People sometimes lie by omitting information. The information lie tellers then report could be entirely truthful. We examined whether the truthful information that lie tellers report in omission lies contains verbal cues indicating that the person is lying. We made a distinction between (i) essential information (events surrounding the omission)…

This study investigated the nature of switch costs after trials on which the cued task had been either only prepared (cue-only trials) or both prepared and performed (completed trials). Previous studies have found that task-switch costs occur following cue-only trials, demonstrating that preparing--without performing--a task is sufficient to…

Construal level theory states that future events that are nearer in the future and events that are more likely to happen have lower construal levels, and therefore have less detail, than events that are further away and/or less likely to happen. Consistent with this theory, the number of details in a statement can be a moderately good cue to…

Two experiments determined whether metamemory judgments invoking covert retrieval practice for a list of unrelated paired associate words led to the facilitation of learning a subsequent list. Three types of relation between successive lists were compared: negative transfer (A-B, A-D); a control for item-specific proactive interference (A-B, C-D);…

The current study examined verbal cues of veracity and deception in 911 calls reporting homicides or suicides of another person. Specifically, the current study compared differences in the presence/absence and number of potential verbal indicators between a sample of deceptive callers who concealed their role in causing the person's death and…

How can syntactic and learnability analyses inform each other, and thus deepen our understanding of syntax and its acquisition? This dissertation illuminates this question through three case studies in Korean syntax. I examine cases in which two structures that display distinct syntactic properties share extremely similar surface forms, thus…

Noise is a common impedance to easy and accurate speech understanding. In the presence of noise, speech processing mechanisms proceed with partial or ambiguous inputs, and listeners will engage additional cognitive resources to make sense of what they hear. The extent to which this is situation is affected by diminished exposure to a language is…

Accurately judging students' comprehension is a key professional competence for teachers. It is crucial for adapting instruction to students' needs and thereby promoting student learning. According to the cue-utilization framework, the accuracy of teachers' judgments depends on how predictive (or diagnostic) the information (or cues) that teachers…

Irrelevant salient distractors can trigger early quitting in visual search, causing observers to miss targets they might otherwise find. Here, we asked whether task-relevant salient cues can produce a similar early quitting effect on the subset of trials where those cues fail to highlight the target. We presented participants with a difficult…

We investigated the role of distinct inhibitory processes as 4- to 6-year-olds from the Northeastern United States (N = 48, M[subscript age] = 68.27 months, 22 boys, 26 girls; 63% White, 6% Black, 4% Asian, 2% Hispanic, 8% more than one race, with 17% not reporting) and adults evaluated accurate or deceptive information from human or non-human…

Meaningful gestures enhance degraded speech comprehension in neurotypical adults, but it is unknown whether this is the case for neurodivergent populations, such as autistic individuals. Previous research demonstrated atypical multisensory and speech-gesture integration in autistic individuals, suggesting that integrating speech and gestures may…

Syntactic movement is central to mainstream generative theories of syntax (Chomsky, 1957; 1981; 1995; 2001). Under this view, sentences contain words that have moved and words that have not. Children only ever hear words in their moved positions so it is unclear how they could determine the ways these constituents must be merged and moved from…

Mandarin is a tone language that is spoken by billions of people in the world. Despite huge demand, there is a lack of assessment and treatment tools targeting Mandarin speakers with communication disorders. To better understand the speech profile of Mandarin speakers with communication disorders, this dissertation first examined contrastive…

There is growing consensus that selection history strongly guides spatial attention and is distinct from current goals and physical salience. Here, we focused on target-location probability cueing: when the target is more likely to appear in one region, search performance gradually improves for targets appearing in that region. Probability cueing…

When memories are reactivated during sleep, they are potentially transformed and strengthened. However, disturbed sleep may make this process ineffective. In a prior study, memories formed shortly before sleep were weakened by auditory stimulation when that stimulation provoked memory reactivation while also disrupting sleep -- a procedure known…