Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences, School of
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Recent Submissions
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Multilingualism in later life: natural history & effects of language learning
(The University of Edinburgh, 2023-03-21)The overarching aim of this thesis is to explore the question of what role the knowledge and use of multiple languages plays in ageing. To answer this question two approaches were taken: first a natural history perspective ... -
First language attrition in late bilingualism: lexical, syntactic and prosodic changes in English-Italian bilinguals
(The University of Edinburgh, 2023-03-16)Among the most notable findings in recent bilingualism research is that the two languages are constantly active, thus giving rise to complex interactions, in the bilingual mind. One of the natural consequences of these ... -
Analysing time-consciousness: a new account of the experienced present
(The University of Edinburgh, 2023-02-20)This thesis presents a novel theory of temporal experience. While time as measured by the clock is a perennially popular topic, the time of experience remains relatively neglected and poorly understood despite its centrality ... -
Causation is non-eventive
(The University of Edinburgh, 2023-02-14)This thesis presents a system developed to account for the observation that subverbal causation is present in stative structures, which requires a reanalysis of the subverbal primitives involved in causal structures (e. ... -
Reasoning about quantities and concepts: studies in social learning
(The University of Edinburgh, 2023-02-03)We live and learn in a ‘society of mind’. This means that we form beliefs not just based on our own observations and prior expectations but also based on the communications from other people, such as our social network ... -
Justice as a point of equipoise: an Aristotelian approach to contemporary corporate ethics
(The University of Edinburgh, 2023-01-25)How can contemporary companies and corporations, necessarily operating within market-derived norms, act justly in their dealings? Why should they care about doing so? I claim in this thesis that Aristotle’s conception of ... -
Navigating expectations for sustainable product design: a discursive psychology analysis of designers’ accounts
(The University of Edinburgh, 2023-01-24)Sustainable design is vital to achieving sustainable development. It is commonly argued that designers should ensure more sustainable design decisions are made, based on environmental values, and should take responsibility ... -
Asymmetric welfarism about meaning in life
(The University of Edinburgh, 2023-01-20)This thesis is guided by the following question: what, if anything, makes a life meaningful? My answer to this question is asymmetric welfarism about meaning in life. According to asymmetric welfarism, the meaning of ... -
Mindreading in context
(The University of Edinburgh, 2023-01-19)This thesis concerns mindreading, the ability to attribute mental states to others. The standard conception of mindreading emerged from philosophical debates about our everyday use of mental-state terms and experiments in ... -
Developmental trajectory of grammatical gender: evidence from Arabic
(The University of Edinburgh, 2023-01-18)There is a well-documented bias among children to disproportionately rely on morphophonological cues to determine noun gender classes (Culbertson et al., 2019; Gagliardi & Lidz , 2014; Karmiloff-Smith, 1979; Levy, 1983; ... -
Copular clauses in Malay: synchronic, diachronic, and typological perspectives
(The University of Edinburgh, 2023-01-16)This thesis examines the copulas ialah and adalah in Malay on different levels of linguistic analysis, in different periods in time, and against different genetically related languages. Addressing the scarcity of research ... -
Sentence processing in first language attrition: the interplay of language, experience and cognitive load
(The University of Edinburgh, 2022-12-22)In a bilingual mind, two languages frequently interact with each other during language comprehension and production. Both languages stay active, and bilingual speakers must resolve interferences from the unwanted language, ... -
Economic attitudes and individual difference: replication and extension
(The University of Edinburgh, 2022-12-16)The work presented in this dissertation primarily focused on two topics. The first was understanding differences in support for redistribution. In this section, we replicated existing research on the three-player two-situation ... -
Mindful love: the role of mindfulness in willingness to sacrifice in romantic relationships
(The University of Edinburgh, 2022-12-05)INTRODUCTION: The well-being of romantic relationships often depends on the degree to which partners are able to sacrifice their own interests to meet each other’s needs when necessary. While enacted sacrifices are not ... -
Embodied metacognition: how we feel our hearts to know our minds
(The University of Edinburgh, 2022-11-23)The aim of the present work is to make a plausible case for the phylogenetic origin of self-knowledge, one which is compatible with a prevalent view about its ontogenetic origin, the social-scaffolding view. Essentially, ... -
Relation learning and reasoning on computational models of high level cognition
(The University of Edinburgh, 2022-11-18)Relational reasoning is central to many cognitive processes, ranging from “lower” processes like object recognition to “higher” processes such as analogy-making and sequential decision-making. The first chapter of this ... -
Symbolic-connectionist model of relation learning and visual reasoning
(The University of Edinburgh, 2022-11-17)Humans regularly reason from visual information, engaging in simple object search in a scene to abstract mathematical thinking. In recent decades, the field of machine learning has extensively focused on visual tasks ... -
Choosing to presuppose: strategic uses of presupposition triggers
(The University of Edinburgh, 2022-11-15)This PhD project investigates the discourse structuring and managing properties of presupposition triggers. Specifically, the thesis is a theoretical and experimental investigation of what motivates speakers to presuppose ... -
Understanding long-term forgetting in the healthy and clinical population: evidence from different research paradigms and methods
(The University of Edinburgh, 2022-10-20)Memory and forgetting are closely related, yet cognitive research has neglected the topic of long-term forgetting, leaving several questions unanswered. From a theoretical point of view, understanding the dynamics of ... -
Mechanisms underlying pre-school children’s syntactic, morphophonological and referential processing during language production
(The University of Edinburgh, 2022-10-17)Much work has focused on how children learn the words and grammar of their language, with the emphasis being on how children learn to understand their native language. Little work has actually considered how children learn ...
