http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/7776 http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/41794 The emergence of the design stance in early childhood Matan, Adee Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, 1996. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 112-113). Sun, 29 Oct 1995 22:58:59 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/14467 Learning locative verbs : how universal linking rules constrain productivity Gropen, Jess Harry Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, 1989. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 250-253). Sat, 29 Oct 1988 22:58:59 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/40975 The nature of the working memory system underlying language processing and its relationship to the long-term memory system Fedorenko, Evelina Georgievna This thesis examines two questions concerning the working memory system underlying language processing: (1) To what extent is the working memory system underlying language processing domain-specific? and (2) What is the relationship between the working memory system and the long-term memory system in language processing? In Chapter 1, I describe ten experiments investigating the extent to which the working memory system underlying linguistic integrations is domain-specific. I argue that the results of these experiments demonstrate that at least some aspects of the working memory system used for linguistic integrations are not domain-specific, being involved in arithmetic, and possibly, musical processing. In Chapter 2, I describe six experiments investigating the relationship between the two retrieval operations that are required when an incoming word is integrated into an evolving structure: the retrieval of the lexical properties of the word from long-term memory and the retrieval of its structural dependents from working memory. I demonstrate that the relative ease or difficulty of retrieving the lexical properties of an incoming word affect the difficulty of retrieving its structural dependents. I therefore argue that the two retrieval operations rely on overlapping pools of resources. Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, 2007. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 139-145). Sun, 29 Oct 2006 22:58:59 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/40974 The identification and function of English prosodic features Breen, Mara E This thesis contains three sets of studies designed to explore the identification and function of prosodic features in English. The first set of studies explores the identification of prosodic features using prosodic annotation. We compared inter-rater agreement for two current prosodic annotation schemes, ToBI (Silverman, et al., 1992) and RaP (Dilley & Brown, 2005) which provide guidelines for the identification of English prosodic features. The studies described here survey inter-rater agreement for both novice and expert raters in both systems, and for both spontaneous and read speech. The results indicate high agreement for both systems on binary classification, but only moderate agreement for categories with more than two levels. The second section explores an aspect of the function of prosody in determining the propositional content of a sentence by investigating the relationship between syntactic structure and intonational phrasing. The first study tests and refines a model designed to predict the intonational phrasing of a sentence given the syntactic structure. In further analysis, we demonstrate that specific acoustic cues-word duration and the presence of silence after a word, can give rise to the perception of intonational boundaries. The final set of experiments explores the relationship between prosody and information structure, and how this relationship is realized acoustically. In a series of four experiments, we manipulated the information status of elements of declarative sentences by varying the questions that preceded those sentences. We found that all of the acoustic features we tested-duration, f0, and intensity-were utilized by speakers to indicate the location of an accented element. However, speakers did not consistently indicate differences in information status type (wide focus, new information, contrastive information) with the acoustic features we investigated. Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, 2007. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 98-102). Sun, 29 Oct 2006 22:58:59 GMT