Open-ended responses to surveys can be highly beneficial to higher education institutions, providing clarity and context that quantitative data can sometimes lack. However, analyzing open-ended responses typically takes time and manpower most institutional assessment offices do not have to spare. This study focused on finding a potential solution…

To model behavioral and neural correlates of language comprehension in naturalistic environments, researchers have turned to broad-coverage tools from natural-language processing and machine learning. Where syntactic structure is explicitly modeled, prior work has relied predominantly on context-free grammars (CFGs), yet such formalisms are not…

The animacy effect refers to the memory advantage of words denoting animate beings over words denoting inanimate objects. Remembering animate beings may serve important evolutionary functions, but the cognitive mechanism underlying the animacy effect has remained elusive. According to the richness-of-encoding account, animate words stimulate…

Under the noisy-channel framework of language comprehension, comprehenders infer the speaker's intended meaning by integrating the perceived utterance with their knowledge of the language, the world, and the kinds of errors that can occur in communication. Previous research has shown that, when sentences are improbable under the meaning prior…

This dissertation investigates how the abstract representation of vowels affects spoken word recognition in Brazilian Portuguese and American English by examining two issues in theoretical phonology and speech processing: underspecification theory, and underlying representation when there is alternation. Three experiments were conducted in…

Interpreting a sentence can be characterized as a rational process in which comprehenders integrate linguistic input with top-down knowledge (e.g., plausibility). One type of evidence for this is that comprehenders sometimes reinterpret sentences to arrive at interpretations that conflict with the original language input. Does this reflect a…

The prevalent "core phonological deficit" model of dyslexia proposes that the reading and spelling difficulties characterizing affected children stem from prior developmental difficulties in processing speech sound structure, for example, perceiving and identifying syllable stress patterns, syllables, rhymes and phonemes. Yet spoken word…

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…

Purpose: Individuals with developmental language disorder (DLD) often exhibit slower processing on time-based tasks in comparison with age-matched peers. Processing speed has been linked to various linguistic skills and might serve as a global indicator of individual differences in language abilities. Despite an extensive literature on processing…

To learn the meaning of a new word, or to recognize the meaning of a known one, both children and adults benefit from surrounding words, or the sentential context. Most of the evidence from children is based on their accuracy and efficiency when listening to speech in their familiar native accent: they successfully use the words they know to…

People with aphasia may produce speech errors or pauses during speaking turns. A communication partner may choose to guess the person's intended meaning, or may allow the person time to repair their turns (i.e., edited turns). The aim of this study was to understand the topic-related effects that occur when speakers without aphasia allow their…

Recent studies have demonstrated that saccadic programming in reading is not only determined by low-level visual factors. High-level morphological effects on saccade have been shown in two morphologically rich languages. In the present study, we examined the underlying mechanism of such morphological influences by comparing the processes of…

How do infants learn about the formal properties of language using only cues they can access in speech? And what intuitions do they bring to the learning problem? Chapter 2: To explore whether current notions of statistically-based language learning could successfully scale to infants' linguistic experiences "in the wild", we implemented…

The phenomenon of scalar diversity refers to the well-replicated finding that different scalar expressions give rise to scalar implicatures (SIs) at different rates. Previous work has shown that part of the scalar diversity effect can be explained by theoretically motivated factors. Although the effect has been established only in controlled…

Prediction-based accounts of language acquisition have the potential to explain several different effects in child language acquisition and adult language processing. However, evidence regarding the developmental predictions of such accounts is mixed. Here, we consider several predictions of these accounts in two large-scale developmental studies…