Linguistics Dissertations and Theses: Recent submissions

Now showing items 41-60 of 95

    • ACOUSTIC CORRELATES OF LEXICAL STRESS IN NATIVE SPEAKERS OF UYGHUR AND L2 LEARNERS 

      Yakup, Mahire (University of Kansas, 2013-05-31)
      Some syllables are louder, longer and stronger than other syllables at the lexical level. These prominent prosodic characteristics of certain syllables are captured by suprasegmental features including fundamental frequency, ...

    • Psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic investigations of scalar implicature 

      Politzer-Ahles, Stephen (University of Kansas, 2013-05-31)
      The present study examines the representation and composition of meaning in scalar implicatures. Scalar implicature is the phenomenon whereby the use of a less informative term (e.g., some) is inferred to mean the negation ...

    • Complementizer Agreement in Najdi Arabic 

      Lewis, Robert (University of Kansas, 2013-08-13)
      This thesis proposes an analysis to account for complementizer agreement in Najdi Arabic. I motivate the clause structure of the left periphery following a cartographical approach initiated by Rizzi (1997, 1999), by which ...

    • The Perception of Epenthetic Vowels in Voiced and Voiceless Contexts in Japanese 

      Hsieh, Chih-Hsiang (University of Kansas, 2013-08-31)
      Dupoux et al. (1999) showed that Japanese native speakers perceptually inserted a vowel /u/ between consonant clusters when listening to nonce words containing consonant clusters. Our study aimed to examine the effect of ...

    • Past tense and past participle verb use in young children with and without Specific Language Impairment 

      Echelbarger, Margaret (University of Kansas, 2013-08-31)
      Finiteness marking is an area of weakness in specific language impairment (SLI) and two hypotheses attempt to account for this difficulty. The Extended Optional Infinitive (EOI) account proposes that SLI children have ...

    • The Morpho-syntax of Indefinite Pronouns in Iliatenco Me'phaa 

      Duncan, Philip Travis (University of Kansas, 2013-08-31)
      In this thesis I investigate the indefinite pronoun system of Iliatenco Me'phaa, an Otomanguean language from Guerrero, Mexico. I adopt a primarily descriptive approach in order to provide an account of salient properties ...

    • Quantificational Pronouns in Uyghur 

      Coffee, Jonathan Jasper (University of Kansas, 2013-08-31)
      This thesis examines the syntactic distribution and semantic function of four series of indefinite quantifier pronouns in Uyghur: i) the universal or her-series, ii) the negative indefinite or héchseries, iii) the indefinite ...

    • Processing Verbal Inflection in Native and Non-Native Spanish 

      Martinez García, María Teresa (University of Kansas, 2013-05-31)
      The role of morphological complexity in visual word recognition has recently been studied in detail both with native speakers and second language (L2) learners. The present study investigates how morphologically complex ...

    • Morphological variability in long-distance subject-verb agreement: A study of native and nonnative processing 

      Ocampo, Sally Ann (University of Kansas, 2013-05-31)
      This study examined morphosyntactic variability in Spanish-speaking learners of English in order to determine the effects of two linguistic factors on the establishment of subject-verb agreement: structural distance and ...

    • The productivity of tone sandhi patterns in Wuxi Chinese 

      Yan, Hanbo (University of Kansas, 2013-05-31)
      The complex tone sandhi patterns of Chinese dialects present analytical challenges to theoretical phonology, and productivity tests can help us address the issue from another perspective. Previous studies have shown that ...

    • Processing of wh-movement by second language learners 

      Johnson, Adrienne Marie (University of Kansas, 2012-01-01)
      This study examined whether, similar to native speakers of English, native Korean learners of English are able to process sentences with wh-dependencies incrementally, using grammatical constraints on wh-islands. Participants ...

    • Effects of Verb Familiarity on Finiteness Marking in Children with SLI 

      Abel, Alyson D. (University of Kansas, 2012-08-31)
      Children must acquire multiple language dimensions to ultimately achieve adult levels of language competence. Two such language dimensions, finiteness marking and the verb lexicon, are considered areas of weakness in ...

    • Examining the nature of variability in gender and number agreement in native and non-native Spanish 

      Lopez Prego, Beatriz (University of Kansas, 2012-05-31)
      We explored the nature of morphological variability in English-speaking learners of Spanish, examining whether the variability is systematic and whether performance is impacted by task demands. McCarthy (2008) proposed ...

    • An Acoustic Study of Underspecified Vowels in Turkish 

      Lanfranca, Mark (University of Kansas, 2012-05-31)
      This paper examines the acoustics of underspecification and vowel harmony (VH) in Turkish. In Turkish, vowels in suffixes that change according to VH rules are widely believed to be underspecified for rounding and/or ...

    • THE NATIVE AND NONNATIVE PROCESSING OF NUMBER AND GENDER AGREEMENT IN SPANISH: AN ERP INVESTIGATION 

      Aleman Banon, Jose (University of Kansas, 2012-08-31)
      The present study utilizes EEG to examine the processing of number and gender agreement in Spanish by native speakers and adult English-speaking learners. With respect to native processing, the study focuses on how different ...

    • Online Processing of Wh-Dependencies in English by Native Speakers of Spanish 

      Canales, Alonso Jose (University of Kansas, 2012-08-31)
      This study investigated if, Spanish-speaking learners of English are capable of processing wh-dependencies incrementally and observing the grammatical constraints that regulate wh-extraction in English, similar to native ...

    • The Syntax and Acquisition of Negative Polarity Items in Heritage Korean 

      Kim, Sok-Ju (University of Kansas, 2012-08-31)
      This dissertation investigates the syntax and acquisition of Korean negative polarity items (NPIs) in two groups of adult heritage Korean speakers: simultaneous heritage speakers and early sequential heritage speakers who ...

    • The Licensing of Negative Sensitive Items in Jordanian Arabic 

      Alsarayreh, Atef Atallah (University of Kansas, 2012-05-31)
      This study investigates the licensing conditions on Negative Sensitive Items (NSIs) in Jordanian Arabic (JA). JA exhibits both types of NSIs that are discussed in the literature: Negative Polarity Items (NPIs) and Negative ...

    • Finiteness in Jordanian Arabic: a semantic and morphosyntactic approach 

      Al-Aqarbeh, Rania Nayef (University of Kansas, 2011-12-31)
      Previous research on finiteness has been dominated by the studies in tensed languages, e.g. English. Consequently, finiteness has been identified with tense. The traditional definition influences the morphological, semantic, ...

    • Transitivity Alternations in Sorani Kurdish 

      Gharib, Hiba Esmail (University of Kansas, 2011-05-31)
      Guerssel et al. propose Lexical Conceptual Structures to account for the syntactic properties of verbs in four languages. The Lexical Conceptual Structures reference a universal set of semantic components to predict the ...