This dissertation explores the role of memory in language processing, and specifically how interference during lexical encoding can result in downstream interference during retrieval. The dissertation merges insights from both the sentence processing literature as well as the study of memory in non-sentential contexts and focuses on two factors…

Since corpus linguistics gained popularity as a methodology in the latter half of the 20th century, second language acquisition research has seen the emergence of work investigating formulaic language, such as idioms, lexical bundles, and collocations. A collocation is a string of words that co-occur more routinely than probability would predict,…

Research utilizing morphological priming has found that L2 speakers show facilitation from derived L2 primes, which could suggest morphological processing during derived L2 word recognition. However, the process of L2 derived word recognition is still poorly understood, with some arguing that the observed priming effects may not be morphological…

Age of acquisition (AoA) refers to the age at which people learn a particular item and the AoA effect refers to the phenomenon that early-acquired items are processed more quickly and accurately than those acquired later. Over several decades, the AoA effect has been investigated using neuroscientific, behavioral, corpus and computational…

Emotion plays important roles in learning, memory, and other cognitive processes; it does so not only in the form of "macro-level emotion" (e.g., salient affective states and self-reportable motivational currents) but also in the form of "micro-level emotion" (e.g., subtle feelings and linguistic attributes that are usually…

This dissertation investigates the effect of phonetically cued emotional information (i.e., emotional prosody) on spoken word recognition. Even words whose meanings are not emotionally laden (e.g., "pineapple") can be uttered in a way that conveys anger, happiness, or sadness through phonetic modulation, and the current work investigates…

This study investigated whether vocabulary delays in toddlers with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) can be explained by a cognitive style that prioritizes processing of detailed, local features of input over global contextual integration--as claimed by the weak central coherence (WCC) theory. Thirty toddlers with ASD and 30 younger,…

This study examined lexical processing in English by native speakers of Korean and Chinese, compared to that of native speakers of English, using normal, alternated, and inverse fonts. Sixty four adult students participated in a lexical decision task. The findings demonstrated similarities and differences in accuracy and latency among the three L1…

It is not clear how compound words are represented within the influential framework of the lemma-lexeme theory. Theoretically, compounds could be structured through a multiple lemma architecture, in which the lemma nodes of both the compound and its constituents are involved in lexical processing. If this were the case, syntactic properties of…

In bilingual language processing, the parallel activation hypothesis suggests that bilinguals activate their two languages simultaneously during language processing. Support for the parallel activation mainly comes from studies of lexical (word-form) processing, with relatively less attention to phonological (sound) processing. According to…

Previous research suggests that the left hemisphere (LH) focuses on strongly related word meanings; the right hemisphere (RH) may contribute uniquely to the processing of lexical ambiguity by activating and maintaining a wide range of meanings, including subordinate meanings. The present study used the word-lists false memory paradigm [Roediger,…

Indicates that phonological information of both whole-character and of sub-word components (radicals) was automatically activated despite experimental tasks in which subjects were given little incentive to execute phonetic processing. Concludes that the interaction of figurative and phonological processing is due to mutual activation of the whole…

Considers specific aspects of phonological and orthographic processing in Chinese that may differ from those in English. Emphasizes that early phonological processes and phonological mediation are two different questions in the identification-with-phonology hypothesis. Shows that "mediation" and "prelexical phonology," two very…

Finds phonological priming effects on compound targets (characters containing separate radical components); no evidence of phonological priming on integrated targets (those not containing separate radicals); semantic priming effects on both compound and integrated target recognition, suggesting that phonological and semantic activation are…

Finds that, when only one reading is possible, subjects make a judgment directly, but when multiple readings exist for a given character the subjects first compare the possible readings and make inferences; only when this process is complete do they apply a strategy to identify a reading as On (borrowed from Chinese) or Kun (native Japanese). (SR)