Semantic similarity between stimuli can lead to false memories and can also potentially cause retroactive interference (RI) for veridical memories. Here, participants first learned spatial locations for "critical" words that reliably produce false memories in the Deese-Roediger-McDermott paradigm. Next, participants centrally viewed…

It is becoming ever more challenging to address the changing landscape faced by California Community Colleges. Change agents strive to implement needed interventions but are often disappointed in the outcomes. However, the literature shows that the odds of successful change increase when interventions align with the organization's culture. The…

The purpose of this research is to support the language revitalization and reclamation of Nuu-wee-ya', a Dene language from Southern Oregon and Northern California, and to contribute to the discussions on methodological particularities of archive-based research for language revitalization. Nuu-wee-ya' is a sleeping language comprising three…

Background and aims: eBooks have become a ubiquitous presence in many classrooms today. Yet, empirical evidence on literacy development has not been well produced, especially for children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). This mixed-method case study aimed to explore how four children with ASD interact with ebooks and printed books with parents…

Verbal Fluency (VF) task total scores are widely used in language attrition studies, but they do not provide insight into the processes underlying optimal performance. We analyse the efficacy of clustering (subcategories within a category) and switching (shifting between these subcategories) strategies in phonemic (PVF) and semantic (SVF) tasks.…

One perennially important question for theories of sentence comprehension is whether the human sentence processing mechanism is "parallel" (i.e., it simultaneously represents multiple syntactic analyses of linguistic input) or "serial" (i.e., it constructs only a single analysis at a time). Despite its centrality, this question…

The primary goal of this dissertation is to contribute to a predictive model of Spanish heritage grammars by applying recent advancements in machine learning to ferret out factors and covariates that give rise to the Spanish subjunctive. Given that "[p]redictive models would entail that we have a far better understanding of the various…

Misinterpretations during language comprehension are common. The ability to recover from processing difficulties is therefore crucial for successful day-to-day communication. Previous research on the recovery from misinterpretations has focused on sentences containing syntactic ambiguities. The present study instead investigated the outcome of…

We examined whether the position of modifiers in English influences how words are encoded and subsequently retrieved from memory. Compared with premodifiers, postmodifiers might confer more perceptual significance to the associated head nouns, are more consistent with the "given-before-new" information structure, and might also be easier…

Many U.S. adult schools currently aim to create academic and career pathways by implementing higher order thinking and metalinguistic application in their ESL curriculum. However, this 'ability to reflect on and manipulate the structural features of language' poses a significant hurdle to adult ESL learners newly learning to read and write, as…

Theories of preview benefit in reading hinge on integration across saccades and the idea that preview benefit is greater the more similar the preview and target are. Schotter (2013) reported preview benefit from a synonymous preview, but it is unclear whether this effect occurs because of similarity between the preview and target (i.e.,…

Background and aims: High quality student-teacher relationships (STR) are important for children's academic and social development. We explore how individual child language domains (semantics, syntax, pragmatics), teacher years of experience, and classroom placement (general or special education) relate to STR quality for children with autism…

Examining post-election statements made by UC System, UT-Austin, and UW-Madison executive leadership, this study employs word frequency, collocation, and a three-pronged latent semantic analysis to explicate the associative diction, major concepts, and institutional priorities expressed by said leadership to answer the research question,…

Previous analyses of the Spanish deictic verbs "venir" "to come", "ir" "to go", traer "to bring" and "llevar" "to take" have drawn upon Fillmore's (1975) series of lectures on deixis in noting that speakers of Spanish forbid the use of the verbs "venir" and…

The two studies reported on in this paper examine the features of words that distinguish students' performances on vocabulary assessments as a means of understanding what contributes to the ease or difficulty of vocabulary knowledge. The two studies differ in the type of assessment, the types of words that were studied, and the grade levels and…