As humans, we use language with ease and speed, solving the complex computational problem of processing form and meaning seemingly without effort. This dissertation studies how the properties of language enable us to achieve this, by investigating what is computationally difficult about language, and what is easy. We first investigate the…

A striking characteristic of human thought is that we form representations about abstract kinds (Giraffes have purple tongues), despite experiencing only particular individuals (This giraffe has a purple tongue). These generic generalizations have been hypothesized to be a cognitive default, that is, more basic and automatic than other forms of…

Generic language ("Owls eat at night") expresses knowledge about categories and may represent a cognitively default mode of generalization. English-speaking children and adults more accurately recall generic than quantified sentences ("All owls eat at night") and tend to recall quantified sentences as generic. However, generics…

This dissertation uses the processing of anaphoric relations to probe how linguistic information is encoded in and retrieved from memory during real-time sentence comprehension. More specifically, the dissertation attempts to resolve a tension between the demands of a linguistic processor implemented in a general-purpose cognitive architecture and…

An experiment compared the impact of more and less semantically connected sentence contexts on vocabulary learning. Third graders (N = 40) were taught the definitions and meanings of six unfamiliar verbs: "anticipate," "attain," "devise," "restrain," "wield," and "persist." The verbs were…

This study explored the viability of several theories in describing adjective memory. For the study, college students were told either to form images or to learn sentences. A noun-prompted sentence recall task exposed their memory for adjectives modifying either subject nouns. Results revealed that subject modifiers were better remembered than…

The author is presenting a program that she designed for teaching liaison interpreting to translation students in their fifth semester of the translation program at the College of Languages and Translation (COLT), who are starting their training in liaison interpreting. The students never had any interpreting or translation training before. The…

There is a need for a new kind of linguistic theory which, while being concerned with both generation and analysis, must include the roles of memory, non-linguistic knowledge, and inference. The role of logic is diminished according to such a theory because inference has no real logical content. Meaning must be studied with respect to the actual…