Human communication relies on the ability to assess what others intend to communicate beyond what they directly say. Under classic theories of communication, a critical component of this process is the evaluation of what another person knows (epistemic reasoning) and how that knowledge will affect the value of what they communicate. For example, a…

This research project examined the views and perceptions of healthcare provider staff regarding HIV testing and the implementation of HIV testing as a routine part of medical practice in a university student health center at a Historically Black College or University (HBCU). This study further explored whether healthcare provider staff promoted…

This dissertation investigates how distributional information in the speech stream can assist infants in the initial stages of acquisition of their native language phonology. An exploratory statistical analysis derives this information from the adult speech data in the corpus of conversations between adults and young children in Russian. Because…