Scholarship & Research
Permanent URI for this communityhttps://scholarworks.montana.edu/handle/1/1
Browse
4 results
Search Results
Item To hell, heaven, and back again: language, religon, and the varied meanings of Yellowstone(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Letters & Science, 2024) Taylor, Joshua James; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Mark FiegeThis thesis examines the history of language and Yellowstone National Park from the early nineteenth century through the second decade of the twentieth century. I examine how the language used to describe Yellowstone's many features changed over time and how that language reflected the larger culture and the change that took place over time.Item Humans and howls: wolves and the future of animal communication(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Letters & Science, 2021) Narotzky, Emma May; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Mark FiegeWolf howls have seldom been subjected to studies focusing on their semantic content, especially in wild populations where the context is natural but the availability of contextual clues for researchers is limited. The meaning of wolf howls as interpreted by humans depends on the human's position in ecological, cultural, and scientific context. I describe human interpretations of wolf howling from the perspective of amateur observers, historians, and biologists; the historical context of wolf howl research within ethology and questions about semantics in animal communication research; and the possibility of semantic differences in wolf howls from different contexts recorded in the wild. Wolf howls were recorded in Yellowstone National Park in 2017 and howls from territorial borders were compared with howls from territory interiors. Howls from the two groups were not discriminable. There may be no structural differences containing semantic information about territorial content, or the location relative to a border may not be a useful proxy for territorial message. Questions about intended meaning as opposed to observed function in animal communication are difficult to answer and often collide with humans' desire to be unique in their communication systems. Questions about wolves run into political and cultural baggage arising from humans' and wolves' history as ecological competitors. As semantic research in animal communication develops, wolves may become a coveted subject species because of their social living, strong individual/personal characters, and group coordination. These studies and their results will always be filtered through a thick barrier of human biases and reflections--possibly more so than any other non-primate in the world--but information about wolf communication can be disentangled from human culture in both scientific and vernacular accounts with enough historical information about the sources of the humans' biases. Future research on this topic will require simultaneous approaches from different angles, including ethological, historical, neurological, perceptual, and socioecological.Item Backward associative priming relies on an automatic semantic matching process(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Letters & Science, 2019) Calcaterra, Ryan David; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Keith A. HutchisonBackward (BA) priming, which is the facilitated recognition of targets that have a backward association with the prime (e.g., baby-stork), is said to occur due to a semantic matching process that is only engaged in the LDT at long SOAs (Neely, Keefe, & Ross, 1989). However, BA priming occurs at short SOAs and in other tasks (Kahan, Neely, & Forsythe, 1999), suggesting that it may rely on an automatic process. A lexical decision task was administered in which a nonword relatedness proportion (NWRP) was created, such that 50% of nonwords were related to their primes (e.g., boy-girk), and participants were warned that checking for a relation will not be helpful for task performance. For unmasked (but not masked) primes, BA priming occurred even when conditions (i.e., high NWRP and warning) decreased the utility of a semantic matching strategy. This suggests that BA priming relies on an automatic semantic matching process that requires a conscious prime. Furthermore, analyses of integrative priming (e.g., log-house) suggest that INT priming relies on a hybrid prospective/retrospective process.Item Semantic activation without awareness : still no reliable evidence(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Letters & Science, 2005) Bengson, Jesse Jon; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Keith A. HutchisonThree experiments were conducted to examine whether semantic association contributes to unconscious priming. Experiment 1 used exclusion instructions in which participants were told to avoid completing the stem (e.g. mo---) with a word related to a masked prime (e.g. cash) flashed for 0, 38, or 212 ms. Significant semantic priming was found only in the items analysis when data was averaged across participants. In the subjects analysis, this performance was moderated by participantsα ability to report the prime. Experiment 2 used a free association task to examine unconscious semantic priming. Participants were instructed to respond to a target homograph (e.g. pupil) with the first word that came to mind that is not related to the meaning of the flashed word (e.g. student). No significant unconscious semantic priming was found. Experiment 3 replicated the conditions previously used to demonstrate unconscious semantic priming and show that such priming is due to methodological problems. The same methodology as Experiment 2 was used except participants were given inclusion instead of exclusion instructions. Significant priming was found across all trials; however, this priming dissolved when only the trials where participants failed to report the prime were examined. The results of all experiments suggest that unconscious semantic priming from word stimuli is a result of residual conscious awareness of the prime.