Language and Cognition

Background: Effects of word frequency on language comprehension and production are pervasive in speakers with and without aphasia. Frequency effects at the sentence level are likewise pervasive in neurotypical speakers, but have received relatively little attention in the aphasia literature. When discussed, frequency-based explanations have typically been dismissed as explanations of sentence-level deficits. Usage-based approaches to understanding the accessibility of clause and phrase structures are not widely used in aphasiology, in spite of their psycholinguistic plausibility.

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Co-speech bodily gesture has remarkable flexibility in displaying or enacting viewpoint, since — unlike speech but like signed languages — it deploys multiple relatively orthogonal articulators, including head and gaze, two arms and hands, and torso posture. Combined with the viewpoints expressed in the linguistic track, this allows oral narrators to embody viewpoints of two characters at once, or to embody both narratorial viewpoint and an embedded character viewpoint simultaneously. This paper examines video data of semi-spontaneous personal narratives told by speakers of American...

Advisor: George Lakoff

Co-advisors: George Lakoff and Terry Regier