Silvia Allegretta
Silvia's project will explore how bilinguals with aphasia process cognates and non-cognates compared to neurologically healthy bilinguals in the presence of semantically related or unrelated competitors. Participants’ language competence will first be assessed using the Bilingual Aphasia Test and its Norwegian adaptation. Participants will then participate in an eye-tracking task using the visual world paradigm. Here, they will hear a short English sentence that will include the target word, followed by four pictures: the target picture and three distractors (phonological, semantic, and unrelated). A translation task with the words used in the eye-tracking task will be administered after the eye-tracking task to ensure that all of the words are familiar to the participant. A verbal fluency task will also assess their ability to generate words from a given letter and category. The Flanker task will be used to obtain a complete participant profile and investigate the role that inhibitory control has on reaction times in congruent and incongruent trials.
This study will be the first to combine the study of word recognition in aphasia with semantic conceptualization in L2. Moreover, it will employ eye-tracking, which is still an unusual methodology in the field of aphasiology. The thesis is supervised by Associate Professor Ingeborg Sofie Ribu (OsloMet) and Researcher Franziska K?der (UiO).
Ana Boskovic
Ana's study, "Two Dialects, One Mind: Navigating Word Segmentation in Bidialectal Infants", explores, for the first time, the mechanisms underlying word segmentation in bidialectal infants. It investigates whether 16-month-old infants, exposed to two distinct Norwegian dialects, process these dialects as separate speech streams - similar to bilingual infants - or as a single stream, like monolinguals. Using an artificial language paradigm, the study assesses infants' ability to track transitional probabilities across two conflicting speech streams.
Eye-tracking technology will measure infants' ability to differentiate between familiar words and novel syllable combinations. By comparing bidialectal and monodialectal infants, the project seeks to explore how exposure to dialectal diversity influences cognitive processing during early language acquisition. This study offers valuable insights into the largely unexplored area of segmental processing in bidialectal infants, enhancing our understanding of how linguistic diversity within a single language impacts the development of critical language skills.
This thesis is supervised by Professor Natalia Kartushina.
Jakob Scherm Eikner
The eye's pupil typically adjusts to real changes in ambient light, for example when driving and the driver enters or exits a tunnel. The eyes' pupils will also react to imagined and illusory changes in brightness and darkness, as well as react to single words referring to brightness and darkness. Can our pupils then also react to simulated changes in light prompted solely by a fictional narrative? Jakob’s MA-project will use pupillometry to investigate how the pupil reacts to fictional narratives, by analysing the diameter of the pupil when the participants are reading a narrative which simulates a bright environment – for instance driving a car on a sunny day – and when reading a narrative which simulates a dark environment – for instance driving a car through a tunnel – all while seated under constant lighting conditions.
The supervisors of the study are Professor Luca Onnis and Professor Bruno Laeng.