This study investigates the effect of conventional and nonconventional expressions on listener comprehensibility. A forty-item comprehensibility test, including conventional expressions, interlanguage attempts, sociopragmatic deviances and alternative grammar constructions produced by French L2 (second language) speakers (N=27) was created.…

Individual speakers' speech patterns differ from one another, despite presumably similar language input. What are the sources of this individual variability? In this dissertation, I explore sources of individual differences in pronunciation of coronal obstruents (/s/, /t[superscript h]/, /c[superscript h]/, /c/) at the ends of nouns in Korean.…

This corpus-based multifactorial study delves deeper into the well-known alternation between bare and full infinitive complements, specifically regarding the "help" concordances. It extends the line of research to learners' language productions with a focus on comparing and contrasting the probabilistic grammatical knowledge reflected in…

How does the relation between two words create humor? In this article, we investigated the effect of global and local contrast on the humor of word pairs. We capitalized on the existence of psycholinguistic lexical norms by examining violations of expectations set up by typical patterns of English usage (global contrast) and within the local…

This dissertation is about the learnability of different generative, Separationist approaches to nominal morphosyntax. The core of my investigation is number, gender, and declension class, as manifested across nouns, adnominals (adjectives, numerals, demonstratives, and quantifiers), and articles. An extreme position would require that all of…

This research investigated three synonymous adjectives "perfect," "flawless," and "impeccable" in terms of meaning, degree of formality, collocations, and grammatical patterns. The three synonymous adjectives were scrutinized through the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). The findings suggested that these…

This study aims to investigate ChatGPT's ability to comprehend input from nonnative speakers, specifically those learning English as a second language, with Japanese speakers serving as the model population. The experiment examines how ChatGPT evaluates the difficulty levels of the Test of English for International Communication (TOEIC), which is…

This dissertation sets out to find an answer to the question why not all logically conceivable patterns are found typologically. In other words, my aim is to find paradigmatic gaps and explain their absence. In doing so, I use the mathematical notion of monotonicity (which is a more general term to convey order preservation) as proposed by Graf…

In the age when environmental sustainability is among the chief concerns and goals of communities around the world, a number of linguistic studies have been conducted to illuminate the roles of language in protection and destruction of ecological systems. Most of the studies, however, focus on written and/or formal discourses. The present study…

Bilinguals can be proficient in oral language without necessarily knowing how to read and write in at least one of their languages. Literacy has been shown to affect language processing in monolinguals. In the present study, we test if literacy affects grammaticality judgments for Cantonese-English bilinguals who varied in Chinese literacy…

Despite the growing interest in AI for language assessment, there remains a significant research gap regarding its usefulness for assessing less proficient language skills, particularly those of learners of English as a second or foreign language (S/FL). AI models often prioritize proficient writing, neglecting the intricacies of learner language.…

Despite OT's success, opaque alternations prove difficult to capture with constraints, and some violate the theory's formal restrictions. Here, I propose a novel account of opacity drawing upon developments in psychology. Rather than one grammar, I propose a dual-system model with implicit and explicit mechanisms, a domain-specific OT-like system…

Evidence of sensitivity to graphotactic and morphological patterns in English spelling has been extensively examined in monolinguals. Comparatively few studies have examined bilinguals' sensitivity to spelling regularities. The present study compared late Chinese-English bilinguals and English monolinguals on their sensitivity to systematic…

This paper analyses disfluencies and ungrammatical expressions in the speech of 11-13-year-old Finnish-speaking boys with ASD (N = 5) and with neurotypical development (N = 6). The ASD data were from authentic group therapy sessions and neurotypical data from teacher-led group discussions. The proportion of disfluencies and ungrammatical…

This dissertation investigates the soft typology of phonological patterns. By studying the types of patterns observed in the world's languages, we can do more than determine what is attested and what is unattested, or what is possible and what is impossible, but discover a wide range of more gradient phenomena. Phonological patterns range from…