Language processing by Catherine Caldwell-Harris
Neural Information Processing, 1997
I introduce the notion of mixed schema, which is a representation containing both a linguistic ca... more I introduce the notion of mixed schema, which is a representation containing both a linguistic category (like noun) and an overtly occurring expression (a word, such as first). Important questions in linguistics and language learning are what principles govern the ease of learning a generalization R and how easily R can be creatively extended. The connectionist framework used here suggests the following factors: Frequency of use, summed over all uses of R Number of different uses of R Diversity of uses: are the uses concentrated in one conceptual domain, or sprinkled across several domains.
Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science, 2016
Indian English only (IndE-only), e.g. "I'll meet you here only", is rejected as poor English by m... more Indian English only (IndE-only), e.g. "I'll meet you here only", is rejected as poor English by many IndE speakers. In the present study, we used a mixed method to investigate familiarity, comprehension and use of IndE-only in 20 L1 IndE speakers in the US. Participants completed a psycholinguistic task comprising syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic judgments of IndE, standard English, and grammatically or semantically odd control sentences. L1 IndE speakers' task performance was compared to a control group of 33 American English speakers. Results showed that IndE speakers were familiar with syntactic aspects of IndE-only consistent with the literature, and were able to extract significantly more information about implicatures and conversational contexts compared to the control group. L1 IndE speakers were also interviewed about their attitudes towards IndE and IndE-only. Qualitative results indicated that despite some stigmatization, mostly in the written form, IndE-only exemplifies the emerging identity of L1 IndE.
This study examined whether musical training, ethnicity, and experience with a natural tone langu... more This study examined whether musical training, ethnicity, and experience with a natural tone language infl uenced sensitivity to tone while listening to an artifi cial tone language. The language was designed with three tones, modeled after level-tone African languages. Participants listened to a 15-min random concatenation of six 3-syllable words. Sensitivity to tone was assessed using minimal pairs differing
Boston University Child Language Development, 2001
A general assumption is that acquiring a language very early (birth to age 4 years) will result i... more A general assumption is that acquiring a language very early (birth to age 4 years) will result in the attainment of native-like linguistic ability. Theoretical interest in bilingualism and second language (L2) acquisition has focused on how grammatical proficiency in L2 declines as a function of age of acquisition (e.g.). Clearly more information is needed about the different circumstances and range of language types which result in how grammars influence each other during early bilingual acquisition. The idea of languages influencing each other means that bilingual speakers will not have the same language processing structures as monolingual speakers, which challenges the received wisdom that becoming bilingual in early childhood invariably results in native-like linguistic knowledge.
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Language processing by Catherine Caldwell-Harris