Диссертации, представленные на защиту и подготовленные в НИУ ВШЭ

The dissertation is dedicated to the experimental study of time reference across typical (non-brain-damaged monolingual) and atypical (brain-damaged or bilingual language attritor) adult language speakers. Cross-linguistic reports have highlighted that people with brain damage and children experience more difficulties with discourse-linked linguistic phenomena (e.g., past time reference) than with those without such linking (e.g., reference to the present). These data gave rise to the PAst DIscourse LInking Hypothesis (PADILIH; Bastiaanse et al., 2011). The goal of the dissertation was to test the universality of the PADILIH: 1) whether, similarly to individuals with aphasia, the brains of healthy people are sensitive to the reference to different time frames and to the shifts between them; 2) whether the PADILIH’s specific prediction about past time reference and a broader prediction on other similar phenomena are cross-linguistically valid; 3) whether, once acquired, the means of time reference in a language are subject to attrition under the influence of another language with a different repertoire of time reference means. The presented studies used behavioral and electrophysiological methods, characteristic properties of three languages (Dutch, Russian and German), a thorough experimental design regarding both the selected materials and the experimental procedures, and up-to-date statistical approaches to empirical data analysis. The obtained evidence confirms the cross-populational and cross-linguistic relevance of the PADILIH, but highlights a strong modulation of time reference processing by language-specific categories.