Language is the basis of human communication and is the most important key to complete mental development and thinking. Therefore, children must learn to communicate using appropriate language. For this to happen, the development of language in the child must be understood as a biological process, complete with internal laws and with marked stages…

In this thesis, I use a combination of simulations and empirical data to demonstrate that a small set of structural and functional principles - the basic tenets of predictive coding theory - succinctly accounts for a very wide range of properties in the language processing system. Predictive coding approximates hierarchical Bayesian inference via…

Vygotsky chose consciousness as a foundation for his approach to psychology, although it took several iterations to arrive at his final conception of a dynamic, semantic system, which included not only thought and language, the subject of most of his work up to that point, but how we refract our experience of the world through personhood as well.…

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…

Word finding difficulty is a frequently reported subjective cognitive concern among persons with Multiple Sclerosis (pwMS). Word-finding relies on several information retrieval processes, including search and retrieval from the conceptual store, the phonological store, the syllabary, as well as other stores of information. Neuropsychological…

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…

The lexical representation of compound words in speech production is still under debate. While most studies with healthy adult speakers suggest that a single lemma representation is active during compound production, data from neuropsychological studies point toward multiple representations, with activation of the compound's constituent lemmas in…

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…

Lexical ERPs (event-related potentials) obtained in an oddball paradigm were suggested to be an index of the formation of new word representations in the brain in the learning process: with increased exposure to new lexemes, the ERP amplitude grows, which is interpreted as a signature of a new memory-trace build-up and activation. Previous…

It is well known that the semantic features of gender associated with peoples' names are represented in the conceptual semantic system. However, there is scant evidence that such knowledge plays a role in name comprehension, and if so, in which processing stage this occurs. The aim of this study was to provide evidence concerning the time course…

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…

Investigating instances where lexical selection fails can lead to deeper insights into the cognitive machinery and architecture supporting successful word retrieval and speech production. In this paper, we used a multiplex lexical network approach that combines semantic and phonological similarities among words to model the structure of the mental…

Negation is a universal component of human language; polarity sensitivity (i.e., lexical distributional constraints in relation to negation) is arguably so while being pervasive across languages. Negation has long been a field of inquiry in psychological theories and experiments of reasoning, which inspired many follow-up studies of negation and…

Reading plays an essential role in our everyday lives. The aim of this study is to investigate how letters are represented in the brain using the unique characteristics of the Arabic language, which can be written with 2 different scripts. The hypothesis proposed is that the processing of script is sound based: Phonology is what determines letter…

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…