The field of Linguistics has long been interested in the verb meanings of intransitive verbs and their argument structure, specifically the breakdown of intransitive verbs into unaccusative and unergative verb types. Despite extensive research, a universally applicable explanation for this breakdown remains elusive due in part to the variability…

Statistical learning (SL) plays a key role in literacy acquisition. Studies have increasingly revealed the influence of distributional statistical properties of words on visual word processing, including the effects of word frequency (lexical level) and mappings between orthography, phonology, and semantics (sub-lexical level). However, there has…

This dissertation is concerned with how world knowledge (plausibility) affects reading beyond how predictable what comes next is. Previous studies have explained the effect of plausibility in terms of probability, either because plausibility is the conditional probability of a role filler given what precedes or because plausibility affects reading…

Previous studies provided evidence for a connection between language processing and language change. We add to these studies with an exploration of the influence of lexical-distributional properties of words in orthographic space, semantic space, and the mapping between orthographic and semantic space on the probability of lexical extinction.…

The objective of this research is to build automated models that emulate VerbNet, a semantic resource for English verbs. VerbNet has been built and expanded by linguists, forming a hierarchical clustering of verbs with common semantic and syntactic expressions, and is useful in semantic tasks. A major drawback is the difficulty of extending a…

Previous work has ostensibly shown that readers rapidly adapt to less predictable ambiguity resolutions after repeated exposure to unbalanced statistical input (e.g., a high number of reduced relative-clause garden-path sentences), and that these readers grow to disfavor the a priori more frequent (e.g. main verb) resolution after exposure (Fine,…

Since probability is a new topic at the primary school level in many countries, many primary school teachers may consider themselves not well prepared or may not value the formative role of probability as a topic for their students to learn. Consequently, the assessment of teachers' attitudes using valid and reliable instruments is a preliminary…

Automatic answer assessment systems typically apply semantic similarity methods where student responses are compared with some reference answers in order to access their correctness. But student responses in dialogue based tutoring systems are often grammatically and semantically incomplete and additional information (e.g., dialogue history) is…

We evaluate here the performance of four models of cross-situational word learning: two global models, which extract and retain multiple referential alternatives from each word occurrence; and two local models, which extract just a single referent from each occurrence. One of these local models, dubbed "Pursuit," uses an associative…

We used event-related potentials (ERP) to investigate whether Spanish-English bilinguals preactivate form and meaning of predictable words. Participants read high-cloze sentence contexts (e.g., "The student is going to the library to borrow a..."), followed by the predictable word ("book"), a word that was form-related…

The presented research was conducted in order to investigate the connections between developmental dyslexia and the functioning of verbatim and gist memory traces--assumed in the fuzzy-trace theory. The participants were 71 high school students (33 with dyslexia and 38 without learning difficulties). The modified procedure and multinomial model of…

We investigated how struggling adult readers make use of sentence context to facilitate word processing when comprehending spoken language, conditions under which print decoding is not a barrier to comprehension. Stimuli were strongly and weakly constraining sentences (as measured by cloze probability), which ended with the most expected word…

Statistical learning may be central to lexical and grammatical development. The phonological and distributional properties of words provide probabilistic cues to their grammatical and semantic properties. Infants can capitalize on such probabilistic cues to learn grammatical patterns in listening tasks. However, infants often struggle to learn…

Two visual-world eye-tracking experiments investigated the role of prediction in the processing of repair disfluencies (e.g., "The chef reached for some salt uh I mean some ketchup ..."). Experiment 1 showed that listeners were more likely to fixate a critical distractor item (e.g., "pepper") during the processing of repair…

An interdisciplinary approach from linguistics, information sciences, learning sciences, and educational technology is used to explore the concept of information. Several key issues are highlighted, including: (1) learning language through meaning or probability; (2) the situational difference between message and meaning; (3) relationship between…