In recent years, converging evidence has suggested that prediction plays a role in language comprehension, as it appears to do in information processing in a range of cognitive domains. Much of the evidence for this comes from the N400, a neural index of the processing of meaningful stimuli which has been argued to index the extent to which a word…

In this dissertation, I examine how fingerspelled words and core signs in American Sign Language (ASL) reduce as they are repeated. This investigation is motivated by theories of language production that posit that reduction may be shaped not only by reducing articulatory effort, but also by accommodation to an interlocutor's understanding of the…

While large language models (LLMs) continue to grow in scale and gain new zero-shot capabilities, their performance for languages beyond English increasingly lags behind. This gap is due to the "curse of multilinguality," where multilingual language models perform worse on individual languages than a monolingual model trained on that…

The essence of human intelligence lies in its ability to learn continuously, accumulating past knowledge to aid in future learning and problem-solving endeavors. In contrast, the current machine learning paradigm often operates in isolation, lacking the capacity for continual learning and adaptation. This deficiency becomes apparent in the face of…

This two-part dissertation centers on a re-examination of the role of book indexes in information retrieval research on full-text digital book collections in digital libraries. Early research focused on information retrieval and book indexes (in addition to other parts of books) in the 2000s when the Google Books corpus was first released to the…

While mathematics achievement continues to decline across the United States, minimal research has been conducted on the use of CT skills to increase proficiency. This explanatory, nonexperimental quantitative study focused on the self-assessment of teachers' content knowledge in computational thinking skills and the relationship to students'…

Research over the past two decades has reported a robust relationship between relative social status and first-person singular (FPS) pronoun use in English. For my dissertation study, I wanted to test the replicability of those findings using American Sign Language (ASL) data that I collected for this purpose. In alignment with previous work, I…

This dissertation features a relative clause island, whose status has been known to differ significantly across languages and extraction types. By conducting a series of acceptability judgment experiments with human participants, as well as measuring token-by-token surprisal values among large language models, I demonstrate the following: First,…

In this thesis, I use a combination of simulations and empirical data to demonstrate that a small set of structural and functional principles - the basic tenets of predictive coding theory - succinctly accounts for a very wide range of properties in the language processing system. Predictive coding approximates hierarchical Bayesian inference via…

This dissertation advances research on evaluation (RoE) through a trio of studies focusing on the role of context and the innovative use of Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) software in formative evaluation in a qualitative research project. The first article extends Coryn et al. (2017) and elucidates how various contextual…

In this dissertation, I establish a research program that uses computational modeling as a testbed for theories of phonological learning. This dissertation focuses on a fundamental question: how do children acquire sound patterns from noisy, real-world data, especially in the presence of lexical exceptions that defy regular patterns? For instance,…

In this dissertation, I investigate how people navigate ambiguity in everyday speech, with a focus on quantifier-negation sentences. Combining corpus analysis, behavioral experiments, and computational modeling in the Rational Speech Act framework, I explore preferred interpretations of quantifier-negation and examine the contexts and prosodies…

Human language is an incredibly rich yet incredibly constrained system. Learning and generalizing these systematic constraints from small, sparse, and underspecified data presents a fundamental inference problem. Therapidity and ease by which humans learn these constraints has made this a foundational study in cognitive science, linguistics, and…

Speakers display considerable variability in language use and representations: they may have different pronunciations of the same word, different intended meanings for the same phrases, and different sets of syntactic constraints in their internalized grammars. Comprehenders adapt to such variability by constantly updating their expectations for…

The past thirty years have shown a rise in models of language acquisition in which the state of the learner is characterized as a probability distribution over a set of non-stochastic grammars. In recent years, increasingly powerful models have been constructed as earlier models have failed to generalize well to increasingly complex and realistic…