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
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
