This thesis presents arguments for a representational analysis of certain locality constraints on movement. I look at two types of locality effects: Negative Intervention effects in English (Beck 1996, 2006, Pesetsky 2000), and Relativized Minimality effects with adverb scrambling in Russian, Japanese, and Korean (Rizzi 1990, 2001, Li, Lin &…

One of the problems associated with automatic thesaurus construction is with determining the semantic relationship between word pairs. Quasi-synonyms provide a type of equivalence relationship: words are similar only for purposes of information retrieval. Determining such relationships in a thesaurus is hard to achieve automatically. The term…

Klinefelter (47,XXY) syndrome (KS), the most common form of sex-chromosomal aneuploidy, is characterized by physical, endocrinologic, and reproductive abnormalities. Individuals with KS also exhibit a cognitive/behavioral phenotype characterized by language and language-based learning disabilities and executive and attentional dysfunction in the…

Two experiments compared 7- and 8-year-olds' and 9- and 10-year-olds' ability to use semantic analysis and inference from context to understand idioms. We used a multiple-choice task and manipulated whether the idioms were transparent or opaque, familiar or novel, and presented with or without a supportive story context. Performance was compared…

Readers acquire information outside the current eye fixation. Previous research indicates that having only the fixated word available slows reading, but when the next word is visible, reading is almost as fast as when the whole line is seen. Parafoveal-on-foveal effects are interpreted to reflect that the characteristics of a parafoveal word can…

The current study investigated the neural correlates that underlie the processing of ambiguous words and the potential effects of semantic competition on that processing. Participants performed speeded lexical decisions on semantically related and unrelated prime-target pairs presented in the auditory modality. The primes were either ambiguous…

Priming effects have been well documented in behavioral psycholinguistics experiments: The processing of a word or a sentence is typically facilitated when it shares lexico-semantic or syntactic features with a previously encountered stimulus. Here, we used fMRI priming to investigate which brain areas show adaptation to the repetition of a…

We investigated whether children's ability to deal with referentially opaque contexts could be predicted by both metarepresentational ability (false-belief understanding) and metalinguistic awareness (the ability to compare and evaluate statements containing referring expressions). Five- to 7-year-olds completed opacity, false-belief,…

Verbal repetition is conventionally considered to require motor-reproduction of only the phonologically relevant content of a perceived linguistic stimulus, while imitation of incidental acoustic properties of the stimulus is not an explicit part of this task. Exemplar-based theories of speech processing, however, would predict that imitation…

When addressing infants, many adults adopt a particular type of speech, known as infant-directed speech (IDS). IDS is characterized by exaggerated intonation, as well as reduced speech rate, shorter utterance duration, and grammatical simplification. It is commonly asserted that IDS serves in part to facilitate language learning. Although…

Comprehension of verb-phrase ellipsis (VPE) requires reevaluation of recently processed constituents, which often necessitates retrieval of information about the elided constituent from memory. A. E. Martin and B. McElree (2008) argued that representations formed during comprehension are content addressable and that VPE antecedents are retrieved…

The influence of addition and deletion neighbors on visual word identification was investigated in four experiments. Experiments 1 and 2 used Spanish stimuli. In Experiment 1, lexical decision latencies were slower and less accurate for words and nonwords with higher-frequency deletion neighbors (e.g., "jugar" in "juzgar"),…

Previous research has suggested that a failure in processing contextual information may account for the heterogeneous clinical manifestations and cognitive impairments observed in schizophrenia. In the domain of language, context processing in schizophrenia has been investigated mostly with single-word semantic priming paradigms; however, natural…

Speakers monitor their speech output by listening to their own voice. However, signers do not look directly at their hands and cannot see their own face. We investigated the importance of a visual perceptual loop for sign language monitoring by examining whether changes in visual input alter sign production. Deaf signers produced American Sign…

Our goal was to investigate auditory and speech perception abilities of children with and without reading disability (RD) and associations between auditory, speech perception, reading, and spelling skills. Participants were 9-year-old, Finnish-speaking children with RD (N = 30) and typically reading children (N = 30). Results showed significant…