The majority of research in computational psycholinguistics on sentence processing has focused on word-by-word incremental processing within sentences, rather than holistic sentence-level representations. This study introduces two novel computational approaches for quantifying sentence-level processing: sentence surprisal and sentence relevance.…

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…

What is the nature of conceptual representations? Models of semantic memory often describe concepts as a distributed feature space. However, it remains unknown which subset of this feature space constitutes the invariant representation of a concept. In this dissertation, I investigate the nature of modality-independent representations and their…

Both classic thought experiments and recent empirical evidence suggest that children frequently encounter new words whose meanings are underdetermined by the extralinguistic contexts in which they occur. The role that these referentially ambiguous events play in children's word learning is central to ongoing debates in the field. Do children learn…

Combining adjective meaning with the modified noun is particularly challenging for children under three years. Previous research suggests that in processing noun-adjective phrases children may over-rely on noun information, delaying or omitting adjective interpretation. However, the question of whether this difficulty is modulated by semantic…

Numerous developmental findings suggest that infants and toddlers engage predictive processing during language comprehension. However, a significant limitation of this research is that associative (bottom-up) and predictive (top-down) explanations are not readily differentiated. Following adult studies that varied predictiveness relative to…

How do infants learn about the formal properties of language using only cues they can access in speech? And what intuitions do they bring to the learning problem? Chapter 2: To explore whether current notions of statistically-based language learning could successfully scale to infants' linguistic experiences "in the wild", we implemented…

The phenomenon of scalar diversity refers to the well-replicated finding that different scalar expressions give rise to scalar implicatures (SIs) at different rates. Previous work has shown that part of the scalar diversity effect can be explained by theoretically motivated factors. Although the effect has been established only in controlled…

Previous studies on L2 (i.e., second language) Chinese compound processing have focused on the relative efficiency of two routes: holistic processing versus combinatorial processing. However, it is still unclear whether Chinese compounds are processed with multilevel representations among L2 learners due to the hierarchical structure of the…

Eventualities have been recognized as psychologically and linguistically relevant for more than 50 years. Psychologically, eventualities are complex bundles of information derived from our perceptions of the world. The question for linguists is how much of this complexity is reflected in our eventuality-denoting lexical entries and the…

Previous research suggests that statistical learning enhances memory for self-related information at the individual level and that individuals exhibit better memory for partner-related items than they do for irrelevant items in joint contexts (i.e., the joint memory effect, JME). However, whether statistical learning improves memory for…

The present study examined the neural correlates of emotion effects evoked by emotion-label and emotion-laden nouns in Chinese-English bilinguals' two languages through the emotion categorization tasks. At the perceptual processing stage, only L2 emotion-label and emotion-laden nouns induced amplified N100 than neutral nouns. At the semantic…

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…

This dissertation delves into second language acquisition, sociophonetic variation, and speech perception, investigating how prior linguistic experiences and exposure to regional variations in a second language influence the decoding of dialectal linguistic cues. It aims to enhance the understanding of words pronounced with different phones and…

Reading morphologically complex words requires analysis of their morphemic subunits (e.g., play + er); however, the positional constraints of morphemic processing are still little understood. The current study involved three unprimed lexical decision experiments to directly compare the positional encoding of stems and affixes during reading and to…