Understanding language requires readers and listeners to cull meaning from fast-unfolding messages that often contain conflicting cues pointing to incompatible ways of interpreting the input (e.g., "The cat was chased by the mouse"). This article reviews mounting evidence from multiple methods demonstrating that cognitive control plays…

Personality has been found to have significant connections to language. Ranging from impacting narrative style, to informing expectations about others based on linguistic factors such as accent, personality affects both language comprehension and production (Oberlander & Gill, 2004; Van den Brink et al., 2012). However, research in this area…

This study investigates the processing of "wh"-dependencies in English by native speakers and advanced Mandarin Chinese-speaking learners. We examined processing at a filled gap site that was in a licit position (non-island) or located inside an island, a grammatically unlicensed position. Natives showed N400 in the non-island condition,…

Background: Aphasia is often accompanied by impairment of non-language cognitive functions. Assessment of cognitive capacity in people with aphasia (PWA) with standard neuropsychological methods may be problematic due to their language difficulties. Numerous experimental studies indicate that P300 may be considered as an index of cognitive…

Whereas executive functions are known to be closely tied to successful language processing in children and younger adults, less is known about how age-related decline in these functions affects language processing in elderly adults. Because the abilities to use linguistic context and resolve potential ambiguities such as between an idiom's…

The testing effect, defined as the positive effect of "retrieval practice" (i.e., self-testing) on long-term memory retention relative to other ways to support learning, is a robust empirical phenomenon. Despite substantial scientific evidence for the testing effect, less is known about its effectiveness in relation to individual…

Purpose: This study aims to investigate the relationship between nonverbal cognitive functions and language processing of people with aphasia (PWA) by taking a data-driven approach, as well as multiple cognitive components and multilevel linguistic perspectives. It is hypothesized that language performance is differentially associated with…

Development of reading skills has been shown to be tightly linked to phonological processing skills and to some extent to speech perception abilities. Although speech perception is also known to play a role in reading development, it is not clear which processes underlie this connection. Using event-related potentials (ERPs) we investigated the…

Successful spoken language comprehension depends upon both sensory and cognitive processing. Since older adults often experience declines in one or both of these domains, and perform worse on some language processing tasks than younger listeners, an important question is how declines to both auditory perception and cognitive abilities affect…

Relatively few studies have analyzed the mechanisms underlying the cognitive changes that affect language in the elderly, and fewer have done so for narrative discourse. The goal of this study was to explore the neurofunctional changes associated with aging for different components of narrative discourse. Functional near-infrared spectroscopy…

This study investigates how syntactic and semantic load factors impact sentence comprehension and BOLD signal under moderate hypoglycemia. A dual session, whole brain fMRI study was conducted on 16 healthy participants using the glucose clamp technique. In one session, they experienced insulin-induced hypoglycemia (plasma glucose at [image…

Purpose: Deficits in auditory perception compromise a range of linguistic processes in persons with Parkinson's disease (PD), including speech perception and sensitivity to affective and linguistic prosody. An unanswered question is whether this deficit exists not only at the level of speech perception, but also at a more pervasive level of…

Text cues facilitate the perception of spoken sentences to which they are semantically related (Zekveld, Rudner, et al., 2011). In this study, semantically related and unrelated cues preceding sentences evoked more activation in middle temporal gyrus (MTG) and inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) than nonword cues, regardless of acoustic quality (speech…

In an event-related potential (ERP) study we investigated the role of age of acquisition (AoA) on the use of second language rhythmic properties during syntactic ambiguity resolution. Syntactically ambiguous sentences embedded in rhythmically regular and irregular contexts were presented to Turkish early and late second language (L2) learners of…

Bilinguals sometimes outperform age-matched monolinguals on non-language tasks involving cognitive control. But the bilingual advantage is not consistently found in every experiment and may reflect specific attributes of the bilinguals tested. The goal of this dissertation was to determine if the way in which bilinguals use language, specifically…