Infancy is a period of significant change for both the brain and behavior. During the first two years of life, the brain experiences an explosion of synaptic connections and myelination, alongside rapid development in motor, linguistic, and social behavioral abilities. Understanding the relationship between brain development and behavioral…

Though efforts have been made for centuries, how concepts are represented in the brain is still elusive. The embodiment view claims that the sensory, motor and other brain areas through which people acquire concept information during life experiences represent this information during concept retrieval. Some compelling neurobiological evidence…

Language is a quintessentially human trait. Many decades of neurolinguistic research provided evidence of neural structures which specialize in complex linguistic and cognitive processes supporting human communications. Because the world is multilingual, (Crystal, 2010; de Bot, 2019) a prominent question related to brain processes supporting…

Data-driven learning uncontroversially plays a role in human language acquisition--how large a role is a matter of much debate. The success of artificial neural networks in NLP in recent years calls for a re-evaluation of our understanding of the possibilities for learning grammar from data alone. This dissertation argues the case for using…

Reading is an essential skill for daily life and academic success. According to the connectionist model of reading, word recognition involves orthographic, phonological, and semantic processing, as well as the interactions among them. Language skill such as phonological processing, develops earlier than reading acquisition, and thus likely serves…

Although spoken word recognition is more fundamental to human communication than text recognition, knowledge of word-processing in auditory cortex is comparatively impoverished. This dissertation synthesizes current models of auditory cortex, models of cortical pattern recognition, models of single-word reading, results in phonetics and results in…

This dissertation contains several projects, each addressing different questions with different techniques. In chapter 1, I argue that they are unified thematically by their goal of "scaling up psycholinguistics"; they are all aimed at analyzing large data-sets using tools that reveal patterns to propose and test mechanism-neutral hypotheses about…

Multisensory Structured Language Instruction has been used for decades by clinicians and practitioners as an intervention for teaching students with dyslexia. Multisensory Structured Language Instruction uses the integration of multiple senses (visual, auditory, and kinesthetic/tactile) simultaneously to teach literacy. Although the anecdotal…

A basic challenge for research into the neurobiology of language is understanding how the brain combines words to make complex representations. Linguistic theory divides this task into several computations including syntactic structure building and semantic composition. The close relationship between these computations, however, poses a strong…

The dissertation presents a theory of semantics and pragmatics for both language and vision. I focus on sentences including proper names, descriptions, and attitude report verbs, and on the Necker cube. I propose the Open Instruction Theory (OIT), according to which the linguistic meaning of a sentence and the semantic contribution of visual…