People sometimes lie by omitting information. The information lie tellers then report could be entirely truthful. We examined whether the truthful information that lie tellers report in omission lies contains verbal cues indicating that the person is lying. We made a distinction between (i) essential information (events surrounding the omission)…

This study investigated the nature of switch costs after trials on which the cued task had been either only prepared (cue-only trials) or both prepared and performed (completed trials). Previous studies have found that task-switch costs occur following cue-only trials, demonstrating that preparing--without performing--a task is sufficient to…

Construal level theory states that future events that are nearer in the future and events that are more likely to happen have lower construal levels, and therefore have less detail, than events that are further away and/or less likely to happen. Consistent with this theory, the number of details in a statement can be a moderately good cue to…

Two experiments determined whether metamemory judgments invoking covert retrieval practice for a list of unrelated paired associate words led to the facilitation of learning a subsequent list. Three types of relation between successive lists were compared: negative transfer (A-B, A-D); a control for item-specific proactive interference (A-B, C-D);…

The current study examined verbal cues of veracity and deception in 911 calls reporting homicides or suicides of another person. Specifically, the current study compared differences in the presence/absence and number of potential verbal indicators between a sample of deceptive callers who concealed their role in causing the person's death and…

Accurately judging students' comprehension is a key professional competence for teachers. It is crucial for adapting instruction to students' needs and thereby promoting student learning. According to the cue-utilization framework, the accuracy of teachers' judgments depends on how predictive (or diagnostic) the information (or cues) that teachers…

Irrelevant salient distractors can trigger early quitting in visual search, causing observers to miss targets they might otherwise find. Here, we asked whether task-relevant salient cues can produce a similar early quitting effect on the subset of trials where those cues fail to highlight the target. We presented participants with a difficult…

How can syntactic and learnability analyses inform each other, and thus deepen our understanding of syntax and its acquisition? This dissertation illuminates this question through three case studies in Korean syntax. I examine cases in which two structures that display distinct syntactic properties share extremely similar surface forms, thus…

Noise is a common impedance to easy and accurate speech understanding. In the presence of noise, speech processing mechanisms proceed with partial or ambiguous inputs, and listeners will engage additional cognitive resources to make sense of what they hear. The extent to which this is situation is affected by diminished exposure to a language is…

Syntactic movement is central to mainstream generative theories of syntax (Chomsky, 1957; 1981; 1995; 2001). Under this view, sentences contain words that have moved and words that have not. Children only ever hear words in their moved positions so it is unclear how they could determine the ways these constituents must be merged and moved from…

Mandarin is a tone language that is spoken by billions of people in the world. Despite huge demand, there is a lack of assessment and treatment tools targeting Mandarin speakers with communication disorders. To better understand the speech profile of Mandarin speakers with communication disorders, this dissertation first examined contrastive…

There is growing consensus that selection history strongly guides spatial attention and is distinct from current goals and physical salience. Here, we focused on target-location probability cueing: when the target is more likely to appear in one region, search performance gradually improves for targets appearing in that region. Probability cueing…

The improvements in attention by mindfulness training have been proved. However, the effects of mindfulness training on attention to emotional stimuli were mixed. We employed a randomized, controlled design to investigate the effects of mindfulness training on attention to emotional expressions, and investigated whether baseline levels of…

Attention allows us to focus on relevant information while ignoring distractions. Effective suppression of distracting information is crucial for efficient visual search. Recent studies have developed two paradigms to investigate attentional suppression: cued-suppression which is based on top-down control, and learned-suppression which is based on…

This dissertation examines the associations between pragmatic meaning categories in English and specific realizations of prosodic prominence. It has been well-established that in Mainstream American English (MAE), prominence is often used to convey contrast. A more limited set of studies suggests that prosodic prominence may also be capable of…