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Spring 2024

Harrigan, Atticus

This dissertation investigates the underpinnings of the phenomenon of Order in Nêhiyawêwin (Plains Cree) using quantitative methods and the Ahenakew-Wolfart Corpus (Arppe, Schmirler, Harrigan, & Wolvengrey, 2020). Instantiated as person-marking allomorphy on the verb, Order is central to verb...

Spring 2024

Daley, Natasha

Background and objectives: Past research has found that autistic individuals have pragmatic and morphosyntactic deficits in narrative language; however, the majority of these studies use fictional narrative prompts and are on children, not older autistic individuals. Furthermore, very few use...

Spring 2024

Moore, Devin

Recording and transcribing textual material is a critical part of documentary and descriptive linguistics. The advantages of text collection in minority language communities are recognised to extend beyond linguistics and texts offer a valuable record of the community’s oral history. Although...

Fall 2024

Woerle, Timothy A.

Under normal conversational conditions, listeners are typically able to adapt to a speaker’s accent or idiosyncrasies with relative ease. While this is a well-established phenomenon, the exact mechanisms which allow fast adaptation are not yet entirely understood, and there are a variety of...

Fall 2023

Hammond-Thrasher, Stephanie J

Previous research indicates that knowledge about sociocultural norms affects language processing immediately and automatically. One such example is the Stereotype Effect, where sentences containing violations of gender stereotypes take longer to read and are rated as less appropriate than...

Fall 2023

Alden, McKinley R.

This dissertation is a series of studies that explore the acoustic production of stress, length, non-stress metrical phonology, and other syllable structure altering phenomena in Central Alaskan Yup’ik and Chugach Alutiiq. The intricate systems of weight, length, and stress that conspire to...

Spring 2023

Ling, Sijie

As we listen to spoken language, the brain performs multiple levels of computation, from understanding individual words to comprehending the arc of a story. Recently, computational models have been developed that also process text on multiple levels. These models, called multi-timescale long...

Fall 2023

St Louis, Samara

It is increasingly common to encounter speakers with an accented variety of English, especially as society becomes more diverse and multilingual. To begin shedding light on how to improve communication outcomes when interacting with a speaker who has an accent, this research investigates...

Spring 2018

Loo, Kaidi

This dissertation examines the comprehension and production of Estonian case-inflected nouns. Estonian is a morphologically complex Finno-Ugric language with 14 cases in both singular and plural for each noun. Because storing millions of forms in memory seems implausible, languages like Estonian...

Fall 2017

Morrow, Keely P

A socio-cognitive approach to language assumes language is multimodal, embodied in general cognition, and modulated by contextual cues (van Dijk, 2014). Research on situation models confirms that language is processed multimodally and experiences top-down influence from pre-existing knowledge in...