Scalar implicatures (SIs) lie at the interface between semantics and pragmatics, and therefore have evoked great interest for language acquisition research. Many acquisition studies show that young children know the literal semantics of scalar items (like "some", "might", "start" and "or") but have…

Language comprehension is remarkable in that we adapt easily to different forms of language use, from adapting to speakers' dialects, meanings of new slang words, and fictional worlds described in novels. While there is growing evidence comprehenders adapt their expectations for text during reading, the nature of these adaptation mechanisms…

High level reading comprehension is a process that results in a reader's semantic interpretation of a text, or mental model of that text, referred to as the "reader's situation model." Individual differences in readers' verbal working memory resources, as measured by reading span tasks (RST), and operation span tasks (OST), have shown to…

Referential expressions such as pronouns are frequently used in conversations, and native speakers seem to understand who these expressions refer to effortlessly. Although the process of pronoun resolution seems to be easy, interpretations of pronouns are dependent on various sources of information from the discourse including morphosyntax (e.g.,…

Children's evolving understanding of polysemy represents a unique aspect of semantic knowledge that is rarely addressed in reading theory or intervention. The ubiquity of words with multiple meanings in written language, however, underscores its importance for the development of fluent reading and comprehension. Early struggling readers'…

Understanding implicature--something meant, implied, or suggested distinct from what is said--is paramount for successful human communication. Yet, it is unclear how our cognitive abilities fill in gaps of unspecified information. This study presents three distinct sets of experiments investigating how people understand implied contrasts conveyed…

Bilinguals sometimes outperform age-matched monolinguals on non-language tasks involving cognitive control. But the bilingual advantage is not consistently found in every experiment and may reflect specific attributes of the bilinguals tested. The goal of this dissertation was to determine if the way in which bilinguals use language, specifically…

This study tracks changes in three primary characteristics of Early New High German (ENHG) publications from 1499 to 1710: the complexity of the syntactic system of the language, the pictorial saturation of the publications, and the relationship between verbal text and illustrations on the ENHG printed page. Drawing on findings from literary…

Proper Names appear at the heart of several debates in philosophy and the cognitive sciences. These include "reference", "intentionality", and the nature of "belief" as well as "language acquisition", "cognitive development", and "memory". This dissertation follows a cognitive approach to the philosophical problems posed by proper names. It puts…