Language is one of the essential tools used to segment the continuous stream of experience into events. In this process, the choice of words and grammar frames events in different ways. Grammatical aspect plays an important role in representing an event as a complete whole (perfective: peeled) or as a dynamic process (imperfective: was peeling).…

Establishing dependencies during language comprehension requires access to previously encoded information. In the current study, we investigate the speed and accuracy of processing dependencies containing subject-verb agreement. Three speed-accuracy tradeoff experiments investigate the accessibility of number information across different amounts…

Previous studies show that linguistic information and talker information interact during processing. Familiarity with a language facilitates talker processing, and familiarity with a talker's voice facilitates linguistic processing. To probe the factors involved in talker processing, researchers examined how individual differences in reading…

This dissertation explores how items encountered in the comprehension of language are stored in memory and subsequently accessed. Processing and comprehending language frequently requires the retrieval of items in memory so that a current linguistic element can be assigned an interpretation. For example, in a sentence such as "Miles loved his…

The employment of genre-based pedagogy and Task-Based Language Teaching in second language education is representative of a paradigmatic shift towards a focus on meaning-making. Despite this shift, second language acquisition (SLA) research continues to predominantly rely on complexity, accuracy, and fluency metrics to assess learner production…

In this dissertation, I address two outstanding questions regarding how linguistic and extra-linguistic information are brought together in the interpretation of language situated within a discourse. The first part of this dissertation experimentally addresses how alternatives invoked by sentences containing the focus-sensitive operator 'only' are…

Lexical semantics provide many important resources in natural language processing, despite the recent preferences for distributional methods. In this dissertation we investigate an under-represented lexical relationship, that of scalarity. We define scalarity as it relates to adjectives and introduce novel methods to identify words belonging to a…

Natural Language Generation (NLG) is the process of generating natural language text from an input, which is a communicative goal and a database or knowledge base. Informally, the architecture of a standard NLG system consists of the following modules (Reiter and Dale, 2000): content determination, sentence planning (or microplanning) and surface…

Topic models like latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) provide a framework for analyzing large datasets where observations are collected into groups. Although topic modeling has been fruitfully applied to problems social science, biology, and computer vision, it has been most widely used to model datasets where documents are modeled as exchangeable…

In this dissertation, I defend "semantic singularism", which is the view that syntactically plural terms, such as "they" or "Russell and Whitehead", are semantically singular. A semantically singular term is a term that denotes a single entity. Semantic singularism is to be distinguished from "syntactic singularism", according to which…

Producing a sentence involves encoding a preverbal message into a grammatical structure by retrieving lexical items and integrating them into a functional (semantic-to-grammatical) structure. Individuals with agrammatism are impaired in this grammatical encoding process. However, it is unclear what aspect of grammatical encoding is impaired and…

Previous research has found that the recent processing of a linguistic form (e.g. word or syntactic pattern) facilitates its reuse. A separate line of research has found that the appearance of a linguistic form in certain structural contexts (e.g. the focus position of a cleft sentence) can increase the likelihood of a form's reuse. However, these…

Understanding the syntactic structure of a sentence is a necessary preliminary to understanding its semantics and therefore for many practical applications. The field of natural language processing has achieved a high degree of accuracy in parsing, at least in English. However, the syntactic structures produced by the most commonly used parsers…

Speakers show remarkable adaptability in updating and correcting their utterances in response to changes in the environment. When an interlocutor raises an eyebrow or the AC kicks on and introduces ambient noise, it seems that speakers are able to quickly integrate this information into their speech plans and adapt appropriately. This ability to…

A crucial component of language acquisition involves organizing words into grammatical categories and discovering relations between them. The organization of words into categories, and the generalization of patterns from some seen word combinations to novel ones, account for important aspects of the expansion of linguistic knowledge in the early…