Scalar inference, the process by which we infer meanings stronger than what was explicitly said, has long been a central topic of investigation in theoretical semantics-pragmatics, as well as in psycholinguistics. Upon encountering the sentence "Mary ate some of the deep dish", for instance, hearers regularly compute the pragmatic…

The study explored the role of verbal fluency in determining reading and comprehension skills in Bengali among 10-year old typically developing Bengali children. Robust correlations were found between semantic fluency and word reading (0.63) as well as semantic fluency and comprehension (0.70). Good correlation was found between letter fluency and…

The theory of metaphor has gone through its development, starting with the works of Aristotle, in which it was begun, to the present state, when the linguistic paradigm became anthropocentric, and all linguistic phenomena are considered in direct connection with a person, his thinking, with society. The metaphor, which manifests the principle of…

Psycholinguistic research aims to understand how people make sense of language in their everyday lives. However, most of this research studies language under experimental conditions in which people are instructed to specifically monitor (and indicate) when there is a breakdown in their understanding. Moreover, there is an assumption that people…

Perception verbs and mental verbs have significant overlap in their syntax and semantics; both reference mental representations when taking embedded clauses, as in "I see that Maria was here" and "I think that Maria was here." Some have suggested that perception is more accessible for young children than mental states, raising…

Recent semantic space models learn vector representations for word meanings by observing statistical redundancies across a text corpus. A word's meaning is represented as a point in a high-dimensional semantic space, and semantic similarity between words is quantified by a function of their spatial proximity (typically the cosine of the angle…

This dissertation presents various machine learning applications for predicting different cognitive states of students while they are using a vocabulary tutoring system, DSCoVAR. We conduct four studies, each of which includes a comprehensive analysis of behavioral and linguistic data and provides data-driven evidence for designing personalized…

An over-arching goal in neurolinguistic research is to characterize the neural bases of semantic representation. A particularly relevant goal concerns whether we represent features and events (a) together in a generalized semantic hub or (b) separately in distinct but complementary systems. While the left anterior temporal lobe (ATL) is strongly…

Reconstructing memory for sequences is a complex process, likely involving multiple sources of information. In 3 experiments, we examined the source(s) of information that might underlie the ability to accurately place an event within a temporal context. The task was to estimate, after studying each list, the temporal position of a single test…

Within phenomenological philosophy four topics, (1) Body, (2) Time, (3) Others and the Social Order and (4) World serve as the major contexts in which human perception, action and reflection take place. At present only three of these domains have been studied from an empirical perspective, leaving Body as the one domain requiring further analysis.…

We report two picture-word interference experiments investigating conceptual and lexical activation, and response selection, in speaking. We varied stimulus onset asynchrony to investigate potential fine-grained activation and competition effects. Morphologically related existing and pseudoword adjectives, as well as associatively related…

Many cognitive scientists regard language as a rich source of evidence about the human mind. Much research over the past forty years has been driven by the assumption that words reveal underlying concepts. At the same time, cross-linguistic work has shown that languages differ dramatically in how they partition the world by name. To maintain the…

Disagreement exists regarding the functional locus of semantic interference of distractor words in picture naming. This effect is a cornerstone of modern psycholinguistic models of word production, which assume that it arises in lexical response-selection. However, recent evidence from studies of dual-task performance suggests a locus in…

The most important information conveyed by language is often contained not in the utterance itself, but in the interaction between the utterance and the comprehender's knowledge of the world and the current situation. This dissertation uses psycholinguistic methods to explore the effects of a common type of inference--causal inference--on language…

This article argues that Vygotsky's choice of word meaning as the basic unit of analysis for cultural psychology connects him to a German psycholinguistic tradition--exemplified in the work of G. W. F. Hegel and J. G. Herder--distinct from the Marxist tradition. While later commentators criticize Vygotsky's reliance on word meaning, arguing that…