The release of ChatGPT in 2022 has generated extensive speculation about how Artificial Intelligence (AI) will impact the capacity of institutions for higher learning to achieve their central missions of promoting learning and certifying knowledge. Our main questions were whether people could identify AI-generated text and whether factors such as…

A robust finding in psycholinguistics is that prior language experience influences subsequent language processing. This phenomenon is known as syntactic priming. Most of the empirical support for L2 syntactic priming comes from lab-based experiments. However, this evidence might not reflect how priming occurs in typical language activities in the…

In this dissertation, I investigate how people navigate ambiguity in everyday speech, with a focus on quantifier-negation sentences. Combining corpus analysis, behavioral experiments, and computational modeling in the Rational Speech Act framework, I explore preferred interpretations of quantifier-negation and examine the contexts and prosodies…

In the history of psycholinguistics, there are traditional accounts that have been told about language learning and processing. These accounts revolve around the constraints imposed by the age of language learning and by universal principles that are assumed to be natively given. The contribution of Brian MacWhinney and his collaborators has been…

The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) has outpaced existing research and regulatory frameworks in higher education, leading to varied institutional responses. Although some educators and institutions have embraced AI and generative AI (GenAI), other individuals remain cautious. This systematic literature review explored teaching…

Course planning is essential for academic success and the achievement of personal goals. Although universities provide course syllabi and curriculum maps for course planning, integrating and understanding these resources by the learners themselves for effective course planning is time-consuming and difficult. To address this issue, this study…

Is academic integrity research presented from a positive integrity standpoint? This paper uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques to explore a data set of 8,507 academic integrity papers published between 1904 and 2019.Two main techniques are used to linguistically examine paper titles: (1) bigram (word pair) analysis and (2) sentiment…

By age 2, children are developing foundational language processing skills, such as quickly recognizing words and predicting words before they occur. How do these skills relate to children's structural knowledge of vocabulary? Multiple aspects of language processing were simultaneously measured in a sample of 2-to-5-year-olds (N = 215): While older…

Semantic composition in language must be closely related to semantic composition in thought. But the way the two processes are explained differs considerably. Focusing primarily on propositional content, language theorists generally take semantic composition to be a truth-conditional process. Focusing more on extensional content, cognitive…

Compositionality has been a central concept in linguistics and philosophy for decades, and it is increasingly prominent in many other areas of cognitive science. Its status, however, remains contentious. Here, I reassess the nature and scope of the principle of compositionality (Partee, 1995) from the perspective of psycholinguistics and cognitive…

Semantic processing impairments are present in a proportion of individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Despite the numerous imaging studies investigating this language domain in ASD, there is a lack of consensus regarding the brain structures showing abnormal pattern of activity. This meta-analysis aimed to identify neural activation…

This dissertation articulates and defends a view about linguistic competence called 'variabilism'. According to variabilism, the epistemic demands of full linguistic competence vary in a particular way. More specifically, variabilism holds that different individual lexical application conditions (individually essential metaphysical ways of being…

Establishing dependencies during language comprehension requires access to previously encoded information. In the current study, we investigate the speed and accuracy of processing dependencies containing subject-verb agreement. Three speed-accuracy tradeoff experiments investigate the accessibility of number information across different amounts…

Human language is an incredibly rich yet incredibly constrained system. Learning and generalizing these systematic constraints from small, sparse, and underspecified data presents a fundamental inference problem. Therapidity and ease by which humans learn these constraints has made this a foundational study in cognitive science, linguistics, and…

This activity prompts students to go beyond the often reductionist responses to new technologies (e.g. technological determinism) by creating a media literacy-focused infographic about the role, uses, ethical concerns, and/or impact of generative AI (e.g. ChatGPT). Sample topics have included the role of AI in specific industries (e.g. film,…