Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine whether older adults exhibit reduced abilities in coordinating lexical retrieval and syntactic formulation during sentence production and whether an individual's working memory capacity predicts age-related changes in sentence production. Method: A total of 124 Korean-speaking individuals (79 young…

All communication systems rely on sets of rules that must generally be followed for successful communication to be possible; in the case of human language, these rules are given by the grammar. However, despite these rules, there is considerable variation that has been noted across the grammar. In this dissertation, I explore one understudied…

Purpose: Tests measuring speech comprehension and listening effort for cochlear implant (CI) users may reflect important aspects of real-world speech communication. In this study, we describe the development of a multiple-talker, English-language sentence verification task (SVT) for use in adult CI users to measure speech comprehension and…

The acquisition of Italian stop consonants by Mandarin Chinese-speaking learners has hardly been investigated. This study was designed to fill this gap. To investigate Chinese learners' acquisition patterns of Italian voiced and voiceless stops, a perception experiment and a production experiment were conducted. Twenty Mandarin Chinese-speaking…

At conceptual and linguistic levels of cognition, events are said to be represented in terms of abstract categories, for example, the sentence "Jackie cut the bagel with a knife" encodes the categories Agent (i.e., "Jackie") and Patient (i.e., "the bagel"). In this paper, we ask whether entities such as "the…

Background: Generalisation inferences let readers identify a conceptually superordinate statement to represent multiple subordinate concepts. This study measures text genres' influence on the scope and timing of generalisation inferences. Methods: To measure the scope, or breadth, of generalisation inferences, undergraduates (N = 266) read…

This study delves into the syntactic parsing abilities of children and infants exposed to Catalan as their first language. Focusing first on ages 3 to 6, we conducted two sentence-picture matching tasks. In experiment 1, 3 to 4-year-old children failed in identifying singular third-person subjects within null-subject sentences, although they…

Comprehension of sentences with a center-embedded, object-gapped relative clause (ORC) is challenging for children as well as adults. Mismatching lexical and grammatical features of subject noun phrases (NPs) across the main clause and relative clause has been shown to facilitate comprehension. Adani et al. concluded that children's comprehension…

Machine translation (MT) is the automated process of translating text between different languages, encompassing a wide range of language pairs. This study focuses on non-professional bilingual speakers of Turkish and English, aiming to assess their ability to discern accuracy in machine translations and their preferences regarding MT. A particular…

Cloze items are commonly used for both assessing learning and as a learning activity. This paper investigates the selection of sentences for cloze item creation by comparing methods ranging from simple heuristics to deep learning summarization models. An evaluation using human-generated cloze items from three different science texts indicates that…

Verb-object idioms such as "kick the bucket" are very common in Spanish. This research set out to find what systematic differences exist between the literal and idiomatic interpretations of idioms of this kind from three different experimental perspectives: production, perception, and acceptability judgments focused on verbal aspect.…

"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…

To identify the relationship between non-verbal working memory and graphic symbol selection, this study examined whether the response time to select target symbols in a sentence construction task differed between two groups: a high non-verbal working memory group and a low non-verbal working memory group. The interaction effect between non-verbal…

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…

Theories of language processing differ with respect to the role of abstract syntax and semantics vs surface-level lexical co-occurrence (n-gram) frequency. The contribution of each of these factors has been demonstrated in previous studies of children and adults, but none have investigated them jointly. This study evaluated the role of all three…