Evaluating creativity of verbal responses or texts is a challenging task due to psychometric issues associated with subjective ratings and the peculiarities of textual data. We explore an approach to objectively assess the creativity of responses in a sentence generation task to (1) better understand what language-related aspects are valued by…

Theoretical interest in the relation between speech production and perception has led to research on whether individual speaker-listeners' production patterns are linked to the information they attend to in perception. However, for prosodic structure, the production-perception relation has received little attention. This dissertation investigates…

To avoid potential miscommunication resulting from structural ambiguity, speakers and listeners often rely on differences in prosodic realization. For instance, the sentence "Jennifer blackmailed the boss of the clerk [who was dishonest"][subscript RC'] is realized with different prosody depending on the attachment of the relative clause…

Roald Dahl is famous for his lexical creativity, for his skill in naming his characters, his ability to create names for a variety of imagined creatures and sweets, and for his most mentioned achievement in creating the language used by the BFG. This paper presents an overview of the development and patterning of Dahl's word creation as found in a…

The present dissertation extracted 17,291 questions from Aki, Ryo, and Tai and their mother's spontaneously produced speech data available in the CHILDES database (MacWhinney, 2000; Oshima-Takane & MacWhinney, 1998). The children's age ranged from 1;3 to 3;0. Their questions were coded for (1) yes/no questions that include a sentence-final…

To investigate whether idiom production was vulnerable to age-related difficulties, we asked 40 younger (ages 18-30) and 40 older healthy adults (ages 60-85) to produce idiomatic expressions in a story-completion task. Younger adults produced significantly more correct idiom responses (73%) than did older adults (60%). When older adults generated…

What are the chances of a dyad of Spanish-speaking strangers using informal address in casual, initial interactions in Buenos Aires, Argentina, today? To discover the pattern(s) of contemporary address, the Principal Investigator (PI) conducted a sociolinguistic experiment focusing on strangers' initial interactions to minimize the influence of…

Adult knowledge of a language involves correctly balancing lexically-based and more language-general patterns. For example, verb argument structures may sometimes readily generalize to new verbs, yet with particular verbs may resist generalization. From the perspective of acquisition, this creates significant learnability problems, with some…