Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences, School of
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Recent Submissions
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Cross-dialect variation in Dinka tonal morphology
(The University of Edinburgh, 2020-11)This study has two main components: to describe the tone system of the previously-undocumented Hol dialect of Dinka, and to classify an unclassified inflectional category. Dinka, a West Nilotic language comprised predominantly ... -
Thinking for the bound and dead: beyond MAN3 towards a new (truly) universal theory of human victory
(The University of Edinburgh, 2023-08-30)This project is a blend of Africana intellectual history and philosophical anti-humanism. The opening chapter seeks to contextualize the thought of Huey P. Newton in the Black nationalist tradition outline his conceptualization ... -
Intervention, participation, perception: case studies of language activism in Catalonia, Norway & Scotland
(The University of Edinburgh, 2023-08-14)This thesis brings together and contextualises three papers, each examining a case-study of language activism. The corresponding research project presents linguistic ethnographic and discourse analytical research in the ... -
Aspects of cross-variety Dinka tonal phonology
(The University of Edinburgh, 2023-07-27)This thesis examines tonal phonology across varieties of Dinka (West Nilotic, South Sudan), a typologically unusual language. The sound system—particularly the suprasegmentals—of Dinka is highly complex; the language has ... -
Attitudes and perceptions of Saudi students towards their non-native EMI instructors
(The University of Edinburgh, 2023-07-10)This thesis examines undergraduate students’ attitudes toward non-native English speaker (NNES) instructors in an EMI context in Saudi Arabia. It also investigates their perceptions of the speech of those instructors, in ... -
Function-first approach to doubt
(The University of Edinburgh, 2023-06-27)Doubt is a much-maligned state. We are racked by doubts, tormented by doubts, plagued by them, paralysed. Doubts can be troubling, consuming, agonising. But however ill-regarded is doubt, anxiety is more so. We recognise ... -
Pregnancy and children’s development (PRECEDE): how maternal inflammation in pregnancy affects child outcomes
(The University of Edinburgh, 2023-06-23)The main research question of this thesis is to examine how maternal inflammatory processes during pregnancy possibly affect a child’s development in domains of cognition, behaviour, and general school readiness. It starts ... -
Effects of modality, administration and stimulus on picture descriptions in adults
(The University of Edinburgh, 2023-06-07)BACKGROUND: Picture descriptions are a commonly used tool in the diagnostic process of aphasias, including vascular as well as neurodegenerative disorders affecting language production. However, this widespread clinical ... -
Abilities, freedom, and inputs: a time traveller's tale
(The University of Edinburgh, 2023-06-05)The philosophy of time travel is a sub-field of metaphysics – the study of what there is and what things are like – that considers questions about the possibility of time travel and what a world in which time travel is ... -
Concept is a container
(The University of Edinburgh, 2016-11-28)This thesis puts forward a theory which I call container theory for how a single notion of concept can satisfy the two desiderata that Machery (2009) sets out for concepts: (a) the Judgement Desideratum - a concept must ... -
Binocular strategies in reading and non-reading visual tasks: from oculomotor behaviours to higher cognition
(The University of Edinburgh, 2023-04-21)Humans use two eyes to extract selected information from the real world and deliver it to the human brain for higher cognition and the perceptual system. However, the two eyes are not always aligned. Eye movements are ... -
Explanatory mixed methods approach to the effects of integrating apology strategies: evidence from Saudi Arabic
(The University of Edinburgh, 2023-04-20)Apology is a critical speech act in everyday language. It has attracted many researchers from different perspectives, apology realisations patterns, apologies in different cultures, apology competence among second language ... -
Application of gene-set analysis to identify the molecular genetic correlates of human cognitive abilities
(The University of Edinburgh, 2015-06-30)Individual differences across seemingly disparate cognitive tests are not independent. This general factor of cognitive ability allows around half of the variation in a diverse battery of cognitive tests to be explained ... -
Computational framework of human causal generalization
(The University of Edinburgh, 2023-04-11)How do people decide how general a causal relationship is, in terms of the entities or situations it applies to? How can people make these difficult judgments in a fast, efficient way? To address these questions, I ... -
Social biases of mention order
(The University of Edinburgh, 2023-03-23)What can first mention, the entity mentioned first in an utterance, tell us about group identification, self-other equivalences and assumptions of agency? In the field of psycholinguistics, language is not routinely studied ... -
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 ... -
Changes in psychological state in character disordered and neurotic patients
(University of Edinburgh, 1969)This study was prompted "by the suggestion (Foulds, 1967) that hospitalized female character disorders tend to present with an ’’exaggerated” degree of mental suffering and that they would possibly show a markedly rapid ... -
Measurement of identification between mothers and their adolescent children
(University of Edinburgh, 1969)In this study the identification between adolescent children and their mothers was measured. Following Lazowick (1954) two measures of identification for each mother-child pair were obtained from a Semantic Differential ... -
Social factors in the perception of ambiguous stimuli
(University of Edinburgh, 1961)This investigation started, as an attempt to examine the norms of rejection developed by groups of industrial inspectors. The industrial inspection task is essentially a judging procedure whereby successive components ...