In everyday life, humans rely on working memory (WM) processes to make sense of relationships between linguistic elements that are not linearly adjacent. For example, to understand the sentence "The dog that the cat chased is cute," we encode the referent "the dog" into WM, maintain and retrieve it after reading the verb…

Previous research has found mixed results for a link between executive function and perspective-taking. One proposed reason for this is that perspective-taking during comprehension tasks may not be internally reliable. This dissertation presents two large individual differences experiments with multiple perspective-taking during comprehension and…

When individuals read a narrative text, they construct a mental representation known as a situational model to comprehend the unfolding story. These models require updates at meaningful changes in the story to reflect current information accurately. Existing research highlights the attentional and working memory demands of these updating…

This dissertation investigates the interaction of developing extralinguistic cognitive systems with early language learning and processing through the case study of verb argument structure. The interaction of these systems with the linguistic system underpins fundamental theories of language learning and use: language does not exist in isolation.…

Purpose: The current study aimed to investigate the behavioral and electrophysiological patterns of the sentence superiority effect (SSE) in sentence repetition in monolingual adults with typical language development. The ultimate goal of this study is to establish the foundation for future studies of SSE in sentence repetition in individuals with…

Evidence from neuropsychological studies of individuals with brain damage post-stroke has supported the separation of working memory (WM) capacities for semantic (word meaning) and phonological (speech sound) information. These separate capacities have been shown to play different roles in supporting multiword language production, with semantic WM…

The purpose of this research is to investigate the relationship between participating in an online software application focused on phonological processing and working memory and outcomes on foundational reading assessment measures. The online software application utilized was the Sound Reading Program. Students began the intervention working in…

This dissertation sheds light on some of the representations used in human language production. Language production consists of several distinct stages; in particular, we focus on the stages of lexical retrieval and grammatical encoding. Lexical retrieval involves retrieving the words required to express the intended meaning; grammatical encoding…

The present study investigates the time course of acoustic cue integration in the processing of the Korean three-way laryngeal stop contrast by native Korean listeners and English second language (L2) learners of Korean. As such, this study seeks to understand how native listeners and L2 learners weight and integrate fine-grained acoustic…

Second language acquisition has been observed to be variable in its outcome such that, unlike native speakers, all second language learners do not achieve total success. Second language acquisition is made of macro and micro processes. External and internal (e.g., age, individual differences) factors are assumed to affect language processing in…

The current research investigates interactions between lexical and structural processing in the construction and interpretation of transitive and dative sentence structures, and relates speakers' choice of structure in sentence production to STM processes and recent/long-term language experience conditioned on lexical information. Study 1…

This dissertation examines the relative effects of phonetic salience and phonological prominence on speech sound processing. Three test cases, respectively, investigate the processing of consonants versus vowels by speakers of German, Hebrew, and Amharic; the processing of aspirated versus unaspirated stops by speaker of Spanish and Thai; and the…

Within the field of psycholinguistics there are those who argue for a close relationship between working memory capacity (WMC) and syntactic processing (Just and Carpenter, 1992) and those who argue that there is no such relationship (Waters and Caplan, 1996b; 2004). Despite years of research, empirical data has yet to settle this disagreement,…

Referential expressions such as pronouns are frequently used in conversations, and native speakers seem to understand who these expressions refer to effortlessly. Although the process of pronoun resolution seems to be easy, interpretations of pronouns are dependent on various sources of information from the discourse including morphosyntax (e.g.,…

This study investigated the pragmatic comprehension and production of the speech act of refusals in English by a group of Spanish-English bilinguals (SEB) in comparison with native English speakers (NES), taking into account variables such as length of residency in the L2 environment, type of refusals and level of politeness. Other variables…