It is well known that persons with aphasia (PWA) demonstrate deficits in sentence processing. Specifically, many show difficulties with syntactic re-analysis, or the ability to revise one's interpretation of a sentence due to a temporary ambiguity. Emerging evidence suggests that structural priming, individuals' tendency to unconsciously re-use a…

Segmentation is a cornerstone of language processing across levels of linguistic analysis, and yet, standard models of linguistic memory leave the role of higher-order segments in online comprehension understudied. This dissertation advances the Context-Sensitive Encoding (CSE) hypothesis: that implicit prosodic boundaries (Bader, 1998; J. Fodor,…

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…

Research indicates that readers break down complex words into their smallest, meaning-based units (morphemes) when spelling (e.g., Senechal, 2000). However, it remains unclear how morphemes are formed and whether newly formed morphological knowledge (i.e., knowledge of morphemes) is strong enough to support word learning. The current research…

When we read, errors in oculomotor programming can cause the eyes to land and fixate on different words from what the mind intended. Previous work suggests that these "mislocated fixations" form 10-30% of first-pass fixations in reading eye movement data, which presents theoretical and analytic issues for eyetracking-while-reading…

It has long been suggested that contextual facilitation effects (hereafter, context effects) reflect the interaction between the construction of an internal representation of context and the processing of a semantically related word (Kuperberg & Jaeger, 2016; Stanovich, 1980). Listening and reading studies have constantly replicated the…

Skilled hearing readers activate phonological, orthographic, and semantic representations in order to recognize and comprehend words. However, deaf readers may achieve reading comprehension by different means. More specifically, enhanced visual attention, reduced access to phonology, and bimodal bilingualism may influence how deaf readers…

The representational product of sentence comprehension is the result of the interplay between episodic and semantic memory and our knowledge of the grammatical devices of our language which guide how we retrieve information from these systems. Past participles, being a part of speech derived from verbs but used in a prenominal position (e.g. words…

Moving one's eyes while reading is one of the most complex everyday tasks humans face. To perform efficiently, readers must make decisions about when and where to move their eyes every 200-300ms. Over the past decades, it has been demonstrated that these fine-grained decisions are influenced by a range of linguistic properties of the text, and…

This dissertation examines the processing of sentences involving long-distance linguistic dependencies, or sentences containing elements that must be linked across intervening words and phrases. Specifically, both behavioral (self-paced reading and eye tracking) and neurophysiological (electroencephalography) methods were used (a) to evaluate the…

The purpose of this study is to add to the knowledge of reading development by investigating reading processes from a neurocognitive and educational perspective. This study seeks to provide some insight about reading development for the neuroscience field. The goals of this study are to attain a clearer picture of reading development by using both…