Linguistic phenomena (e.g., words and syntactic structure) co-occur with a wide variety of meanings. These systematic correlations can help readers to interpret a text and create predictions about upcoming material. However, to what extent these correlations influence discourse processing is still unknown. We address this question by examining…

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…

This dissertation features a relative clause island, whose status has been known to differ significantly across languages and extraction types. By conducting a series of acceptability judgment experiments with human participants, as well as measuring token-by-token surprisal values among large language models, I demonstrate the following: First,…

Systematic reviews and meta-analyses are crucial for advancing research, yet they are time-consuming and resource-demanding. Although machine learning and natural language processing algorithms may reduce this time and these resources, their performance has not been tested in education and educational psychology, and there is a lack of clear…

Background: Core lexicon (CL) analysis is a time efficient and possibly reliable measure that captures discourse production abilities. For people with aphasia, CL scores have demonstrated correlations with aphasia severity, as well as other discourse and linguistic measures. It was also found to be clinician-friendly and clinically sensitive…

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…

Automatic essay scoring (AES) is an essential educational application in natural language processing. This automated process will alleviate the burden by increasing the reliability and consistency of the assessment. With the advances in text embedding libraries and neural network models, AES systems achieved good results in terms of accuracy.…

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…

In the property listing task (PLT), participants are asked to list properties for a concept (e.g., for the concept "dog," "barks," and "is a pet" may be produced). In conceptual property norming (CPNs) studies, participants are asked to list properties for large sets of concepts. Here, we use a mathematical model of…

Young children can exploit the syntactic context of a novel word to narrow down its probable meaning. But how do they learn which contexts are linked to which semantic features in the first place? We investigate if 3- to 4-year-old children (n = 60) can learn about a syntactic context from tracking its use with only a few familiar words. After…

Background: Over the past few decades, the process and methodology of automatic question generation (AQG) have undergone significant transformations. Recent progress in generative natural language models has opened up new potential in the generation of educational content. Objectives: This paper explores the potential of large language models…

We present a visual world eye-tracking study on Tseltal (a Mayan language) and investigate whether verbal information can be used to anticipate an upcoming referent. Basic word order in transitive sentences in Tseltal is Verb--Object--Subject (VOS). The verb is usually encountered first, making argument structure and syntactic information…

Free text answers to short questions can reflect students' mastery of concepts and their relationships relevant to learning objectives. However, automating the assessment of free text answers has been challenging due to the complexity of natural language. Existing studies often predict the scores of free text answers in a "black box"…

It is widely assumed that subliminal word priming is case insensitive and that a short SOA (< 100 ms) is required to observe any effects. Here we attempted to replicate results from an influential study with the inclusion of a longer SOA to re-examine these assumptions. Participants performed a semantic categorisation task on visible word…

Purpose: Processing real-world sounds requires acoustic and higher-order semantic information. We tested the theory that individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) show enhanced processing of acoustic features and impaired processing of semantic information. Methods: We used a change deafness task that required detection of speech and…