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…

The so-called syllable position effect in speech errors has been interpreted as reflecting constraints posed by the frame structure of a given language, which is separately operating from linguistic content during speech production. The effect refers to the phenomenon that when a speech error occurs, replaced and replacing sounds tend to be in the…

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…

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…

Agreement is a covariation in morphological form that reflects relations between words. A series of experiments were carried out in Italian during production and comprehension where an element interferes with agreement. The likelihood of interference found in both modalities is related to the markedness of the intervener and to its grammatical…

The processing of morphological information during Chinese word memorization was investigated in the present study. Participants were asked to study words presented to them on a computer screen in the studying phase and then judge whether presented words were old or new in the test phase. In addition to parent words (i.e. the words studied in the…

This article aims to discuss ten beliefs that teachers hold about second language (L2) learning and to relate these to relevant theories and approaches in the field of second language acquisition (SLA). It is especially written for L2 teachers who would like to know more about theoretical approaches that seek to explain L2 learning. Preliminary…

A fundamental challenge for human cognition is perceiving and acting in a world in which the statistics that characterize available sensory data are non-stationary. This thesis focuses on this problem specifically in the domain of sentence comprehension, where linguistic variability poses computational challenges to the processes underlying…

This dissertation provides a language processing perspective on the study of second language acquisition (SLA) of tense and aspect. Of special interest are the universal vis-a-vis language-specific dimensions of temporal and aspectual semantics involved. According to the Aspect Hypothesis (AH, e.g. Andersen & Shirai, 1994), the initial…

Psycholinguistic research has shown that the influence of abstract syntactic knowledge on performance is shaped by particular sentences that have been experienced. To explore this idea, the authors applied a connectionist model of sentence production to the development and use of abstract syntax. The model makes use of (a) error-based learning to…

Exploratory study designed to provide a general overview of the simultaneous interpretation process. Based on an unpublished doctoral dissertation supported by a Public Health Service Research Grant from the National Institute of Mental Health. (VM)

Children aged three to six were shown drawings of three objects that were identical except for differences in size in one or both dimensions. Each child was asked to determine if one object was the tallest. A missing feature model was not supported, since a child was often correct for some items and incorrect for others. Errors were partially…

The failure of inhibition hypothesis posits a theoretical distinction between implicit and explicit access in deep dyslexia. Specifically, the effects of failure of inhibition are assumed only in conditions that have an explicit selection requirement in the context of production (i.e., aloud reading). In contrast, the failure of inhibition…

Environmentally contaminated speech errors (irrelevant words or phrases derived from the speaker's environment and erroneously incorporated into speech) are hypothesized to occur at a high level of speech processing, but with a relatively late insertion point. The data indicate that speech production processes are not independent of other…

The properties of four different tests of the treatment effect in experiments using linguistic materials are examined. (Author/RM)