A variant of the picture--word interference paradigm was used in three experiments to investigate the horizontal information flow of semantic and phonological information between nouns in spoken Mandarin Chinese sentences. Experiment 1 demonstrated that there is a semantic interference effect when the word in the second phrase (N3) and the first…

Recent studies have shown that listeners use verbs and other predicate terms to anticipate reference to semantic entities during real-time language comprehension. This process involves evaluating the denoted action against relevant properties of potential referents. The current study explored whether action-relevant properties are readily…

This paper investigates whether the semantic and phonological levels in speech production are specific to spoken languages or universal across modalities. We examined semantic and phonological effects during Catalan Signed Language (LSC: Llengua de Signes Catalana) production using an adaptation of the picture-word interference task: native and…

Stanislas Dehaene has published a remarkable book on the neurons of reading. It is a comprehensive description of the main issues related to the "paradox of reading": how humans process linguistic information using the visual brain path while the brain has not evolved in the short period of time since the invention of writing. The article presents…

The authors investigated semantic neighborhood density effects on visual word processing to examine the dynamics of activation and competition among semantic representations. Experiment 1 validated feature-based semantic representations as a basis for computing semantic neighborhood density and suggested that near and distant neighbors have…

Work in experimental psycholinguistics has shown that the processing of coordinate structures is facilitated when the two conjuncts share the same syntactic structure [Frazier, L., Munn, A., & Clifton, C. (2000). "Processing coordinate structures." "Journal of Psycholinguistic Research," 29(4) 343-370]. In the present paper, we argue that this…

In semantic categorization, masked primes that are category-congruent with the target (e.g., "Planets: mars-VENUS") facilitate responses relative to category-incongruent primes (e.g., "tree-VENUS"). The present study investigated why this category congruence effect is more consistently found with narrow categories (e.g., "Numbers larger/smaller…

Models of speech perception attribute a different role to contextual information in the processing of assimilated speech. This study concerned perceptual processing of regressive voice assimilation in French. This phonological variation is asymmetric in that assimilation is partial for voiced stops and nearly complete for voiceless stops. Two…

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…