"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…

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.…

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…

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…

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…

Taking into account the peculiarities of the Georgian language and integrating them into the teaching process remains an important task. Georgian is an agglutinative language, which means the existence of grammatical markers in word-forms related to certain semantic features. The system of the Georgian verb is unique in that it is based on…

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…

This study examined givenness in discourse via passive constructions in research articles. While it is commonly held in grammar books and grammar classes that the passive voice is the counterpart of the active voice, the present study argues that Argument movement in passive constructions can act as a syntactic device contributing to sound…

This dissertation explores the role of memory in language processing, and specifically how interference during lexical encoding can result in downstream interference during retrieval. The dissertation merges insights from both the sentence processing literature as well as the study of memory in non-sentential contexts and focuses on two factors…

The world's linguistic diversity is severely underrepresented in research on cognitive and neural aspects of language processing, with great consequences for our understanding of the relationship between language, cognition, and the human brain. The practical challenges of carrying out neurophysiological (but also behavioral) experiments under…

This study examines the referential context effect on second-language relative clause ambiguity resolution by proficient L1 Chinese learners who learn English as a foreign language (EFL) and investigates whether the ambiguity resolution process is constrained by individuals' working memory capacity (WMC). It presents a self-paced reading study and…