Both classic thought experiments and recent empirical evidence suggest that children frequently encounter new words whose meanings are underdetermined by the extralinguistic contexts in which they occur. The role that these referentially ambiguous events play in children's word learning is central to ongoing debates in the field. Do children learn…

Ambiguity is a natural part of language and in studying the comprehension and resolution of ambiguity in a second language (L2), we must consider the influence of the native language. This dissertation examines L2 processing of the lexical semantic ambiguities, homonyms and polysemes. These are words that share the same form but have different…

This study investigates the organization of the mental lexicon in Spanish as a foreign language in contrast to its structure in Spanish as a native language through semantic networks derived from lexical availability or semantic fluency tasks. To this end, we collected the responses of 75 American learners of Spanish and 75 native speakers in…

What is the nature of conceptual representations? Models of semantic memory often describe concepts as a distributed feature space. However, it remains unknown which subset of this feature space constitutes the invariant representation of a concept. In this dissertation, I investigate the nature of modality-independent representations and their…

Lexical ambiguity--the phenomenon of a single word having multiple, distinguishable senses--is pervasive in language. Both the degree of ambiguity of a word (roughly, its number of senses) and the relatedness of those senses have been found to have widespread effects on language acquisition and processing. Recently, distributional approaches to…

"Hospital" can refer to a physical place or more figuratively to the people associated with it. Such place-for-institution metonyms are common in everyday language, but there remain several open questions in the literature regarding how they are processed. The goal of the current eyetracking experiments was to investigate how metonyms…

Most words in natural languages are polysemous; that is, they have related but different meanings in different contexts. This one-to-many mapping of form to meaning presents a challenge to understanding how word meanings are learned, represented, and processed. Previous work has focused on solutions in which multiple static semantic…

Combining adjective meaning with the modified noun is particularly challenging for children under three years. Previous research suggests that in processing noun-adjective phrases children may over-rely on noun information, delaying or omitting adjective interpretation. However, the question of whether this difficulty is modulated by semantic…

Numerous developmental findings suggest that infants and toddlers engage predictive processing during language comprehension. However, a significant limitation of this research is that associative (bottom-up) and predictive (top-down) explanations are not readily differentiated. Following adult studies that varied predictiveness relative to…

Semantic similarity between stimuli can lead to false memories and can also potentially cause retroactive interference (RI) for veridical memories. Here, participants first learned spatial locations for "critical" words that reliably produce false memories in the Deese-Roediger-McDermott paradigm. Next, participants centrally viewed…

How do infants learn about the formal properties of language using only cues they can access in speech? And what intuitions do they bring to the learning problem? Chapter 2: To explore whether current notions of statistically-based language learning could successfully scale to infants' linguistic experiences "in the wild", we implemented…

The phenomenon of scalar diversity refers to the well-replicated finding that different scalar expressions give rise to scalar implicatures (SIs) at different rates. Previous work has shown that part of the scalar diversity effect can be explained by theoretically motivated factors. Although the effect has been established only in controlled…

Previous studies on L2 (i.e., second language) Chinese compound processing have focused on the relative efficiency of two routes: holistic processing versus combinatorial processing. However, it is still unclear whether Chinese compounds are processed with multilevel representations among L2 learners due to the hierarchical structure of the…

Eventualities have been recognized as psychologically and linguistically relevant for more than 50 years. Psychologically, eventualities are complex bundles of information derived from our perceptions of the world. The question for linguists is how much of this complexity is reflected in our eventuality-denoting lexical entries and the…

Previous research suggests that statistical learning enhances memory for self-related information at the individual level and that individuals exhibit better memory for partner-related items than they do for irrelevant items in joint contexts (i.e., the joint memory effect, JME). However, whether statistical learning improves memory for…