This dissertation investigates how bilinguals use their two grammars to comprehend written intra-sentential codeswitches. I focus on adjective/noun constructions in Spanish and English where I manipulate the congruence of grammatical word order in the two languages across the codeswitch boundary. This allows me to test three codeswitching…

People often speak ambiguously, as in the case of "indirect requests." Certain indirect requests are conventional and thus straightforward to interpret, such as "Can you turn on the heater?", but others require substantial additional inference, such as "It's cold in here." How do comprehenders make inferences about a…

This study investigated whether Mandarin speakers interpret prosodic information as focus markers in a sentence-picture verification task. Previous production studies have shown that both Mandarin-speaking adults and Mandarin-speaking children mark focus by prosodic information (Ouyang and Kaiser in Lang Cogn Neurosc 30(1-2):57-72, 2014; Yang and…

This article examines how semantic memory processes influence the items that are considered by decision makers in memory-based preferential choice. Experiments 1A through 1C ask participants to list the choice items that come to their minds while deliberating in a variety of everyday choice settings. These experiments use semantic space models to…

The processing advantage of Subject-gapped relative clause (SRC) versus Object-gapped relative clause (ORC) has been advocated by competing processing accounts. Using a self-paced listening paradigm, this study investigates what Chinese RC online processing asymmetry looks like under concurrent memory load manipulation. Both On-line listening…

Given the novelty of human--machine communication (HMC) in task-based language learning (TBLL), we conducted a multimethodological pilot study to explore the use of Alexa in out-of-class task-based learning to mediate texts in English as a foreign language. Fourteen Polish intermediate learners participated in the quasi-experiment and programme…

Purpose: A fundamental feature of human speech is variation, including the manner of phonation, as exemplified in the case of whispered speech. In this study, we employed whispered speech to examine an unresolved issue about congenital amusia, a neurodevelopmental disorder of musical pitch processing, which also affects speech pitch processing…

It is well established that emotion is extensively influenced by language. However, previous studies mainly focus on the first language (L1) rather than the second language (L2). The current study explored whether L2 shapes emotion perception in masked priming paradigm by distinguishing emotion-label words (e.g. fear, pride) and emotion-laden…

Little is explored regarding the modality-specific differences in recall abilities of preschool children. Understanding modality-specific differences in the recall at an early age might give an insight into age-linked trends, which can lay a foundation for later development. The current study used a cross-sectional design to investigate the…

The English Resultative Construction (ERC) is a satellite-framed structure with no identical equivalent in Spanish. In a series of studies, we analyzed and compared recognition (acceptability judgment task) and comprehension (sentence comprehension task) of three ERC subtypes with the English Depictive Construction (EDC) (which has a Spanish…

How does linguistic structure affect children's developing cardinal number knowledge? The bootstrapping theory proposes that children might use syntactic information provided by known words such as quantifiers to bootstrap the meanings of unfamiliar words such as number words. Prior studies of numeral and quantifier development have indicated that…

Semantic illusions are recognition errors that occur when an individual fails to notice that information contradicts their prior knowledge (Barton & Sanford, 1993; Erickson & Mattson, 1981). For example, after hearing the question, "If a plane crashes while flying over state lines, where should the survivors be buried?" many…

Short term memory (STM) and working memory (WM) performance consistently predict language abilities in children with developmental language disorders. However, causality is not fully established. Moreover, evidence from the fine-grained analysis of STM/WM tasks and comprehension of complex sentences, suggests that long term memory (LTM)…

Three experiments using a spelling error detection task investigated the extent to which morphemes and pseudomorphemes affect word processing. We compared the processing of transparent compound words (e.g., doorbell), pseudocompound words (e.g., carpet), and matched control words (e.g., tomato). In half of the compound and pseudocompound words,…

Items in the mental lexicon have three storage and processing strata, the concept, lemma, and lexeme, which equate to semantic, syntactic and phonological information. Lexical items relate to each other at each stratum. Bilingual lexicons, which contain items from all languages, may contain cognates, items sharing concepts and with overlapping…