This study examines effects of memory load on the processing of scalar implicature via a dual-task paradigm using reading span and self-paced reading. Results indicate that participants showed online sensitivity to underinformative sentences (e.g., "Some birds have wings and beaks") at the end of the sentence. This online sensitivity…

Despite the progress in information technology, artificial intelligence as well as all kinds of machine translation software, we found that to dynamically capture the essence and the spirit of the cultural item, one needs to resort to the human mind rather than to the machine that only decodes words away from their shades of meaning. The objective…

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…

Background: When reading a word, skilled adult readers automatically decompose the word into its separate morphemes by processing the word's morpho-orthography. In children, however, it still remains unclear when and how they start to automatically decompose words into morphemes. Methods: To better understand how primary school children learn and…

A phoneme-detection task shows that listeners of Sepedi use semantic information in processing but not prosody (Experiment 1). Sepedi is a language with no grammaticalised prosodic expression of focus. Sepedi listeners detected phoneme targets faster when the phoneme-bearing words were focussed (as opposed to unfocussed) but not when occurring in…

Reading comprehension is key to knowledge acquisition and to reinforcing memory for previous information. While reading, a mental representation is constructed in the reader's mind. The mental model comprises the words in the text, the relations between the words, and inferences linking to concepts in prior knowledge. The automated model of…

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…

Early and late bilinguals both differ in the speed with which they comprehend language or in their processing of sentences compared to monolinguals. This is possibly a result of cross-language interference, differential allocation of cognitive resources, or some other difference in language-dependent processes. This dissertation presents research…

Natural language is highly complex and can be challenging for some learners, yet the contribution of complexity to individual differences in language learning remains poorly understood. This poor understanding appears due to both a lack of consensus among researchers regarding what complexity is, and to on-line language research often employing…

Embodied models of language comprehension assume that words become associated with sensorimotor experiences during word learning. Novel word learning paradigms may provide insight into embodied effects, but studies in this domain have yet to account for how concepts and information known in first language (L1) might influence the sensorimotor…

Young people use slang for identifying themselves with a particular social group, gaining social recognition and respect from that group, and expressing their emotional state. One feature of Internet slang is its active use by youth in online communication, which, under certain conditions, may cause problematic Internet use (PIU). We conducted two…

One of the fundamental questions in the field of language acquisition is a learnability problem, which considers how learners acquire certain aspects of language which are not directly provided in the input or whose referents are not readily observable. This dissertation investigates Japanese children's acquisition of various linguistic phenomena,…

Purpose: Better performance for actions compared to objects has been reported in the semantic variant of primary progressive aphasia (svPPA). This study investigated the influence of the assessment task (naming, semantic picture matching) over the dissociation between objects and actions. Method: Ten individuals with svPPA and 17 matched controls…

We studied English-learning children's ability to learn the meanings of novel words from sentences containing truth-functional negation (Exp1) and to use the semantics of negation to inform word meaning (Exp2). In Exp1, 22-month-olds (n = 21) heard dialogues introducing a novel verb in either negative-transitive "("Mary didn't blick the…

This study examined the effects of working memory (WM), structure, and salience on the processing of English relative clauses (RCs) and participial reduced relative clauses (PRRCs) by L1 Thai learners. Salience in this research is the phonological alterations required for irregular verbs to inflect into the past participial form. The study…