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).…

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…

Foreign language anxiety (FLA), whose impact is often negative on learners' cognitive processing, happens when a learner pursues a foreign language as a non-native speaker. This study aimed to investigate anxiety in learning English as a foreign language and its influence on learners' cognitive processes. The sample comprised graduate and…

Mikhail Bakhtin is a latecomer to the field of child development. His contributions emphasize the dialogic nature of language as a lived event of becoming for all and de-thrones any monologic truths that might be told otherwise. Dismantling any master theory that might determine the ways children are known (or know-able), Bakhtin offers a…

Translation has long played a role in linguistic and literary studies research. More recently, the theoretical and methodological concerns of process research have given translation an additional role in cognitive science. The interest in the cognitive aspects of translation has led scholars to turn to disciplines such as cognitive linguistics,…

Schizophrenia is a complex mental disorder that results in language-related symptoms at various discourse levels, ranging from semantics (e.g. inventing words and producing nonsensical strands of similar-sounding words) to pragmatics and higher-level functioning (e.g. too little or too much information given to interlocutors, and tangential…

In this article we aimed to assess how Alzheimer's disease (AD), which is neurodegenerative, affects the linguistic performance of early, high-proficient bilinguals in their two languages. To this end, we compared the Picture Naming and Word Translation performances of two groups of AD patients varying in disease progression (Mild and Moderate)…

Various recent studies attest that reading involves creating an implicit prosodic representation of the written text which may systematically affect the resolution of syntactic ambiguities in sentence comprehension. Research up to now suggests that implicit prosody itself depends on a partial syntactic analysis of the text, raising the question of…

Largely due to technological advances, methods for analyzing readability have increased significantly in recent years. While past researchers designed hundreds of formulas to estimate the difficulty of texts for readers, controversy has surrounded their use for decades, with criticism stemming largely from their application in creating new texts…

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…

This study examines how the cross-linguistic similarity of translation equivalents affects bilingual word recognition. Performing one of three tasks, Dutch-English bilinguals processed cognates with varying degrees of form overlap between their English and Dutch counterparts (e.g., "lamp-lamp" vs. "flood-vloed" vs. "song-lied"). In lexical…

This study examined the differences in processing between regular and dyslexic readers in a lexical decision task in different visual field presentations (left, right, and center). The research utilized behavioral measures that provide information on accuracy and reaction time and electro-physiological measures that permit the examination of brain…

This dissertation examines the processing of sentences involving long-distance linguistic dependencies, or sentences containing elements that must be linked across intervening words and phrases. Specifically, both behavioral (self-paced reading and eye tracking) and neurophysiological (electroencephalography) methods were used (a) to evaluate the…

In her Keynote Article, Paradis discusses the role of the interface between bilingual development and specific language impairment (SLI) on two different levels. On the level of theoretical explanations of SLI, Paradis asks how domain general versus domain-specific perspectives on SLI can account for bilingual SLI, as well as what bilingual SLI…

Empirical evidence demonstrating that sentence meaning is rapidly reconciled with the visual environment has been broadly construed as supporting the seamless interaction of visual and linguistic representations during situated comprehension. Based on recent behavioral and neuroscientific findings, however, we argue for the more deeply rooted…