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…

Building up on studies that have revealed L2 transfer of imperfective meaning from one Romance language into another [Salaberry, M. R. (2005). Evidence for transfer of knowledge of aspect from L2 Spanish to L3 Portuguese. In D. Ayoun & R. Salaberry (Eds.), "Tense and aspect in romance languages: Theoretical and applied perspectives"…

Recent studies in the second language acquisition of negation have focused on polarity items and their licensing contexts. Although several studies show a correlation between higher degrees of second language (L2) proficiency and the acquisition of the target L2 structures, less attention has been given to the relation between the acquisition of…

Negation is known to have inhibitory consequences for the information under its scope. However, how it produces such effects remains poorly understood. Recently, it has been proposed that negation processing might be implemented at the neural level by the recruitment of inhibitory and cognitive control mechanisms. On this line, this manuscript…

Although the linguistic properties of polar questions have been extensively studied, comparatively little is known about how polar questions are processed in real time. In this paper, we report on three eye-tracking experiments on the processing of positive and negative polar questions in English and French. Our results show that in the early…

A surprising comprehension-production asymmetry in subject-verb (SV) agreement acquisition has been suggested in the literature, and recent research indicates that task-specific as well as language-specific features may contribute to this apparent asymmetry across languages. The present study investigates when during development children acquiring…

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…

In experiments investigating the processing of true and false negative sentences, it is often reported that polarity interacts with truth-value, in the sense that true sentences lead to faster reaction times than false sentences in affirmative conditions whereas the same does not hold for negative sentences. Various reasons for this difference…

Previous studies on bilingual children have shown a significant correlation between first language (L1) and second language (L2) morphological awareness and a unique contribution of morphological awareness in one language to reading performance in the other language, suggesting cross-linguistic influence. However, few studies have compared…

Results from the present event-related potentials (ERP) study show that tones on Swedish word stems can rapidly pre-activate upcoming suffixes, even when the word stem does not carry any lexical meaning. Results also show that listeners are able to rapidly restore suffixes which are replaced with a cough. Accuracy in restoring suffixes correlated…

Purpose: Language production in semantic dementia (SD) is characterized by a lexical-semantic deficit and largely preserved argument structure and inflection production. This study investigates (a) the effect of argument structure on verb retrieval and (b) the interrelation between inflection marking and verb retrieval in SD. Method: Seven…

Across languages of the world, some grammatical patterns have been argued to be more common than expected by chance. These are sometimes referred to as (statistical) "language universals." One such universal is the correlation between constituent order freedom and the presence of a case system in a language. Here, we explore whether this…

Native speakers of English regularly hear sentences without overt subjects. Nevertheless, they maintain a [[superscript -]pro] grammar that requires sentences to have an overt subject. It is proposed that listeners of English recognize that speakers reduce predictable material and thus attribute null subjects to this process, rather than changing…

Translanguaging (TL) theory underscores individuals' agentive deployment of all semiotic resources to construct meaning, highlighting language as part of an integrated repertoire for communication. To explore the potential of pedagogical TL in Chinese vocabulary instruction, this paper focused on one Chinese Language Arts lesson from a larger…

The acquisition of verbal morphology presents challenges for many second language (L2) learners, in part because they do not readily process those forms during sentence comprehension. Instead, L2 learners rely on lexical-semantic cues (e.g., temporal adverbs and explicit subjects). This study investigated the role of task-essential training in…