The concept of bias is familiar to linguists primarily from the literature on questions. Following the work of Giannakidou and Mari (Truth and Veridicality in Grammar and Thought: Modality, Mood, and Propositional Attitudes, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2021), we assume "nonveridical equilibrium" (implying that p and ¬p as equal…

Recent studies have suggested that negation comprehension falls back onto inhibitory brain systems that are also crucial for impulse control and other non-linguistic control domains (Beltran et al., 2018, 2019; de Vega et al., 2016; Liu et al., 2020). Against this backdrop, the present pilot study investigated the use of negation within…

According to the Presupposition-Denial Account, complement set reference arises when focus is on the "shortfall" between the amount conveyed by a natural language quantifier and a larger, expected amount. Negative quantifiers imply a shortfall, through the denial of a presupposition, whereas positive quantifiers do not. An exception may…

Seminal studies on negation revealed that negative sentences are difficult to process, as they require an extra mental step. Similarly, at the discourse level, concession has been repeatedly shown to be more complex than other relations such as result because it implies the denial of an inference. The affinity between negation and concession…

Speech in everyday conversations is riddled with discourse markers (DMs), such as "well," "you know," and "like." However, in many lab-based studies of speech comprehension, such DMs are typically absent from the carefully articulated and highly controlled speech stimuli. As such, little is known about how these DMs…

This study reports the results of a Give-X task investigating the comprehension of ordinal and cardinal numbers in monolingual Russian-speaking children. Data collected from 36 children between the ages of 4;06 and 5;10 provided evidence that Russian learners follow the well-attested pattern for cardinal acquisition, but that children use a…

The current study examined the extent to which the cohesion detected in readers' constructed responses to multiple documents was predictive of persuasive, source-based essay quality. Participants (N=95) completed multiple-documents reading tasks wherein they were prompted to think-aloud, self-explain, or evaluate the sources while reading a set of…

Reading comprehension is key to knowledge acquisition and to reinforcing memory for previous information. While reading, a mental representation is constructed in the reader's mind. The mental model comprises the words in the text, the relations between the words, and inferences linking to concepts in prior knowledge. The automated model of…

Educational content labeled with proper knowledge components (KCs) are particularly useful to teachers or content organizers. However, manually labeling educational content is labor intensive and error-prone. To address this challenge, prior research proposed machine learning based solutions to auto-label educational content with limited success.…

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…

Background/Context: Despite the high economic returns to college completion (Avery & Turner, 2012; Carnevale, Jayasundera, & Gulish, 2016), just over half of students who enroll at college attain a bachelor's degree (Bound, Lovenheim, & Turner, 2010; Denning, Eide, & Warnick, 2019; Shapiro et al., 2016). Colleges and non-profits…

Semantic similarity between stimuli can lead to false memories and can also potentially cause retroactive interference (RI) for veridical memories. Here, participants first learned spatial locations for "critical" words that reliably produce false memories in the Deese-Roediger-McDermott paradigm. Next, participants centrally viewed…

This research was undertaken by synthesizing theories, documents, textbooks, research articles, and related academic articles relating to the wisdom repository management process. The objective is to present a system architecture and develop a knowledge management system which culminates in a repository of crystallized intelligence with a…

Research has observed that monitoring one's own learning modifies memory for some materials but not for others. Specifically, making judgments of learning (JOLs) while learning word pairs improves subsequent cued-recall memory performance for related word pairs but not for unrelated word pairs. Theories that have attempted to explain this pattern…

There are two broad views of children's theory of mind. The mentalist view is that it emerges in infancy and is possibly innate. The minimalist view is that it emerges more gradually in childhood and is heavily dependent on learning. According to minimalism, children initially understand behaviors rather than mental states, and they are assisted…