This dissertation is about a particular style of research. The philosophy of this style is that in order to scientifically understand deep learning, it is fruitful to investigate what happens when neural networks are trained on simple, mathematically well-defined tasks. Even though the training data is simple, the training algorithm can end up…

American Sign Language (ASL), like many different signed languages, has a systematic way of using pointing signs for multiple types of nominal reference. Possibly the most basic function of pointing is to indicate, direct and modulate reference to physical objects located in proximal and distal areas called exophoric demonstratives. This study…

Linear algebra is gaining increased attention due to its applications in many modern high-tech industries, such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, and robotics. Coordinate systems underlie many concepts in linear algebra and promote students' spatial thinking of key concepts by imposing a visual aspect to courses that may otherwise be…

Language production and the execution of motor acts have long been thought to have similarities in the rules of their execution. Recent studies have begun to directly compare these two processes by measuring certain phenomena found in both. Until now, comparisons have only been made in parallel, with different groups of participants and/or tasks.…

All communication systems rely on sets of rules that must generally be followed for successful communication to be possible; in the case of human language, these rules are given by the grammar. However, despite these rules, there is considerable variation that has been noted across the grammar. In this dissertation, I explore one understudied…

Deep learning techniques are being unified for decision support in various applications. However, it remains challenging to train robust deep learning models, due to the inherent insufficient labeled data that is usually time-consuming and labor-intensive. Self-supervised learning is a feature representation learning paradigm to learn robust…

Mastering the phonological aspects of a second language (L2) poses significant challenges for adult learners, often affecting their intelligibility in acquiring that language (Derwing, Munro, & Wiebe, 1998). McAllister (1997) has highlighted L2 learners' struggles in perceiving and producing novel segmental features, which is corroborated by…

This dissertation features a relative clause island, whose status has been known to differ significantly across languages and extraction types. By conducting a series of acceptability judgment experiments with human participants, as well as measuring token-by-token surprisal values among large language models, I demonstrate the following: First,…

Language comprehension requires a complex series of decisions under uncertainty. This is especially obvious when one string may have multiple different interpretations, whether due to lexical ambiguity, or the potential for an inference beyond literal content. This dissertation profiles how the human system for language comprehension times those…

Student veterans are often viewed in popular culture with a deficit mindset. They are "wounded warriors" who are navigating mental health challenges, academically underprepared, and non-traditional students balancing other responsibilities beyond college. Despite potential lingering effects of military service, student veterans bring…

In this dissertation, I will present social-cognitive frameworks that support the use of mental imagery for possible self enhancement; and articulate and evaluate a pedagogical intervention designed for the foreign language class. This intervention will allow students to explore and develop prominent and vivid mental representations (self-schemas)…

Learning a second language is a complex task. Adopting the innovative use of a multimodal literacies approach provides young second language (L2) learners with expanded opportunities to immerse themselves in the target language. This study explored how participants utilized their multimodal literacies along with the level of investment…

Counterfactuals are a type of conditional sentences used to convey situations that do not correspond to reality. Tense morphology is a core ingredient to encode counterfactuals in English and most Indo-European languages. Mandarin Chinese (hereafter Chinese) lacks tense morphology and does not require counterfactuals to be formally distinguished…

This case study involves one public school in a suburb of a major metropolitan area, focusing on one classroom of first grade students selected from a pool of volunteer classrooms. The first grade class of students, during their regular mathematics instruction, were given three tasks by their teachers designed to elicit a productive struggle…

Through instructional tasks, teachers can present content in ways that require students to apply critical thinking, problem-solving, and other cognitive skills. The purpose of this mixed methods collective case study was to determine how teacher-assigned instructional tasks in mathematics impact students' learning of mathematical concepts. In this…