J.A. Brown

Radboud University | RU · Department of Language and Speech

MA Thesis in which I explore multiple mapping between orthography and semantics in Dutch–English bilinguals using the Multilink model for visual word processing simulation.

PRESENTATION WILL BE UPLOADED ON YOUTUBE! In my paper with the same title, I review Foolen (2019) who suggests that the vowels in the stems of certain Dutch verbs pose a case of diagrammatic iconicity. He discusses how such iconicity could have come to be from the point of view of three frameworks: iconic resemblance, phonaesthemes, and Mouth-Gest...

BONUS SLIDES (with CHIMPANZEMES) available at: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1s5vAtpx775WJf6ffF9RsrqyngtoDoCrx?usp=sharing PUBLIC VIDEO of the presentation available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVBNyeIUgvA Meaning is often discussed in science and philosophy, but what is it really? I will delve into this question by investigating...

In the enactivist paradigm in philosophy of mind, sense-making—a process of interaction with the environment that gives meaning to it—is a definitional property of cognitive systems, such as humans. De Jaegher and Di Paolo (2007) extend this concept to include participatory sense-making, i.e. interactions between two or more people that bring forth...

This paper is a review of Jacobs (2014), who reviews Peperkamp et al. (2008), Calabrese (2010), and Boersma & Hamann (2010)-in that order-and of Boersma & Hamann (2010) in more detail. It deals with the adaptation of non-native words (i.e. loanwords) to native phonology, and investigates the question of at what point in the process information ente...

Chiac is a language variety of Maritime Canada, specifically southeastern New Brunswick, characterized by strong English influence on an Acadian French substrate. It has been described by Young (2002), King (2008), Papen (2014) and Perrot (2014), among others; it is variously defined as a mixed language, mixed code, or contact variety. The present...

There is an ERRATUM on p. 14: a non-significant p-value of .091 is erroneously reported as significant. Also, the wrong statistical test was used. A 2x3 interaction effect between native language group and direction of association on each of the three pairs should have been tested. (This was pointed out to me by Susanne Brouwer, to whom I give my s...

Languages differ in the metaphorical terms they use to describe pitch (Shayan et al. 2011, Dolscheid et al. 2013). The origin of these differences is not known; the metaphorical mappings for pitch could originate either in experiential correspondences or in what has been called “cross-modal correspondences” (Walker et al., 2010, cited in Dolscheid...

Term paper for The CLS (Centre for Language Studies) Colloquium class, September 2 2018-2019, Radboud University. Foolen (2019) suggests that the vowels in the stems of Dutch verbs pose a case of diagrammatic iconicity. He focuses on one particular group of Dutch verbs, those whose stem vowel is a combination of a long vowel and [i] or [y]. Accord...

This is an updated, improved version of a paper I wrote in 2011 for Meertaligheid en Taalcontact (Multilingualism and Language Contact) class at University of Amsterdam. Updates consist of changing the layout, correcting errors, changing the wording of certain sentences and paragraphs in order to improve the paper, and adding a footnote. An English...

This is an updated, improved English translation of a paper I originally wrote in 2011 for Meertaligheid en Taalcontact (Multilingualism and Language Contact) class at University of Amsterdam. Updates consist of changing the layout, correcting errors, changing the wording of certain sentences and paragraphs in order to improve the paper, and adding...

Term paper I wrote for European Minority Languages class describing the history of Portuguese and Galician and the role politics of language and language planning played in making them into two separate languages. The title translates to "Living Apart Together: Politics of Language and Language Planning in the History of Galician and Portuguese"....

Term paper for Evolution and the Mind class, taught by Dr. Pieter Lemmens, which I co-authored with Frederik Walter and two other students who wish to remain anonymous. We are a philosopher, a linguist, a neuroscientist and a scholar of artificial intelligence, and we look at the notion of "the gap" from these different perspectives, that is, the q...

Colour perception and conceptual metaphor are areas where language and cognition interact. Different languages categorize colours differently (cf. Kay et al. 2009). In order to investigate whether there is a relation between the type of colour terminology and the types of conceptual metaphors found in a given language, a qualitative study was done...

Portuguese is a non-strict negative concord (NC) language. However, colloquial Brazilian Portuguese (BP) alternatively allows the negative quantification (NQ) construction (as described by Agostini & Schwenter 2015; in this paper, the term “lack of NC” is used). The present study compares three corpora of written and spoken BP, largely replicating...

A comparative literature review is carried out on the topic of pronominal reference, looking specifically at pronoun gender agreement. Theoretical (Audring 2013, Josefsson 2006) and empirical accounts (Hammer et al. 2005, Dong et al. 2015) are compared. It is argued that these converge on the finding that pronouns, rather than being mere syntactic...

English translation of the updated, improved version of my BA thesis from 2013 (originally written in Dutch). In this literature study, I research the declarative-procedural memory model of language processing, as originally proposed by Michael T. Ullman. This model is in accordance with a modular view of language, in which the mental lexicon and...

(I found two ERRATA: on page 20 and 24, I use the word "connectivistische" ['connectivist']. This should be "connectionistische" ['connectionist']. Thanks to Ferdy Hubers for pointing out my error. This has been corrected in the English version.) This is an updated, improved version of my BA thesis from 2013. In this version, I removed the preface...