The Mayan language Mam uses complex predicates to express events. Complex predicates map multiple semantic elements onto a single word, and consequently have a blend of lexical and phrasal features. The chameleon-like nature of complex predicates provides a window on children's ability to express phrasal combinations at the one-word stage of…

Background: Bilingual assessment is particularly difficult in the very first period of children's second language (L2) exposure. This exploratory, longitudinal study examined L2 learning after 1 and 2 years of L2 exposure by young immigrants and how it is affected by their age at first exposure to the L2 (AoE). Method: Participants were 18…

Upon hearing a novel label, listeners tend to assume that it refers to a novel, rather than a familiar object. While this disambiguation or mutual exclusivity (ME) effect has been robustly shown across development, it is unclear what it involves. Do listeners use their pragmatic and lexical knowledge to exclude the familiar object and thus select…

Prominent theories of reading development have separately emphasized the relevance of children's skill in learning (Share, 2008) and lexical representations (Perfetti & Hart, 2002). Integrating these ideas, we examined whether skill in learning lexical representations is a mechanism that might explain children's reading development. To do so…

Young people use slang for identifying themselves with a particular social group, gaining social recognition and respect from that group, and expressing their emotional state. One feature of Internet slang is its active use by youth in online communication, which, under certain conditions, may cause problematic Internet use (PIU). We conducted two…

Due to the typological differences between Korean's aspect system and English's aspect system in terms of progressive construction "-ko iss," learners can no doubt have difficulty acquiring and using the "-ko iss" construction in learner Korean. This dissertation investigates two main points: (i) how is the "-ko iss"…

One of the fundamental questions in the field of language acquisition is a learnability problem, which considers how learners acquire certain aspects of language which are not directly provided in the input or whose referents are not readily observable. This dissertation investigates Japanese children's acquisition of various linguistic phenomena,…

The diacritical markers that represent most of the vowels in the Arabic orthography are generally omitted from written texts. Previous research revealed that the absence of diacritics reduces reading comprehension performance even by skilled readers of Arabic. One possible explanation is that many Arabic words become ambiguous when diacritics are…

We removed a key uncertainty in the Deese/Roediger/McDermott (DRM) illusion. The mean backward associative strength (MBAS) of DRM lists is the best-known predictor of this illusion, but it is confounded with semantic relations between lists and critical distractors. Thus, it is unclear whether associative relations, semantic relations, or both…

The study aims at unraveling the conceptual metaphor underlying the English verb of visual perception "see" in fiction writing. It has two research questions: 1) What are the conceptual metaphors underlying the linguistic expressions of the English verb of visual perception "see" in fiction writing and 2) What are the…

This study examined distributional statistical learning of positional, phonetic, and semantic regularities of an artificial orthography in Chinese children aged 8-10 years: 29 with dyslexia, 29 age-matched controls, and 30 reading-level matched controls. Despite having positional regularity learning performance comparable to the controls, the…

The pervasive use of distributional semantic models or word embeddings for both cognitive modeling and practical application is because of their remarkable ability to represent the meanings of words. However, relatively little effort has been made to explore what types of information are encoded in distributional word vectors. Knowing the internal…

Arithmetic problem solving is a crucial part of mathematics education. However, existing problem solving theories do not fully account for the semantic constraints partaking in the encoding and recoding of arithmetic word problems. In this respect, the limitations of the main existing models in the literature are discussed. We then introduce the…

Purpose: Better performance for actions compared to objects has been reported in the semantic variant of primary progressive aphasia (svPPA). This study investigated the influence of the assessment task (naming, semantic picture matching) over the dissociation between objects and actions. Method: Ten individuals with svPPA and 17 matched controls…

The ability to make inferences is essential for effective language comprehension. While inferencing training benefits reading comprehension in school-aged children (see Elleman, 2017, for a review), we do not yet know whether it is beneficial to support the development of these skills prior to school entry. In a pre-registered randomised…