The concept of translanguaging is one of the most successful ones in the recent history of multilingualism research. But what does it really mean? It covers such a wide semantic field that users seem to be free to decide its meaning in whatever way they wish. A key uniting idea of the different approaches is that teachers should 'draw upon' the…

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…

Children can acquire novel word meanings by using pragmatic cues. However, previous literature has frequently focused on in-the-moment word-to-meaning mappings, not delayed retention of novel vocabulary. Here, we examine how children use pragmatics as they learn and retain novel words. Thirty-three younger children (mean age: 5.0, range: 4.0-6.0,…

This paper details the methodology originally used for a cross-sector literature review of formative evaluation in Germany. The study involved an online keyword search using academic databases and Google Search to uncover documents containing and meaningfully discussing formative evaluation as well as alternative forms of this term in German that…

Words contain multitudes. This multiplicity of meanings raises two key questions, both of which this thesis attempts to address. First, are word meanings categorical or continuous? The results of Chapters 2-4 support a hybrid model, in which word meanings occupy a continuous state-space (Elman, 2009), which is further discretized along the…

Purpose: The purpose of this investigation was to evaluate language development and disorders course titles across communication sciences and disorders (CSD) graduate programs in an effort to determine whether adolescents were specifically being recognized via inclusive language or dedicated courses. The findings can be used to propel important…

This study, employing unmasked priming lexical decision tasks, examines the possible effects of the phonogram properties on the representation of Chinese phonograms and their radicals. In Experiment 1, the representation of radicals (semantic radical and phonetic radical) and their host phonograms is compared under various phonograms types.…

Measuring meaning is a central problem in cultural sociology and word embeddings may offer powerful new tools to do so. But like any tool, they build on and exert theoretical assumptions. In this paper, I theorize the ways in which word embeddings model three core premises of a structural linguistic theory of meaning: that meaning is coherent,…

Three preregistered experiments, conducted in 2021, investigated whether English-speaking American preschoolers (N = 120; 4-6 years; 54 females, predominantly White) and adults (N = 80; 18-52 years; 59 females, predominantly Asian) metonymically extend owners' names to owned objects--an extension not typically found in English. In Experiment 1, 5-…

Given that both spoken and written language are subject to corruption from speech errors, disfluencies, and environmental noise, successful language comprehension sometimes requires deriving a non-veridical understanding of the linguistic input. Recent work has demonstrated that these non-veridical understandings are not merely semantic, but that,…

When we memorize multiple words simultaneously, semantic relatedness among those words assists memory. For example, the information about "apple", "banana," and "orange" will be connected via a common concept of "fruits" and become easy to retain and recall. Neural mechanisms underlying this semantic…

"What 'is' marketing?" Perusal of the marketing literature reveals that "marketing" has been defined and characterized in multiple, often inconsistent but typically ambiguous, ways that have evolved over time. The present essay argues that characterizing marketing as a transdisciplinary body of knowledge formally captures its…

This study aimed to understand, from a critical point of view, the condition of semantic, discursive, and rhetorical displacement that operates in the Colombian educational system, where the category of education has been displaced by the concept of competence. The following question guides the investigation: What are the deep meanings, from…

Semantic richness theory predicts that words with richer, more distinctive semantic representations should facilitate performance in a word recognition memory task. We investigated the contribution of multiple aspects of sensorimotor experience--those relating to the body, communication, food, and objects--to word recognition memory, by analyzing…

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…