Lunfardo, a popular way of expression used by Rioplatense Spanish speakers of all ages, genders, and socioeconomic classes across Argentina, was historically classified as a criminal jargon used...Show moreLunfardo, a popular way of expression used by Rioplatense Spanish speakers of all ages, genders, and socioeconomic classes across Argentina, was historically classified as a criminal jargon used solely by criminals and the working class in the region of Rio de la Plata. Little sociolinguistic research has been carried out to ascertain the current status of Lunfardo and even less has been undertaken on regions beyond the capital of Argentina. The present study evaluated the extent to which young adults, aged 18-29 from San Luis, Argentina, could recognise Lunfardo and analysed their linguistic attitudes towards its use and those who use it. This was achieved by gathering quantitative and qualitative data using Lunfardo comprehension tests, rating tasks and interviews with 21 participants. The quantitative findings revealed that young people from San Luis understand a significant amount of Lunfardo terms, with age and gender influencing levels of comprehension. The qualitative findings demonstrated that Lunfardo is no longer considered a criminal jargon, nor is it only characteristic of the working class. Instead, Argentine Spanish speakers across the country, regardless of age, gender, socioeconomic class, and education level, employ Lunfardo daily to converse and form genuine connections with others. This study concludes that there has been a drastic change in how Lunfardo is perceived. It is now overwhelmingly regarded as an essential component of Argentine culture and identity. Overall, the young people of San Luis show little bias towards the use of Lunfardo and those who use it.Show less
In this exploratory study, the productions of the phoneme /ʀ/ were examined in the speech samples of 25 children. All children (aged 2;11 - 6;3) have a (presumed) Developmental Language Disorder...Show moreIn this exploratory study, the productions of the phoneme /ʀ/ were examined in the speech samples of 25 children. All children (aged 2;11 - 6;3) have a (presumed) Developmental Language Disorder and were attending either a toddler Intervention Group or an Auris Language school. From each child a language sample was elicited twice in a play situation and during a picture naming task, by their speech therapist, with an interval of 3 months. The productions of target /ʀ/ within these speech samples were studied and analyzed in terms of correctness, substitutions and deletions. Productions revealed a wide variety of renditions of target /ʀ/, the most significant being /ʀ/ -> [l], [ʋ],and [j]. It was difficult to determine progress in the productions of /ʀ/ between the two recordings, which indicates the need for a longer interval between recordings, or more recordings. A deviating development of /ʀ/ could be observed in the data of this specific group of children.Show less
This study documented the realisation of the plosive voicing contrast in terms of VOT and post-plosive f0 in the Afrikaans and Dutch of early bilingual Afrikaans heritage speakers in the...Show moreThis study documented the realisation of the plosive voicing contrast in terms of VOT and post-plosive f0 in the Afrikaans and Dutch of early bilingual Afrikaans heritage speakers in the Netherlands. In partial replication of Coetzee et al. (2018)’s documentation of the contrast in Afrikaans, where f0 is an increasingly more important cue than VOT, this study found effects of the homeland cue reweighting in heritage speakers’ productions. They were more likely to produce phonologically voiced plosives without prevoicing in Afrikaans than in Dutch, but showed large and systematic f0 differences between the two categories in both languages. Their realisations resembled those of older speakers in the homeland most, pointing to slower spread of language innovations to the heritage language community. Findings also suggest that the representations of similar but distinct phonological contrasts in early bilingual speakers’ different phoneme inventories are distinct, but influence each other and may overlap partially.Show less
This thesis investigates the early coda production of an English-speaking child A. The study compares two influential frameworks in child language acquisition: Universal Grammar (UG) and the...Show moreThis thesis investigates the early coda production of an English-speaking child A. The study compares two influential frameworks in child language acquisition: Universal Grammar (UG) and the Specific Language Hypothesis (SLGH). While Universal Grammar predicts developmental patterns based on innate knowledge in language acquisition, the Specific Language Grammar Hypothesis proposes that the frequency patterns in specific languages mainly guide language acquisition. The two theoretical accounts make different predictions for the development of coda consonants, creating an exciting topic of study. Data analysis in this thesis reveals that while child A's productions align with projections posited by Universal Grammar, it also suggests an influence from the distribution of coda consonants in English. By combining Universal Grammar and the Specific Language Grammar Hypothesis, this research found that Frequency-Based Hypothesis contributes to a more comprehensive understanding of child language acquisition. It provides valuable insights into the intricate processes involved.Show less
