The impact of bilingualism on the executive functioning constructs of inhibition, shifting, and updating remains unclear, with prior findings yielding inconsistent results. Several explanations for the lack of congruency have been suggested, including the dependence on observed variables, the impact of test modality on performance, and the need to…

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…

In educational research, there is a growing interest in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine students' levels of processing. As there is a growing interest in the use of fMRI, a systematic review was conducted to examine how deep and surface levels of processing are operationalized within the neuroscientific field. In addition,…

We propose a neural dynamic model that specifies how low-level visual processes can be integrated with higher level cognition to achieve flexible spatial language behaviors. This model uses real-word visual input that is linked to relational spatial descriptions through a neural mechanism for reference frame transformations. We demonstrate that…

The word "any" may appear in some sentences, but not in others. For example, "any" is permitted in sentences that contain the word "nobody", as in "Nobody ate any fruit". However, in a minimally different context "any" seems strikingly anomalous: *"Everybody ate any fruit". The aim of the present study was to investigate how the brain responds to…

This dissertation will focus on the processing and learning of abstract, phrasal argument structure constructions. Chapter 1 provides the theoretical framework for abstract constructions, and illustrates the importance of such representations in speakers' linguistic knowledge. Chapter 2 reviews the evidence for meaning being associated with…

Spatial language descriptions, such as "The bottle is over the glass", direct the attention of the hearer to particular aspects of the visual world. This paper asks how they do so, and what brain mechanisms underlie this process. In two experiments employing behavioural and eye tracking methodologies we examined the effects of spatial language on…