During language acquisition, children are tasked with the challenge of determining which words can appear in which syntactic constructions. This has been long recognized as a learnability paradox. On one hand, there are generalizations that children must learn. On the other hand, language is known for its arbitrariness, so children also need to…

When informants from a given culture are asked to list items from a specified semantic domain, their lists provide two indicators of each term's prominence or salience: its frequency of appearance across lists and its mean position within the lists that include it. Smith et al. (1995), Sutrop (2001), and most recently Robbins et al. (2017) have…

Linguistic phenomena (e.g., words and syntactic structure) co-occur with a wide variety of meanings. These systematic correlations can help readers to interpret a text and create predictions about upcoming material. However, to what extent these correlations influence discourse processing is still unknown. We address this question by examining…

In this dissertation I investigate the Mandarin "you"-existential sentence. My focus is on its syntax. I also discuss in less detail some semantic peculiarity of the "you"-existential. I begin my investigation of the syntax of "you"-existentials by first looking into what they are not. To this end, I present five…

It is of critical importance to be aware of the historical discrimination embedded in the data and to consider a fairness measure to reduce bias throughout the predictive modeling pipeline. Given various notions of fairness defined in the literature, investigating the correlation and interaction among metrics is vital for addressing unfairness.…

Background: Humans often use co-speech gestures to promote effective communication. Attention has been paid to the cortical areas engaged in the processing of co-speech gestures. Aims: To investigate the neural network underpinned in the processing of co-speech gestures and to observe whether there is a relationship between areas involved in…

In this thesis, I use a combination of simulations and empirical data to demonstrate that a small set of structural and functional principles - the basic tenets of predictive coding theory - succinctly accounts for a very wide range of properties in the language processing system. Predictive coding approximates hierarchical Bayesian inference via…

Background: Core lexicon (CL) analysis is a time efficient and possibly reliable measure that captures discourse production abilities. For people with aphasia, CL scores have demonstrated correlations with aphasia severity, as well as other discourse and linguistic measures. It was also found to be clinician-friendly and clinically sensitive…

Children learn words in a social environment. In my dissertation, I examine how caregivers' social cues facilitate young children's word learning in settings that mirror their typical, dynamic learning environments. In Chapter 1, I overview prior work examining how social cues may support word learning, focusing on possible mechanisms underlying…

Understanding language requires readers and listeners to cull meaning from fast-unfolding messages that often contain conflicting cues pointing to incompatible ways of interpreting the input (e.g., "The cat was chased by the mouse"). This article reviews mounting evidence from multiple methods demonstrating that cognitive control plays…

It is widely assumed that subliminal word priming is case insensitive and that a short SOA (< 100 ms) is required to observe any effects. Here we attempted to replicate results from an influential study with the inclusion of a longer SOA to re-examine these assumptions. Participants performed a semantic categorisation task on visible word…

Background and aims: Many children with developmental language disorder (DLD) have difficulties in executive functioning (EF) and theory of mind (ToM). These difficulties might be explained by the theory that children's conceptual understanding changes over five stages of word meaning structure, from concrete and context-dependent to abstract and…

In this dissertation, I investigate how people navigate ambiguity in everyday speech, with a focus on quantifier-negation sentences. Combining corpus analysis, behavioral experiments, and computational modeling in the Rational Speech Act framework, I explore preferred interpretations of quantifier-negation and examine the contexts and prosodies…

Many words are associated with more than a single meaning. Words are sometimes "ambiguous," applying to unrelated meanings, but the majority of frequent words are "polysemous" in that they apply to multiple "related" meanings. In a preregistered design that included 2 tasks, we tested adults' and 4.5- to 7-year-old…

Idioms entail a competition between bottom-up and top-down activations of literal and figurative meanings. The present study explored the involvement of cognitive control in processing Hebrew ambiguous idioms. Fifty subjects have completed a self-paced reading task and a response inhibition, stop-signal task (SST). Subjects read 26 matched pairs…