Cognitive presence is a core construct of the Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework. It is considered crucial for deep and meaningful online-based learning. CoI-based real-time dashboards visualizing students' cognitive presence may help instructors to monitor and support students' learning progress. Such real-time classifiers are often based on…

We investigate the articulation between domain-general reasoning and interpretive processes in failures of deductive reasoning. We focus on illusory inferences from disjunction-like elements, a broad class of deductive fallacies studied in some detail over the past 15 years. These fallacies have received accounts grounded in reasoning processes,…

The aim was to determine the effect of an 8-week programme of active breaks on memory, attention-concentration, mathematical calculation, linguistic reasoning and creativity in adolescent students. One-hundred-sixty-two adolescents (12.27 ± 0.47 years; range = 12-13 years) participated in this study. The intervention was based on four daily active…

Language is one of the essential tools used to segment the continuous stream of experience into events. In this process, the choice of words and grammar frames events in different ways. Grammatical aspect plays an important role in representing an event as a complete whole (perfective: peeled) or as a dynamic process (imperfective: was peeling).…

Sentence comprehension requires both syntactic prediction and working memory processes. Evidence suggests that both are impaired in agrammatic aphasia, and can independently contribute to comprehension breakdowns, but the relationship between them, especially during real-time sentence comprehension remains unclear. Two EEG studies investigated…

Intro. A full account of speech perception requires explaining how listeners organize the acoustic signal into speech objects (perceptual organization) and how listeners use their memory for language to impart meaning to the speech objects (linguistic memory). Traditionally these mechanisms have been investigated separately, and thus theorized as…

Across three separate investigations, this dissertation documents work examining the role of higher-order processes and cognitive effort during the top-down compensatory repair of degraded speech, specifically perceptual restoration. Perceptual restoration is a phenomenon where a listener can perceptually restore or repair speech…

Mikhail Bakhtin is a latecomer to the field of child development. His contributions emphasize the dialogic nature of language as a lived event of becoming for all and de-thrones any monologic truths that might be told otherwise. Dismantling any master theory that might determine the ways children are known (or know-able), Bakhtin offers a…

Arithmetic word problems are a staple in mathematical curricula yet give individuals of all ages difficulty. Successful word problem solving requires translating the problem into a symbolic arithmetic format. However, the linguistic component may make problem solving more complex and increase cognitive load, specifically the processes that…

People segment their continuous stream of experience into events, or temporal segments that have a beginning and an endpoint. But how are such event boundaries defined? Linguistic theories of event encoding draw a distinction between bounded events that are non-homogeneous, structured temporal developments leading to an inherent endpoint (e.g.,…

Foreign language anxiety has influenced reading achievement in English as a second language learning (ESL). However, less is known about how foreign language anxiety affects Chinese students learning English as L2 and the interplay between foreign language anxiety and cognitive-linguistic factors on L2 reading performance. This longitudinal study…

One of the main limitations of natural language-based approaches to meaning is that they do not incorporate multimodal representations the way humans do. In this study, we evaluate how well different kinds of models account for people's representations of both concrete and abstract concepts. The models we compare include unimodal distributional…

While the effects of pattern learning on language processing are well known, the way in which pattern learning shapes exploratory behavior has long gone unnoticed. We report on the way in which individual differences in statistical pattern learning affect performance in the domain of language along multiple dimensions. Analyzing data from healthy…

This dissertation explores how items encountered in the comprehension of language are stored in memory and subsequently accessed. Processing and comprehending language frequently requires the retrieval of items in memory so that a current linguistic element can be assigned an interpretation. For example, in a sentence such as "Miles loved his…

This study investigates how task complexity affects native speakers' and second language (L2) learners', and experts' perceptions of task difficulty in writing tasks. It also explores how task complexity influences English native speakers' and L2 learners' linguistic complexity in their writing. Ninety participants performed one simple and one…