In two self-paced, sentence-by-sentence reading experiments, we examined the difference in the processing of Spanish discourses containing overt and null pronouns. In both experiments, antecedents appeared in a single phrase ("John met Mary") or in a conjoined phrase ("John and Mary met"). In Experiment 1, we compared reading…

Our language changes very rapidly, accompanying political, social and cultural trends, as well as the evolution of science and technology. The Internet, especially the social media, has accelerated this process of change. This poses a severe challenge for both human beings and natural language processing (NLP) systems, which usually only model a…

Why do questions about idioms often leave us "tongue-tied" in our classrooms? This book takes a look at learning and teaching idioms from two perspectives. First is a survey of recent work on learning and teaching idioms from diverse perspectives in the linguistics and educational research literature. The survey includes definitions of…

This book is the first to bring together a collection of recent empirical studies investigating languaging, an important construct first introduced by Swain in 2006 but which has since been deployed in a growing number of L2 studies. The contributing authors include both established and emerging authors from around the globe. They report on…

This dissertation investigates a class of context-dependent expressions--focus-sensitive particles--as a way of addressing how language users draw on contextual information to interpret expressions whose meanings are underdetermined by their forms. While the problem of context dependence has been widely studied, the question of precisely what…

We investigate the production of subject and object "who"- and "which"-questions in the Italian of 4- to 5-year-olds and report a subject/object asymmetry observed in other studies. We argue that this asymmetry stems from interference of the object copy in the AGREE relation between AgrS and the subject in the Spec of the verb phrase. We show that…

Words like "church" are polysemous, having two related senses (a building and an organization). Three experiments investigated how polysemous senses are represented and processed during sentence comprehension. On one view, readers retrieve an underspecified, core meaning, which is later specified more fully with contextual information. On another…

We investigated the role of discourse context in relative clause processing. We first replicated Reali and Christiansen's (2007a) finding that pronominal object relative clauses are easier to process than analogous subject relative clauses (an effect which stands in contrast to previous research on pronominal relative clauses). We then analyzed…

This study presents the results of three experiments in which the Family Size (FS) effect is explored. The first experiment is carried out with no prime on simple words. The second and third experiments are carried out with morphological priming on complex words. In the first experiment a facilitatory effect of FS is observed: high FS targets…

Purpose: Previous research has suggested that impairments of automatic spreading activation may underlie some aphasic language deficits. The current study further investigated the status of automatic spreading activation in individuals with aphasia as compared with typical adults. Method: Participants were 21 individuals with aphasia (12 fluent, 9…

In this study, we report the results of two self-paced reading experiments that investigated working memory capacity effects on the processing of globally ambiguous relative clauses by advanced Korean second language (L2) learners of English. Consistent with previous monolingual literature on the processing of temporary ambiguity, we found that…

Research on morphological awareness has shown that it contributes to literacy outcomes. However, because of the way morphological awareness is traditionally measured, there is speculation that tasks may reflect cognitive flexibility, working memory, or some other type of executive processing, versus awareness of morphology. Further complicating…

In an English Foreign Language learning context, where access to native like use of metaphorical language is limited, gaining this ability becomes challenging. For many years, foreign language educators didn't pay much attention to idiomatic language and assumed that idioms could only be taught through rote learning. For this reason, they face…

This dissertation aims to identify the locus of L2 processing inefficiency. Previous studies suggest that non-native processing is a specific result of an inefficient predictive mechanism that limits the ability of learners to generate linguistic expectations (Gruter, Rohde, & Schafer, 2014; 2016). Thus, this study employs two distinct online…

There is a growing theoretical, empirical, and methodological debate in the SLA field as to whether unawareness plays a role during attention to or processing of new incoming second language (L2) data. Indeed, studies that have methodologically addressed the construct of unawareness in their research designs offer both empirical support (e.g.,…