Sentence comprehension requires both syntactic prediction and working memory processes. Evidence suggests that both are impaired in agrammatic aphasia, and can independently contribute to comprehension breakdowns, but the relationship between them, especially during real-time sentence comprehension remains unclear. Two EEG studies investigated…

Singular "they" is becoming increasingly common and accepted, but many people find it difficult to learn, instead making seemingly-counterintuitive errors like "she uses they/them pronouns." Existing pronoun production models argue that speakers select pronouns based on morphosyntactic information associated with a name, or…

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…

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.,…

Second language (L2) writing has been determined to be influenced by what is read, with language learners tending to borrow words and short phrases from input texts while writing (e.g., Wang & Wang, 2015). This phenomenon is referred to as lexical alignment. Only one empirical study has investigated the influence that the linguistic complexity…

This dissertation explores how listeners extract meaning from personal and reflexive pronouns in spoken language. To be understood, words like her and herself must be linked to a prior element in the speech stream (or antecedent). This process draws on syntactic knowledge and verbal working memory processes. I present two original research studies…

The main purpose of the current study was to examine the role of vocabulary knowledge (VK) and syntactic knowledge (SK) in L2 listening comprehension, as well as their relative significance. Unlike previous studies, the current project employed assessment tasks to measure aural and proceduralized VK and SK. In terms of VK, to avoid…

One of the central questions in recent second language processing research is whether the types of parsing heuristics and linguistic resources adult L2 learners compute during online processing are qualitatively similar or different from those used by native speakers of the target language. While the current L2 processing literature provides…

This dissertation aims to identify the locus of L2 processing inefficiency. Previous studies suggest that non-native processing is a specific result of an inefficient predictive mechanism that limits the ability of learners to generate linguistic expectations (Gruter, Rohde, & Schafer, 2014; 2016). Thus, this study employs two distinct online…

The present study was conducted in three parts. Each part analyzed theory of mind (ToM) development in children who are deaf in relation to mental verb and complement syntax understanding. In the first part, participants were given a series of tests for the purpose of correlational analysis of ToM, mental verb understanding, and memory for…

There is an ongoing debate in the field of Second Language Acquisition concerning whether a fundamental difference exists between the native language (L1) and adult second language (L2) online processing of syntax and morpho-syntax. The Shallow Structure Hypothesis (SSH) (Clahsen and Felser, 2006a, b) states that L2 online parsing is qualitatively…

Fragile X syndrome is the leading inherited cause of intellectual disability. Most boys with fragile X syndrome have impaired cognition and language deficits, with significant within-syndrome variability. Syntax may be especially delayed relative to nonverbal cognition; however, little is known about the specificity of delay, the sources of that…

This thesis aims to define and extend a line of computational models for text comprehension that are humanly plausible. Since natural language is human by nature, computational models of human language will always be just that--models. To the degree that they miss out on information that humans would tap into, they may be improved by considering…

Recasts are one type of corrective feedback that reformulates all or part of a learner's erroneous utterance during communicative interaction without changing the meaning. Categorized as implicit and input-providing corrective feedback, recasts have become the focus of debate in the area of interaction research in recent years. The debate…