The concept of translanguaging is one of the most successful ones in the recent history of multilingualism research. But what does it really mean? It covers such a wide semantic field that users seem to be free to decide its meaning in whatever way they wish. A key uniting idea of the different approaches is that teachers should 'draw upon' the…

Ambiguity is a natural part of language and in studying the comprehension and resolution of ambiguity in a second language (L2), we must consider the influence of the native language. This dissertation examines L2 processing of the lexical semantic ambiguities, homonyms and polysemes. These are words that share the same form but have different…

Words contain multitudes. This multiplicity of meanings raises two key questions, both of which this thesis attempts to address. First, are word meanings categorical or continuous? The results of Chapters 2-4 support a hybrid model, in which word meanings occupy a continuous state-space (Elman, 2009), which is further discretized along the…

Purpose: The purpose of this investigation was to evaluate language development and disorders course titles across communication sciences and disorders (CSD) graduate programs in an effort to determine whether adolescents were specifically being recognized via inclusive language or dedicated courses. The findings can be used to propel important…

Measuring meaning is a central problem in cultural sociology and word embeddings may offer powerful new tools to do so. But like any tool, they build on and exert theoretical assumptions. In this paper, I theorize the ways in which word embeddings model three core premises of a structural linguistic theory of meaning: that meaning is coherent,…

Three preregistered experiments, conducted in 2021, investigated whether English-speaking American preschoolers (N = 120; 4-6 years; 54 females, predominantly White) and adults (N = 80; 18-52 years; 59 females, predominantly Asian) metonymically extend owners' names to owned objects--an extension not typically found in English. In Experiment 1, 5-…

When we memorize multiple words simultaneously, semantic relatedness among those words assists memory. For example, the information about "apple", "banana," and "orange" will be connected via a common concept of "fruits" and become easy to retain and recall. Neural mechanisms underlying this semantic…

Lexical ambiguity--the phenomenon of a single word having multiple, distinguishable senses--is pervasive in language. Both the degree of ambiguity of a word (roughly, its number of senses) and the relatedness of those senses have been found to have widespread effects on language acquisition and processing. Recently, distributional approaches to…

Semantic richness theory predicts that words with richer, more distinctive semantic representations should facilitate performance in a word recognition memory task. We investigated the contribution of multiple aspects of sensorimotor experience--those relating to the body, communication, food, and objects--to word recognition memory, by analyzing…

The rise of massive open online courses (MOOCs) brings rich opportunities for understanding learners' experiences based on analyzing learner-generated content such as course reviews. Traditionally, the unstructured textual data is analyzed qualitatively via manual coding, thus failing to offer a timely understanding of the learner's experiences.…

The present study explored the public conceptualization of creativity on Twitter through co-listed hashtags associated with #creativity in a million tweets. Exploratory Graph Analysis was used to identify a network of semantic clusters, and a pre-trained language model yielded the sentiment of the underlying tweets. The semantic clusters reflect…

The rhizome is like the poem. The growth power of nature and the possibilities of culture simultaneously and reciprocally. It stretches from biological cell and level of particles to our universal dreams and thoughts about and with life. The rhizome as poem is thus a picture and image of the importance of context and movement, production of…

In natural reading, the processing of words in fixation is influenced by semantic information obtained through preview (i.e., the semantic preview effect). Previous studies have confirmed that two types of semantic information exhibit the semantic preview effect: semantic association, which is reflected by the semantic relationship between preview…

Individuals diagnosed with autism are often thought to face challenges in comprehensive metaphors, even for the individuals without intellectual impairment. This study is to investigate the features and mechanisms of metaphor integration in the process of metaphor comprehension in real-time and context-free situations in autism, as well as the…

Visual working memory (VWM) refers to the temporary storage and manipulation of visual information. Although visually different, objects we view and remember can share the same higher-level category information, such as an apple, orange, and banana all being classified as fruit. We study the influence of category information on VWM, focusing on…