much fixations as the distractor images until sentence offset. This demonstrates that in both SVO and SOV sentences, upcoming NP2s were not anticipated. A possible explanation is that Dutch listeners are less pro-active anticipators because of the flexibility of Dutch word orders. The anticipatory process becomes too costly as the risk of anticipating upcoming constituents incorrectly is too high.Show less
Research master thesis | Linguistics (research) (MA)
open access
Sentence final particles (SFPs) play an important role in the every-day spoken communication of various languages. For example, the addition of a Dutch intentional particle hè or hoor to a bare...Show moreSentence final particles (SFPs) play an important role in the every-day spoken communication of various languages. For example, the addition of a Dutch intentional particle hè or hoor to a bare declarative utterance such as het is lekker weer ‘the weather is great’ can make the difference between the sentence being interpreted as an agreement-seeking question, or a correction. Still, we know very little about the psycho- and neurolinguistic properties of the processing and production of final particles. The purpose of this thesis is to generate more research on the psycholinguistics side and to deepen the theoretical knowledge we have by gathering experimental data. There are theoretical reasons to assume that intentional SFPs play an important role from the beginning of sentence formulation. The SFP-head selects for the entire proposition as its complement, so it is possible that speakers plan the particle ahead before they start producing the rest of the sentence. This hypothesis also makes sense from a psycholinguistic perspective, as it is presumed that the intention of the speaker is already determined before he/she starts uttering a sentence. In this thesis, I focus on sentences in isolation, and investigate the production, planning and perception of Dutch pragmatic particles (i.e. SFPs) that convey the speaker’s intention. The question I pursued to answer is whether Dutch sentence final particles are planned in advance, or whether they are inserted at the final moment. To investigate the potential planning of intentional SFPs I conducted three experiments. In a production experiment (Experiment 1) I investigated whether the speaker already starts encoding the intention of the message with prosodic cues preceding the intentional particle. Such cues would indicate that the speaker is already building up the illocutionary force of the sentence before the particle. Results indicate that there are such cues, and that even though they are sometimes quite small, they are used quite consistently across participants. In Experiment 2, the gating-technique is used in a perception experiment to investigate whether these prosodic cues preceding the particle could possibly help the listener anticipate for the intention or attitude expressed by an utterance. The results of this experiment indicate that participants were not that good at anticipating the end of sentences containing the final particles hè and hoor in the given task. Experiment 3 directly addresses the question whether the speaker plans a final particle ahead or whether they integrate the particle at a later stage of production. This question is about how incremental and how far ahead a sentence is planned in production. In this experiment, I examined the production process of the intentional SFPs hè and hoor in Dutch with a variant on the picture-word-interference task to investigate whether the particles are planned in advance, or not. I created an experiment that manipulates the prime preceding colored pictures, which are associated in a training task with a particular final element. The target condition of the experiment contains sentences with the final elements hè and hoor, which are intentional final particles. The effect of the distractor prime on the target condition was compared to a control condition. A congruent prime was assumed to facilitate sentence production at speech onset, only if the speaker is already planning the particle congruent with the prime. In the control conditions, in which it is assumed that speakers are not yet planning ahead for the final element of the sentence at speech onset, facilitation was assumed not to take place at speech onset. The results obtained for this experiment were not significant, due to high standard deviations. In future research it would be interesting to see whether the paradigm of this experiment could be adjusted, to gain more reliable results that can answer the main question we pursued.Show less
This thesis attempts to determine whether adults who were raised with simultaneous bilingualism and live in a monolingual country still know two languages in a native-like manner, even if one of...Show moreThis thesis attempts to determine whether adults who were raised with simultaneous bilingualism and live in a monolingual country still know two languages in a native-like manner, even if one of the two has become more dominant in daily life. Twenty simultaneous bilinguals were asked to carry out a picture-naming task. For this test, the bilinguals had to name objects in Dutch and English and the time it took them to switch between languages was measured. In general, an L1 is suppressed more severely than an L2 when the other language is spoken, and it therefore takes more time to switch from an L2 to an L1 than vice versa. The participants did not take significantly longer to switch from one language to the other than vice versa, suggesting that simultaneous bilinguals are capable of retrieving both of their languages in a native-like manner even if they live in a monolingual environment.Show less
