In everyday life, humans rely on working memory (WM) processes to make sense of relationships between linguistic elements that are not linearly adjacent. For example, to understand the sentence "The dog that the cat chased is cute," we encode the referent "the dog" into WM, maintain and retrieve it after reading the verb…

The sentence production system transforms preverbal messages in the mind of a speaker into coherent grammatical utterances. During this process, which unfolds rapidly, the system has to link meaning information from the speaker's message to appropriate lexical and grammatical information from the speaker's memory. It usually does so with fluency…

This dissertation examines the cross-linguistic behavior of Thematic Resultative Expressions in English and Japanese from the viewpoint of syntax-semantics mappings of event aspects, and discusses the source of some of their well-recognized syntactic and syntactico-semantic properties. Thematic Resultative Expressions (e.g. "John smashed the…

This dissertation is concerned with Chinese speakers' acquisition of telicity in L2 English. Telicity is a semantic notion having to do with whether an event has an inherent endpoint or not. Most existing work on L2 telicity is conceptualized within an L1-transfer framework and examines learning situations where L1 and L2 differ on whether…

This dissertation is a typological study of verb-final languages, the purpose of which is to examine various grammatical phenomena in verb-final languages to discover whether there are correlations between the final position of the verb and other aspects of grammar. It examines how finality of the verb interacts with argument coding in simple…

The scope of linguistic planning, or the amount of linguistic information that speakers can prepare in advance for an utterance they are about to produce, is highly variable. Distinguishing between possible sources of this variability provides a way to discriminate between accounts of language production that assume structurally incremental and…

Children use syntax as well as observations of events to learn verb meanings. This is known as syntactic bootstrapping. This dissertation investigated the origins and mechanisms of syntactic bootstrapping. Prior evidence suggested that two-year-olds, but not younger children, could use aspects of sentence structure to assign different…