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 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…

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…

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…

Multisyllabic words constitute a large portion of children's vocabulary. However, the relationship between phonological neighborhood density and English multisyllabic word learning is poorly understood. We examine this link in three, four and six year old children using a corpus-based approach. While we were able to replicate the well-accepted…

Emotiology is a growing area of interdisciplinary research and academic discourse which focuses on the linguistic manifestation of emotions. This study employs psycholinguistic methodologies to examine the rationale behind word selection in emotional communication, integrating linguacultural, psycholinguistic, structural, and comparative analyses.…

Decades of psycholinguistics research have shown that human sentence processing is highly incremental and predictive. This has provided evidence for expectation-based theories of sentence processing, which posit that the processing difficulty of linguistic material is modulated by its probability in context. However, these theories do not make…

This paper examines links between perfect rhymes and text readability and decoding using a measure of English rhymes called the Perfect Rhymes Dictionary (PeRDict). PeRDict is based on the Carnegie Mellon University Pronouncing Dictionary (the CMUdict) and provides rhyme counts for ~48,000 words in English and for the most frequent 1,000, 2,500,…

The use of machine translation has become a topic of debate in language learning, which highlights the need to thoroughly examine the appropriateness and role of machine translation in educational settings. Under the theoretical framework of task-technology fit, this explanatory case study set out to investigate the predictive role of machine…

It is standardly believed that some occurrences of expressions designate singularly, while other occurrences of expressions designate plurally. For instance, the singular expression the student may be used on an occasion to talk about one particular student, while the plural expression the students may be used on an occasion to talk about several…

What is the relation between factual conditionals: "If A happened then B happened," and counterfactual conditionals: "If A had happened then B would have happened?" Some theorists propose quite different semantics for the two. In contrast, the theory of mental models and its computer implementation interrelates them. It…

The relationship between language and thought has fascinated us for centuries. The relationship between the two is far beyond what the two words represent on the literal level, and the discussions around it have been covered in various fields from philosophy and psychology to linguistics. Even complicating the situation, the relationship between…

Machine translation post-editing (MTPE) has become a common practice in translation industry, which calls much attention in academia. However, little research has been carried out to investigate students' cognitive and motivational individual differences in MTPE. The purpose of the present study was to examine the predictive effects of…

Perceptive verbs have important function, especially in Cognitive Linguistics perspective, because these verbs are directly related to real experience. Cognitive linguistics focuses on the study of the relationship between language, mind, and socio-physical experience. Thus, this paper discusses how the lexical semantic characteristics…

Grounded or embodied cognition research has employed body-object interaction (BOI; e.g., Pexman et al., 2019) ratings to investigate sensorimotor effects during language processing. We investigated relationships between BOI ratings and nonarbitrary statistical mappings between words' phonological forms and their syntactic category in English;…