The purpose of this dissertation is to answer the following question that falls in the intersection of philosophy of language and epistemology: is there any distinctive kind of knowledge that one might possess, merely in virtue of being a native, competent speaker of a certain natural language? When this is expressed as a question specifically…

Semantic illusions are recognition errors that occur when an individual fails to notice that information contradicts their prior knowledge (Barton & Sanford, 1993; Erickson & Mattson, 1981). For example, after hearing the question, "If a plane crashes while flying over state lines, where should the survivors be buried?" many…

This dissertation probes children's metalinguistic awareness of syntactic ambiguity (as in the sentence "The man is poking the monkey with a banana," where the PP "with a banana" can be understood in two ways, associated with either the monkey or the poking). Several studies suggest that children do not spontaneously detect…

Recent research has demonstrated that L2 learners and heritage speakers might have two different profiles in terms of their syntactic, morpho-syntactic, and lexical-semantic knowledge of a target language (Montrul, 2004, 2006, 2010; Montrul, Foote, & Perpinan, 2008). However, the most influential of the major studies have been limited to…

The goal of language comprehension for humans is not just to decode the semantic content of sentences, but rather to grasp what speakers intend to communicate. To infer speaker meaning, listeners must at minimum assess whether and how the literal meaning of an utterance addresses a question under discussion in the conversation. In cases of…

Morphological awareness can help learners of a second language (L2) infer and learn the meaning of unknown words. It is, however, unclear how morphological awareness evolves in adult English-speaking learners of instructed L2 Spanish and how this development relates to vocabulary knowledge. Moreover, the manner in which derivational morphology is…