The present dissertation reports two experiments that investigate the processing of English wh-dependencies by including language-specific (experiment I) and domain-general (experiment II) factors. We looked into both event-related brain potentials (ERPs) and time-frequency representations (TFRs) of the EEG signal so as to obtain a more thorough…

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…

To model behavioral and neural correlates of language comprehension in naturalistic environments, researchers have turned to broad-coverage tools from natural-language processing and machine learning. Where syntactic structure is explicitly modeled, prior work has relied predominantly on context-free grammars (CFGs), yet such formalisms are not…

In many domains, learners extract recurring units from continuous sequences. For example, in unknown languages, fluent speech is perceived as a continuous signal. Learners need to extract the underlying words from this continuous signal and then memorize them. One prominent candidate mechanism is statistical learning, whereby learners track how…

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 characterizes the subcortical auditory brainstem response (speech-ABR) and cortical auditory processing (P1 and Mismatch Negativity; MMN) to speech sounds and their relationship to autistic traits and sensory features within the same group of autistic children (n = 10) matched on age and non-verbal IQ to their typically developing (TD)…

This paper reviews three studies investigating the relationship between brain regions involved in executive control and those involved in reading comprehension in typically-developing teens. In the first study, three regions of posterior left lateral prefrontal cortex (i.e., precentral gyrus, inferior frontal junction, inferior frontal gyrus) were…

A growing body of research has provided evidence for the foreign language effect on thinking, notably decision-making. Our prior work found reduction of recency effect following positive feedback in a foreign language as compared to the native tongue during even-probability gambling. However, the fundamental mechanisms underlying this effect…

Purpose: Listeners shift their listening strategies between lower level acoustic information and higher level semantic information to prioritize maximum speech intelligibility in challenging listening conditions. Although increasing task demands via acoustic degradation modulates lexical-semantic processing, the neural mechanisms underlying…

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…

It is well known that the semantic features of gender associated with peoples' names are represented in the conceptual semantic system. However, there is scant evidence that such knowledge plays a role in name comprehension, and if so, in which processing stage this occurs. The aim of this study was to provide evidence concerning the time course…

Learning new languages is a complex task involving both explicit and implicit processes (i.e., that do/do not involve awareness). Understanding how these processes interact is essential to a full account of second language (L2) learning, but accounts vary as to whether explicit processes help (e.g., DeKeyser, 2007), hinder (e.g., Ellis &…

Event-related potentials (ERPs) have become widespread in second language acquisition (SLA) research and a growing body of literature has been produced in recent years. We surveyed 61 SLA papers that use ERPs to study L2 sentence processing in healthy late learners. Our main aim was to provide a critical summary of findings from the decade…

Language production ultimately aims to convey meaning. Yet words differ widely in the richness and density of their semantic representations, and these differences impact conceptual and lexical processes during speech planning. Here, we replicated the recent finding that semantic richness, measured as the number of associated semantic features…

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;…