This literature review investigates the neural architectures more strongly involved in sentence processing compared to the processing of unstructured word-lists, focusing on syntactic word-meaning...Show moreThis literature review investigates the neural architectures more strongly involved in sentence processing compared to the processing of unstructured word-lists, focusing on syntactic word-meaning integration. The inferior frontal gyrus, anterior temporal cortex, and posterior temporal cortex emerged as prominent regions associated with sentence processing. Additional regions, such as the angular gyrus and selective right hemispheric architecture, also exhibited enhanced activation during sentence processing. These findings support the concept of a distributed network of syntactically functional neural architecture. The results align with Hagoort's Memory, Unification, and Control model, suggesting that different components of neural architecture correlate with the model's functionality. However, persisting debates regarding the precise involvement of the IFG and its subdivisions as well as other featured regions in sentence processing warrant further investigation. Overall, this review emphasises the diffuse nature of the neural architecture underlying syntactic word-meaning integration, calling for further exploratory and explanatory investigations.Show less
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
Reduplication can express a multitude of semantic or grammatical changes within languages, and can occur in more than one form. Per language there are its own phonological and/or morphosyntactic...Show moreReduplication can express a multitude of semantic or grammatical changes within languages, and can occur in more than one form. Per language there are its own phonological and/or morphosyntactic rules reduplication has to abide by. This thesis is written based on data of the Papuan languages of Timor, Alor and Pantar, found in the collective sketch grammars edited by Antoinette Schapper (Ed.) Volume 1 (2014), Volume 2 (2017), and Volume 3 (2020), comparing the data on reduplication in those languages aiming to formulate typological similarities and differences.Show less
Previous psycholinguistic studies have established that orthography is involved in spoken word production when it is highly relevant to the task. Follow-up research by Wang et al. (2023) used...Show morePrevious psycholinguistic studies have established that orthography is involved in spoken word production when it is highly relevant to the task. Follow-up research by Wang et al. (2023) used blocked cyclic picture naming in Mandarin Chinese to show that orthographic information is activated even when it is not relevant to the task. The study found shorter naming reaction times when pictures were presented in an orthographically homogeneous condition than when they were presented in an orthographically heterogeneous condition, suggesting automatic activation of orthography in spoken word production. The present study replicated the paradigm used by Wang et al. (2023) on English-Dutch bilinguals and a monolingual English control group to investigate whether automatic activation of orthography occurs cross-linguistically and to what extent an effect still occurs when two orthographies are present in the mental lexicon. Current studies on bilingualism have found interference effects in semantics, syntax, and phonology, but no study on orthographic information in the bilingual mental lexicon has been carried out so far. A similar facilitative effect was found in both the English and Dutch groups, confirming the cross-linguistic existence of automatic orthographic activation in spoken word production. Furthermore, the Dutch group had significantly slower reaction times than the English group. These findings suggest that the orthographic information of the native language is automatically activated alongside the orthographic information of the second language, resulting in an interference effectShow 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 aims to evaluate and compare the performance of automatic transcription systems for the ToBI (Tones and Breaks Indices) and ToDI (Transcription of Dutch Intonation) frameworks....Show moreThis study aims to evaluate and compare the performance of automatic transcription systems for the ToBI (Tones and Breaks Indices) and ToDI (Transcription of Dutch Intonation) frameworks. Specifically, the focus is on matching or surpassing the results achieved by previous systems using a relatively small data set for training. By employing recent advancements in Natural Language Processing (NLP), this research demonstrates the potential to achieve comparable or superior performance in generating ToDI transcriptions of intonational phonology with limited labelled data available for boundary detection and boundary classification, while, for accent detection and accent classification, no results substantially better than the majority class baseline were obtained.Show less
In my thesis, the correlation between spatial and temporal descriptions of solar movement in Homeric Greek will be investigated, in order to assess whether the temporal FoR was indeed an outgrowth...Show moreIn my thesis, the correlation between spatial and temporal descriptions of solar movement in Homeric Greek will be investigated, in order to assess whether the temporal FoR was indeed an outgrowth of the spatial FoR, as proposed in Bartolotta (2018).Show less
This thesis is an exploratory corpus study on the origins of single segment speech errors in child language. The central question is which phonological factors other than markedness influence the...Show moreThis thesis is an exploratory corpus study on the origins of single segment speech errors in child language. The central question is which phonological factors other than markedness influence the acquisition of fricatives, more specifically word-initial labiodental fricatives. Through examination of Dutch and U.S. English child speech data of approximately 1-3 years old, patterns emerged that indeed suggest an influence of markedness on the phonemes that children substitute for targets /f/ and /v/. A cross-linguistic difference in the produced phonemes, along with a salient faster and more consistent development of the U.S. English participants, could not be explained by markedness. An influence of neighbourhood density is proposed in addition to the influence of markedness.Show less
![Phonological Development in Children with DLD: An Exploratory Study of [R]](/sites/all/themes/scholarly/img/closed_access.png?solr_nav%5Bid%5D=64f1289c770ec712e446&solr_nav%5Bpage%5D=0&solr_nav%5Boffset%5D=1)
