This study intends to shed light on the inconclusive argument pertaining to children's acquisition of logical form (LF) operation. Specifically, we examined children's interpretations of sentences with the ambiguous modal verb "yinggai" "should," like "Xiaohua yinggai shangchuang shuijiao le", whose meanings…

In two self-paced, sentence-by-sentence reading experiments, we examined the difference in the processing of Spanish discourses containing overt and null pronouns. In both experiments, antecedents appeared in a single phrase ("John met Mary") or in a conjoined phrase ("John and Mary met"). In Experiment 1, we compared reading…

Our language changes very rapidly, accompanying political, social and cultural trends, as well as the evolution of science and technology. The Internet, especially the social media, has accelerated this process of change. This poses a severe challenge for both human beings and natural language processing (NLP) systems, which usually only model a…

Why do questions about idioms often leave us "tongue-tied" in our classrooms? This book takes a look at learning and teaching idioms from two perspectives. First is a survey of recent work on learning and teaching idioms from diverse perspectives in the linguistics and educational research literature. The survey includes definitions of…

In this study, we report the results of two self-paced reading experiments that investigated working memory capacity effects on the processing of globally ambiguous relative clauses by advanced Korean second language (L2) learners of English. Consistent with previous monolingual literature on the processing of temporary ambiguity, we found that…

Research on morphological awareness has shown that it contributes to literacy outcomes. However, because of the way morphological awareness is traditionally measured, there is speculation that tasks may reflect cognitive flexibility, working memory, or some other type of executive processing, versus awareness of morphology. Further complicating…

In an English Foreign Language learning context, where access to native like use of metaphorical language is limited, gaining this ability becomes challenging. For many years, foreign language educators didn't pay much attention to idiomatic language and assumed that idioms could only be taught through rote learning. For this reason, they face…

This dissertation aims to identify the locus of L2 processing inefficiency. Previous studies suggest that non-native processing is a specific result of an inefficient predictive mechanism that limits the ability of learners to generate linguistic expectations (Gruter, Rohde, & Schafer, 2014; 2016). Thus, this study employs two distinct online…

There is a growing theoretical, empirical, and methodological debate in the SLA field as to whether unawareness plays a role during attention to or processing of new incoming second language (L2) data. Indeed, studies that have methodologically addressed the construct of unawareness in their research designs offer both empirical support (e.g.,…

Previous research has given inconsistent evidence about whether familiar metonyms are more difficult to process than literal expressions. In 2 eye-tracking-while-reading experiments, we tested the hypothesis that the difficulty associated with processing metonyms would depend on sentence structure. Experiment 1 examined comprehension of familiar…

Many studies have previously reported that the recognition of a stem target (e.g., "teach") is facilitated by the prior masked presentation of a prime consisting of a derived form of it (e.g., "teacher"). We conducted two lexical decision experiments to investigate masked morphological priming in Spanish. Experiment 1 showed…

The purpose of this study is to develop a better understanding of technologies that use natural language as the basis for concept map construction. In particular, this study focuses on the semantic relation (SR) approach to drawing rich and authentic concept maps that reflect students' internal representations of a problem situation. The…

In connected speech, phonological assimilation to neighboring words can lead to pronunciation variants (e.g., "garden bench" [arrow right] "garde'm' bench"). A large body of literature suggests that listeners use the phonetic context to reconstruct the intended word for assimilation types that often lead to incomplete assimilations (e.g., a…

This study investigates the ERP components associated with the processing of words that are critical to generating and rejecting deductive conditional Modus Ponens arguments ("If P then Q; P//"Therefore, "Q"). The generation of a logical inference is investigated by placing a verb in the minor premise that matches the one used in the antecedent of…

Infants' early communicative repertoires include both words and symbolic gestures. The current study examined the extent to which infants organize words and gestures in a single unified lexicon. As a window into lexical organization, eighteen-month-olds' ("N" = 32) avoidance of word-gesture overlap was examined and compared with…