Linguistics Dissertations and Theses: Recent submissions
Now showing items 61-80 of 95
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Mental State Verb Use by Children with Fragile X Syndrome
(University of Kansas, 2011-12-31)Mental state verbs are an important component of social interactions and are often delayed in impaired populations. In this study, mental state verb use by children with fragile X syndrome was examined during spontaneous ... -
Cortical Responses to Familiar and Novel Orthographic Systems
(University of Kansas, 2011-08-31)The Visual Word Form Area is a portion of the occipitotemporal cortex which has been shown to respond specifically to visually presented words, leading to it being implicated as a significant region in the process of ... -
Tense and Aspect in Limon Creole: A Sociolinguistic View Towards a Creole Continuum
(University of Kansas, 1978) -
Durational Properties of Lexical Stress and Grammatical Stress in Nanchang Chinese and Their Implications for Tonal Contrasts
(University of Kansas, 2010-03-11)Abstract In this thesis, a durational study and a tonal contrast study were conducted to investigate the tonal inventories in syllables with different rhyme durations in Nanchang Chinese, a dialect spoken in southeast ... -
The Perceptual and Production Training of /d, tap, r/ in L2 Spanish: Behavioral, Psycholinguistic, and Neurolinguistic Evidence
(University of Kansas, 2011-04-4)When native speakers of American English begin learning Spanish, their acquisition of native-like pronunciation can be hampered by the tap - trill distinction in words like coro `choir' and corro `I run'. The trill proves ... -
The Effect of Background Language and Speaker Differences on Serial Recall of Aurally Presented Single-Talker Stimuli
(University of Kansas, 2011-04-06)Previous studies suggest that hearing a sound during the completion of a working memory task negatively affects recall performance. This is true for a wide variety of competing background sounds including multitalker babble, ... -
Online processing of scalar implicatures in Chinese as revealed by event-related potentials
(University of Kansas, 2011-04-25)During sentence processing, whether pragmatic information is integrated immediately and automatically or at a delay is a subject of debate in experimental pragmatics. One test case is that of scalar implicatures, which ... -
Acquisition of Tense-Aspect Morphology in English by Native Speakers of Costa Rican Spanish: The Case of Simple Present and Present Progressive
(University of Kansas, 2010-12-16)This study investigated whether native speakers of Costa Rican Spanish are capable of acquiring a series of typical and atypical meanings associated with the English Simple Present and Present Progressive. Given the ... -
Morphological productivity and the decomposition of complex words
(University of Kansas, 2010-12-06)This thesis addresses the role that morphological productivity plays in the process of morphological decomposition. Understanding the role of productivity is crucial, as previ-ous literature has shown words to be decomposable ... -
Examining Morphological Sensitivity and Individual Differences in the Acquisition of Agreement in a Second Language
(University of Kansas, 2011-04-06)This experiment investigates learner sensitivity to agreement violations involving uninterpretable number and gender features in Spanish. Twenty-two low-proficiency, English-speaking learners and a control group of twelve ... -
The Nature of Optional Sibilant Harmony in Navajo
(University of Kansas, 2010-12-03)This thesis represents investigates optional sibilant harmony in Navajo using the first person possessive morpheme, which contains an underlyingly palatal sibilant that may harmonize to alveolar when affixed to noun stems ... -
Positional Roots in Kaqchikel Maya
(University of Kansas, 2010-09-30)This work is the first in-depth investigation of the class of positional words in Kaqchikel (Mayan). Based on original fieldwork, I first establish the existence of a special class of positional roots in Kaqchikel. I show ... -
A Semantic Account of Quasi-Lexemes in Modern English - Processing Semiotic Units of Greek or Latin Origin into Lexical Units
(University of Kansas, 2010-04-01)Testing quasi-lexemes with theories of compounding enables me to analyze their specificity and limitations. Quasi-lexemes have a semantic content like complete lexemes do, but are constrained by their morphological ... -
An acoustic and aerodynamic study of stops in tonal and non-tonal dialects of Korean
(University of Kansas, 2010-03-29)ABSTRACT This study investigates the acoustic and aerodynamic properties of well&ndashknown three&ndashway distinction of Korean voiceless stops in two dialects, which differ in their tonal systems: non&ndashtonal Seoul ... -
Early usage of DO in children with and without Specific Language Impairment
(University of Kansas, 2009-09-15)This study examined the early uses of DO in the spontaneous language samples of 89 children, 37 with Specific Language Impairment, age 5;0-5;6, 37 age-equivalent control children, and 15 language-equivalent control children, ... -
The Morphosyntax of (anti) causatives in Wolof
(University of Kansas, 2010-06-14)The causative/anticausative alternation in Wolof follows four distinct patterns. I show that a derivation approach to Wolof verbs cannot work as a unified approach because of the presence of directed, labile and equipollent ... -
Executive Function in Simultaneous and Sequential Bilingual Children
(University of Kansas, 2010-04-20)This study compared two types of cognitive control, inhibition and attentional monitoring, among monolingual English-speaking children (MON), simultaneous Spanish-English bilingual children (SIM), and sequential Spanish-English ... -
The Acquisition of English and Arabic Existential Constructions
(University of Kansas, 2010-06-22)Abstract This study is an investigation of the acquisition of existential constructions (ECs) in English and in Spoken Arabic. It is the first of its kind in that it examines the acquisition of the pieces and the features ... -
THE ACQUISITION OF VERB INFLECTION IN Q'ANJOB'AL MAYA: A LONGITUDINAL STUDY
(University of Kansas, 2010-07-13)Most first language acquisition studies have shown that children frequently omit verb inflections in matrix clauses (e.g. Brown, 1973). This dissertation investigates the acquisition of verb inflection in imperative, ... -
Effects of Gender on the Production of Emphasis in Jordanian Arabic: A Sociophonetic Study
(University of Kansas, 2010-06-08)Emphasis, or pharyngealization, is a distinctive phonetic phenomenon and a phonemic feature of Semitic languages such as Arabic and Hebrew. The goal of this study is to investigate the effect of gender on the production ...