This study investigates the organization of the mental lexicon in Spanish as a foreign language in contrast to its structure in Spanish as a native language through semantic networks derived from lexical availability or semantic fluency tasks. To this end, we collected the responses of 75 American learners of Spanish and 75 native speakers in…

Recent investigations in automated essay scoring research imply that hybrid models, which combine feature engineering and the powerful tools of deep neural networks (DNNs), reach state-of-the-art performance. However, most of these findings are from holistic scoring tasks. In the present study, we use a total of four prompts from two different…

Corpus evidence suggests that in contexts in which the presence of multiple antecedents might favor plural reference, the disadvantage observed for singular reference may disappear if the potential antecedents are combined in a group-like plural entity. We examined the relative salience of antecedents in conditions where the context either made a…

Previous work on individual differences has revealed limitations in the ability of existing measures (e.g., working memory) to predict language processing. Recent evidence suggests that an individual's sensitivity to detect the statistical regularities present in language (i.e., "chunk sensitivity") may significantly modulate online…

It has been well documented that formulaic language (such as collocations; e.g., "provide information") enjoys a processing advantage over novel language (e.g., "compare information"). In natural language use, however, many formulaic sequences are often inserted with words intervening in between the individual constituents…

Iconicity is a relationship of resemblance between the form and meaning of a sign. Compelling evidence from diverse areas of the cognitive sciences suggests that iconicity plays a pivotal role in the processing, memory, learning, and evolution of both spoken and signed language, indicating that iconicity is a general property of language. However,…

The present study uses event-related potentials (ERPs) to examine nonlocal agreement processing between native (L1) English speakers and Chinese-English second language (L2) learners, whose L1 lacks number agreement. We manipulated number marking with determiners ("the" vs. "that"/"these") to see how…

Naturalistic language learning is contextually grounded. When people learn their first (L1) and often their second (L2) language, they do so in various contexts. In this dissertation I examine the effect of various contexts on language development. Part 1 describes the effects of textual, linguistic context in reading. I employed an eye-tracking…

The purpose of this study was to consider the core of the mental lexicon of the Kazakh language based on the analysis of associative dictionaries, to determine the basic lexico-semantic groups of words and to compare the basic lexical layer with value categories. This study uses the following methods of linguocultural, comparative,…

Sentence production is a stage-like process of mapping a conceptual representation to the linear speech signal via grammatical rules. While the typological diversity of languages is vast and thus must necessarily influence sentence production, psycholinguistic studies of diverse languages are comparatively rare. Here, we present data from a…

People learn language variation through exposure to linguistic interactions. The way we take part in these interactions is shaped by our lexical representations, the mechanisms of language processing, and the social context. Existing work has looked at how we learn and store variation in the ambient language. How this is mediated by the social…

It remains an open question whether second language (L2) learners can process linguistic properties at the syntax-discourse interface. This study examines this issue in the context of the L2 processing of Korean dative sentences under different information structure requirements. Given that discourse constraints associated with information…

The present study reported an experiment examining whether both native speakers (NSs) and non-native speakers (NNSs) give formulaic sequences (FSs) priority over novel phrases in processing, as the dual route model has postulated. In this experiment, NSs and NNSs were asked to read Japanese versions of semi-transparent restricted collocations…

Speakers vary in their pronunciations of the sounds in their native language. Listeners use lexical knowledge to adjust their phonetic categories to speakers' idiosyncratic pronunciations. Lexical information can, however, be inconclusive or become available too late to guide this phonetic retuning. Sentence context is known to affect lexical…

The ability to think about nonpresent time is a crucial aspect of human cognition. Both the past and future imply a temporal displacement of an event outside the "now." They also intrinsically differ: The past refers to inalterable events; the future to alterable events, to possible worlds. Are the past and future processed similarly or…