The goal of this study is to investigate whether or not Turkish has a particular preference in ambiguity resolution of relative clause attachment when two possible NPs are available as in "Someone shot [NP1 the servant] of [NP2 the actress] [RC who was on the balcony]". The relevant literature has showed that RC attachment…

Compositionality has been a central concept in linguistics and philosophy for decades, and it is increasingly prominent in many other areas of cognitive science. Its status, however, remains contentious. Here, I reassess the nature and scope of the principle of compositionality (Partee, 1995) from the perspective of psycholinguistics and cognitive…

Speakers display considerable variability in language use and representations: they may have different pronunciations of the same word, different intended meanings for the same phrases, and different sets of syntactic constraints in their internalized grammars. Comprehenders adapt to such variability by constantly updating their expectations for…

This dissertation explores the role of memory in language processing, and specifically how interference during lexical encoding can result in downstream interference during retrieval. The dissertation merges insights from both the sentence processing literature as well as the study of memory in non-sentential contexts and focuses on two factors…

The meaning of most words in language depends on their context. Understanding how the human brain extracts contextualized meaning, and identifying where in the brain this takes place, remain important scientific challenges. But technological and computational advances in neuroscience and artificial intelligence now provide unprecedented…

Linguistic personality, in the domain of applied linguistics and discourse analysis, has risen to the form, content and style of a genre in the contemporary linguistic paradigm. It is determined by an individual's language behaviors, inter-cultural interactions, and self-expression, and is shaped by the educational environment. The current study…

The goal of this study is to provide better empirical insight into the licensing conditions of a large set of NPIs in German so that they can be used as reliable diagnostics in future research on negation-related phenomena. Experiment 1 tests the acceptability of 60 NPIs under semantic operators that are expected to license superstrong, strong,…

We propose that negative clauses are generally interpreted as if the affirmative portion of the clause is under discussion, a likely topic. This predicts a preference for affirmative (topical) antecedents over negative antecedents of a following missing verb phrase (VP). Three experiments tested the predictions of this hypothesis in sentences…

Although there is a broad consensus that both the procedural and declarative memory systems play a crucial role in language learning, use, and knowledge, the mapping between linguistic types and memory structures remains underspecified: by default, a dual-route mapping of language systems to memory systems is assumed, with declarative memory…

This systematic review synthesizes the literature (involving 62 empirical studies) regarding the effectiveness of cognitive linguistics-inspired language pedagogies (CL-ILPs) on second language (L2) learning. It begins with an overview of the main theoretical tenets of cognitive linguistics followed by a description of the data selection, coding,…

This corpus-driven study explores the linguistics phenomenon of mental verbs in English song lyrics from 1960s until 2000s. This study aims to identify the frequency distributions of lexical verbs, mental verbs, and to analyze the language uses of mental verbs in the Diachronic Corpus of English Song Lyrics (DCOESL). Quantitative and qualitative…

Purpose: This research investigated the nature of cognitive decline in prodromal Alzheimer's disease (AD), particularly in mild cognitive impairment, amnestic type (aMCI). We assessed language in aMCI as compared with healthy aging (HA) and healthy young (HY) with new psycholinguistic assessment of complex sentences, and we tested the degree to…

Semantic variables enable L2 researchers and materials creators to quantify and control the effects of meaning on cognition. However, in recent years, many variables have been normed and published. Parsing the methods employed in norming this myriad of variables and which disparate theories informed their creation can be an opaque and arduous…

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…

Embodiment theories argue that language comprehension involves activating specific sensory--motor systems in the brain. Previous research performed in English and other Indo-European languages suggests that, when compared to compatible sentences referring to the same actions performed sequentially (e.g. 'After cleaning the wound he unrolled the…