In many languages, a noun’s grammatical gender is expressed overtly via its definite article. The languages of interest in this study were Swiss German and Standard German. While both languages...Show moreIn many languages, a noun’s grammatical gender is expressed overtly via its definite article. The languages of interest in this study were Swiss German and Standard German. While both languages have a high lexical similarity and share the same gender system, some nouns do not share the same grammatical gender in both languages. Bidialectal speakers of these languages must have different representations for these words. This provides an opportunity to investigate the representation of lexico-syntactic features in the mental lexicon and the process of gender retrieval in bidialectals simultaneously. In an experiment employing the picture-word interference paradigm, participants named a picture (article + noun) while ignoring a distractor word. Results showed faster naming latencies in Standard German when the grammatical gender of the picture and the distractor word matched than when they did not match. In Swiss German, we did not observe such an effect. We assumed that the gender ambiguity of some Swiss German varieties diluted the effect. In Standard German, we found markedly slower naming latencies for nouns with different grammatical gender in each language than with the same grammatical gender. We argued that Swiss German interfered in Standard German since erroneously used articles corresponded to the grammatical gender in Swiss German. This effect supported the Revised Hierarchical Model according to which bilinguals have a separate lexicon for both languages, and the lexical link from the second to the first language is stronger than from the first to the second language.Show less
While the effects of temporal audiovisual asynchrony and multisensory integration on speech perception have been studied extensively, their effects on speech comprehension are largely unknown. In...Show moreWhile the effects of temporal audiovisual asynchrony and multisensory integration on speech perception have been studied extensively, their effects on speech comprehension are largely unknown. In the current study, thirty participants took part in a picture naming task. Reaction times were measured across four experimental conditions resulting from two independent variables: temporal synchrony of the audiovisual prime and semantic relation between prime and target. The primes consisted of videos with a delay of 500 milliseconds between the onsets of the visual and auditory track. The results indicate no significant effect of temporal synchrony on speech comprehension within this paradigm.Show less
This study compares the use of the Dutch definite articles ‘de’ and ‘het’ by three groups of learners of Dutch as an L2 with different L1 backgrounds: French, Polish and Indonesian. It was expected...Show moreThis study compares the use of the Dutch definite articles ‘de’ and ‘het’ by three groups of learners of Dutch as an L2 with different L1 backgrounds: French, Polish and Indonesian. It was expected that the French group would be most accurate in their article use when looked at the distinction between common gender and neuter gender contexts and was least likely to avoid definite article use by means of substitution (with an indefinite article) or omission due to positive language transfer effects. The Polish group was expected to perform less accurate than the French group only in terms of article use, not gender distinction. The Indonesian group was expected to perform less accurate than the French group on both fronts. In order to test the hypotheses a corpus study was conducted. The results did not confirm the hypotheses, no effects of language transfer were found.Show less
Language is one of the most important factors in our daily lives. Therefore the impact aphasia has on people is even bigger than possibly imagined. Many different treatments, such as melodic, tone...Show moreLanguage is one of the most important factors in our daily lives. Therefore the impact aphasia has on people is even bigger than possibly imagined. Many different treatments, such as melodic, tone and visual techniques, have been investigated thourougly so far. A treatment focussing on the olfactory system on the other hand has not been investigated as much. One of the reasons the olfactory system would be interesting to investigate in relation to the recovery from aphasia is that odors activate memories; when we smell a scent, it reminds us of something, someone or somewhere, and we are able to give words to the scent. This made me curious whether there is indeed a link, direct or indirect, between the olfactory system and the linguistic system. This bachelors’ thesis will investigate whether odor stimulation/training may facilitate correct naming of aphasic patients. The thesis will be theoretically oriented.Show less
