Researchers that investigate the media's coverage of health have historically relied on keyword searches to retrieve relevant health news coverage, and manual content analysis methods to categorize and score health news text. These methods are problematic. Manual content analysis methods are labor intensive, time consuming, and inherently…

This dissertation investigates the neural and behavioral correlates of grammatical agreement computation during language comprehension in native English speakers and highly advanced L1 Spanish-L2 English bilinguals. In a series of electrophysiological (event-related brain potential (ERP)) and behavioral (acceptability judgment and self-paced…

This paper describes My Science Tutor (MyST), an intelligent tutoring system designed to improve science learning by students in 3rd, 4th and 5th grades (7 to 11 years old) through conversational dialogs with a virtual science tutor. In our study, individual students engage in spoken dialogs with the virtual tutor Marni during 15 to 20 minute…

Word association responses in first-language (L1) Spanish and second-language (L2) English were investigated by means of response latencies and types of associative response produced. The primary aims were to establish whether (a) some response types are produced more often or faster than others, (b) participants' L2 response time profiles mirror…

Using the theory of mental models to account for the process of human mental information processing and representation has become an important approach in the field of knowledge engineering. Most methods of knowledge assessment are based on graphical concept mapping techniques. Tools like MITOCAR complement the graphical approaches by…

Speakers routinely adjust their behavior upon assessing the information they share in common with their conversational partners, but there remains controversy over when and how these adjustments happen. In this dissertation I address two debates regarding partner-specific adjustments: (a) whether they recruit the language processing system in a…

Linguists tell us that the sentence "I enjoyed yourself" is ungrammatical because it violates structural constraints on English sentences. Is this a fact about the "psychology" of English speakers, or a fact about some "mind-independent" state of affairs? If it is indeed a fact about the speaker's psychological makeup then is it so in virtue of…

Background: Stuttering is prone to strike during speech initiation more so than at any other point in an utterance. The use of auditory feedback (AAF) has been found to produce robust decreases in the stuttering frequency by creating an electronic rendition of choral speech (i.e., speaking in unison). However, AAF requires users to self-initiate…

Previous research suggests that the right hemisphere (RH) may contribute uniquely to discourse and text processing by activating and maintaining a wide range of meanings, including more distantly related meanings. The present study used the word-lists false memory paradigm [Roediger, H. L., III, & McDermott, K. B. (1995). "Creating false memories:…

Most current approaches to linguistic structure suggest that language is recursive, that recursion is a fundamental property of grammar, and that independent performance constraints limit recursive abilities that would otherwise be infinite. This article presents a usage-based perspective on recursive sentence processing, in which recursion is…

This paper investigates the effect of the repetition of phonological elements on accuracy in spontaneous language production. Using a corpus of naturalistic speech errors, it is shown that repetition of a whole segment doubles the error rate on the second token (a perseveratory effect), for onset consonants, vowels, and coda consonants; the effect…

When interpreting a message, a listener takes into account several sources of linguistic and extralinguistic information. Here we focused on one particular form of extralinguistic information, certain speaker characteristics as conveyed by the voice. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we examined the neural structures involved in the…

Two event-related potential experiments investigated the effects of syntactic and semantic context information on the processing of noun/verb (NV) homographs (e.g., park). Experiment 1 embedded NV-homographs and matched unambiguous words in contexts that provided only syntactic cues or both syntactic and semantic constraints. Replicating prior…

The purpose of the study was to investigate speed of processing in college students with a history of problems with language. Affected individuals (n = 16) were identified through a self-reported history of language and/or reading difficulties, and compared to a group of 16 unaffected individuals. Measures of language ability and a battery of…

Recent studies in usage-based linguistics have found that construction learning is more effective when input is skewed toward a prototypical exemplar of the construction, thereby reflecting the frequency distribution in natural language. This study investigates the extent to which a prototypical ditransitive verb with high frequency ("give")…