In natural reading, the processing of words in fixation is influenced by semantic information obtained through preview (i.e., the semantic preview effect). Previous studies have confirmed that two types of semantic information exhibit the semantic preview effect: semantic association, which is reflected by the semantic relationship between preview…

"Hospital" can refer to a physical place or more figuratively to the people associated with it. Such place-for-institution metonyms are common in everyday language, but there remain several open questions in the literature regarding how they are processed. The goal of the current eyetracking experiments was to investigate how metonyms…

Purpose: Following the Rehabilitation Treatment Specification System (RTSS) framework, the current study investigated the active ingredients in the modified semantic feature analysis (mSFA) targeting either noun or verb retrieval in Mandarin-English bilingual adults with aphasia (BWA). Method: Twelve Mandarin-English BWA completed mSFA treatment…

Most words in natural languages are polysemous; that is, they have related but different meanings in different contexts. This one-to-many mapping of form to meaning presents a challenge to understanding how word meanings are learned, represented, and processed. Previous work has focused on solutions in which multiple static semantic…

Agreement attraction is a cross-linguistic phenomenon where a verb occasionally agrees not with its subject, as required by grammar, but instead with an unrelated noun ("The key to the cabinets were…"). Despite the clear violation of grammatical rules, comprehenders often rate these sentences as acceptable. Contenders for explaining…

Introduction: It is well documented that preschoolers with DLD produce first instances of sentential complement clause sentences later than same-age peers with typical language. However, it remains unknown whether children with DLD are limited in their production of a variety of sentential complement clause sentences. Aims: Using a sentence…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine whether older adults exhibit reduced abilities in coordinating lexical retrieval and syntactic formulation during sentence production and whether an individual's working memory capacity predicts age-related changes in sentence production. Method: A total of 124 Korean-speaking individuals (79 young…

All communication systems rely on sets of rules that must generally be followed for successful communication to be possible; in the case of human language, these rules are given by the grammar. However, despite these rules, there is considerable variation that has been noted across the grammar. In this dissertation, I explore one understudied…

The majority of research in computational psycholinguistics on sentence processing has focused on word-by-word incremental processing within sentences, rather than holistic sentence-level representations. This study introduces two novel computational approaches for quantifying sentence-level processing: sentence surprisal and sentence relevance.…

Many psycholinguistic studies examine how people parse sentences in isolation; however, years of work in discourse processing have shown that sentence-level interpretations are influenced at some stage by discourse-level information. Evidence over the past 20 years remains mixed as to the temporal dynamics of such top-down interactions. In…

Communication Accommodation Theory (CAT) predicts that people adjust their language to match that of the other to promote comprehension, coordinate action, and facilitate harmonious relationships. CAT predicts that mothers will adjust their sentence length and complexity to match those of children. Prior tests of CAT confounded trait-like language…

Purpose: The aim of this study was to develop and validate a large Korean sentence set with varying degrees of semantic predictability that can be used for testing speech recognition and lexical processing. Method: Sentences differing in the degree of final-word predictability (predictable, neutral, and anomalous) were created with words selected…

The coherence principle suggests removing unnecessary--or seductive--content from educational texts to reduce cognitive load. However, the binary proposition that all seductive details should be excluded neglects images' potential to prime semantically related concepts, which makes texts easier to process. It was hypothesized that this priming…

Meaning in language emerges from multiple words, and children are sensitive to multi-word frequency from infancy. While children successfully use cues from single words to generate linguistic predictions, it is less clear whether and how they use multi-word sequences to guide real-time language processing and whether they form predictions on the…

Associative anaphora refers to a discourse operation that links a definite determiner phrase (DP) to an antecedent that acts as an indirect referent of the definite DP. For example, in the sequence 'I bought a laptop. The keyboard was black', the definite DP 'the keyboard' is linked to 'a laptop', meaning 'the keyboard of the laptop'. The…