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…

The systems underlying incremental sentence comprehension are, in general, highly successful -- comprehenders typically understand sentences of their native language quickly and accurately. The occasional failure of the system to deliver an appropriate representation of a sentence is therefore potentially illuminating. There are many ways the…

Singular "they" is becoming increasingly common and accepted, but many people find it difficult to learn, instead making seemingly-counterintuitive errors like "she uses they/them pronouns." Existing pronoun production models argue that speakers select pronouns based on morphosyntactic information associated with a name, or…

Over the past few years, many studies have examined the cognitive processes of students when translating texts from one language to another. However, little is known about the cognitive processes of Arab translators when translating texts from their heritage language into English. This study aims to track the cognitive processes of students as…

Distributional models of semantics learn word meanings from contextual co-occurrence patterns across a large sample of natural language. Early models, such as LSA and HAL (Landauer & Dumais, 1997; Lund & Burgess, 1996), counted co-occurrence events; later models, such as BEAGLE (Jones & Mewhort, 2007), replaced counting co-occurrences…

There is a general consensus in theories of human speech recognition that humans engage in predictive processing during online speech processing. There are also claims that predictive processing indicates the operation of a predictive coding (PC) mechanism (Rao & Ballard, 1999). Formally, PC is a generative model where top-down signals consist…

The present study compared bilingualism with bidialectalism in their respective impact on executive control, using a short-term language switching training paradigm for participants who were both bidialectals (Shanghainese-Mandarin Chinese) and bilinguals (Chinese-English). Twenty participants were assigned to a control group where no language…

Spelling poses a challenge to Arabic-speaking learners due to the complexity of the morphological and orthographic systems in Arabic. Arabic morphology has been argued to play a critical role in spelling since its morphological operations are built on a system consisting of a root that is interlocking into different patterns of vowels to form…

When acquiring a second language, learners must become able to perceive the difference between novel sounds ("discrimination") and also associate strings of sounds with distinct vocabulary items ("lexical encoding"). Recent research has questioned whether discrimination is a sufficient or necessary condition for encoding, and…

Non-adult-like linguistic behavior in children is sometimes taken as evidence for endogenous factors that drive selection of grammatical features from the child's hypothesis space of possible grammars. Analyses of English-acquiring children's productions of medial "wh"-phrases exemplify this trend in particular. We provide an alternative…

Children with reading difficulties (RD) share challenges in executive functions (EF). Neurobiological correlates provide evidence for EF challenges during reading among these readers, but an online cognitive load detection mechanism has yet to be developed. Nevertheless, eye-movement tracking can provide online data of reading patterns (pupil…

This dissertation represents the first attempt to integrate typological, semantic, and psycholinguistic perspectives to elucidate a semantically "bizarre" and "illogical" phenomenon called "expletive negation" (henceforth, EN) which is well known in Romance languages but has so far attracted little attention outside…

The purpose of this study was to examine the role and nature of phonology in silent reading of Japanese sentences. An experiment was conducted using a Japanese sentence acceptability judgment task. One important finding was that participants more rapidly rejected homophonic sentences in which one two-kanji compound word was replaced by its…

We assessed the effect of bilingualism on metacognitive processing in the artificial language learning task, in 2 experiments varying in the difficulty to segment the language. Following a study phase in which participants were exposed to the artificial language, segmentation performance was assessed by means of a dual forced-choice recognition…

There is mounting evidence that the ease of producing and understanding language depends not only on the frequencies of individual words but also on the frequencies of word combinations. However, in two picture description experiments, Janssen and Barber (2012) found that French and Spanish speakers' speech onset latencies for short phrases…