Purpose: This study examined whether college students with developmental language disorder (DLD) showed similar sensitivity to verb bias information during real-time sentence processing as typically developing (TD) peers. Method: Seventeen college students with DLD and 16 TD college students participated in a mouse-tracking experiment that…

Distributional models of semantics learn word meanings from contextual co-occurrence patterns across a large sample of natural language. Early models, such as LSA and HAL (Landauer & Dumais, 1997; Lund & Burgess, 1996), counted co-occurrence events; later models, such as BEAGLE (Jones & Mewhort, 2007), replaced counting co-occurrences…

One perennially important question for theories of sentence comprehension is whether the human sentence processing mechanism is "parallel" (i.e., it simultaneously represents multiple syntactic analyses of linguistic input) or "serial" (i.e., it constructs only a single analysis at a time). Despite its centrality, this question…

Various studies have consistently shown that collocations are processed faster than matched control phrases, both in L1 and in L2. Most of these studies focused on adjacent collocations (e.g. provide information). However, research in corpus linguistics normally uses a span to identify collocations (e.g. plus or minus four words), and these…

The main question that this thesis addresses is: in what way does structural information enter into the processing of long-distance dependencies? Does it constrain the computations, and if so, to what degree? Available experimental evidence suggests that sometimes structurally illicit but otherwise suitable constituents are accessed during…

This dissertation adopts an experimental approach to studying lie judgments. It focuses on lie judgments to different types of meaning within a pragmatic framework -- namely bare linguistic meaning, explicature, and implicature -- to study whether the (in)directness of communicated false content affects the extent to which an utterance is judged…

The present study presents a meta-analysis of the relations between phonological processing abilities and different mathematics subskills. Using a random-effects model with 94 studies (135 unique samples, 826 effect sizes), the present meta-analysis revealed a significant general association between phonological processing and mathematics (average…

In order to learn the mappings from words to referents, children must integrate co-occurrence information across individually ambiguous pairs of scenes and utterances, a challenge known as cross-situational word learning. In machine learning, recent multimodal neural networks have been shown to learn meaningful visual-linguistic mappings from…

How could individual differences in processing non-speech acoustic signals influence their cue weighting strategies for L2 speech contrasts? The present study investigated this question by testing forty L1 Chinese-L2 English listeners with two tasks: one for testing the listeners' sensitivity to pitch and temporal information of non-speech…

Are oral sentences accompanied by pictures easier to understand than written sentences accompanied by the same pictures? This question--intensely discussed for more than two decades in educational, psychological, and psycholinguistic research in terms of "modality effect in multimedia learning," "split-attention effect," or…

This paper examines current practices that embrace the union between foreign language (L2) teaching and translation in higher education (HE). The rejection of monolingualism and prescriptive principles in favour of bi-, multi-, or plurilingualism; a diversified interdisciplinarity; new sociocultural realities characterised by greater international…

This study, which is part of a larger project that aims to make online math more accessible to students with visual impairments (VI), examines the text quality of math assessment items for students with VI who use screen readers. Using data from about 29.5 million students taking standard versions of the MAP Growth math assessment, and 48,845…

We use vocational training curricula to investigate how IT skills are trained within broader "skills packages" and how these relate to labour market outcomes. Skills packages are the typical combinations of IT skills (e.g., CNC) and technical or nontechnical skills (e.g., material sciences or work safety) that are jointly required in the…

Over the last five years, tremendous strides have been made in advancing the AIG methodology required to produce items in diverse content areas. However, the one content area where enormous problems remain unsolved is language arts, generally, and reading comprehension, more specifically. While reading comprehension test items can be created using…

With the increasing consensus that a single effect of bilingualism is unlikely, some scholars shift their focus to elements that may exert an influence on the bilingual brain. One such element that has been garnering attention lately concerns the role of L1-L2 typological distance. In this conceptual analysis, I make the case that the foundations…