A fundamental challenge for human cognition is perceiving and acting in a world in which the statistics that characterize available sensory data are non-stationary. This thesis focuses on this problem specifically in the domain of sentence comprehension, where linguistic variability poses computational challenges to the processes underlying…

Despite considerable evidence suggesting that second language (L2) learners experience difficulties when processing morphosyntactic aspects of L2 in online tasks, the mechanisms underlying these difficulties remain unknown. The aim of this dissertation is to explore possible causes for the difficulties by comparing attentional mechanisms engaged…

This dissertation revisits subject island effects (Ross 1967, Chomsky 1973) cross-linguistically. Controlled acceptability judgment studies in German, English, Japanese and Serbian show that extraction out of specifiers is consistently degraded compared to extraction out of complements, indicating that the Condition on Extraction domains (CED,…

The goal of this dissertation is to investigate the real-time sentence processing of Korean both by native speakers and learners in terms of the availability and the effectiveness of different types of information in the structural prediction. Built on the crosslinguistically contrastive findings between Japanese in Yoshida (2006) and Chinese in…

This study focuses on a meaningful understanding of idiosyncratic language in psychosis. The psychotic neologisms examined in this dissertation challenge the listener's accurate understanding. Idiosyncratic aspects of speech in psychosis are largely researched from a diagnostic perspective in the literature. This study asks how individuals…

This dissertation is a description of Xinaliq, a Northeast (Nakh-Daghestanian) Caucasian language spoken primarily in the village also called Xinaliq, which lies at an elevation of 7,000 feet in the Kuba district of Azerbaijan, near the border with Daghestan. Currently there are approximately 1,500 residents in the village. Most of them are…

The so-called compound use of ki 'im has been interpreted mainly either with exceptive ("except" or "unless") or adversative meaning ("but" or "rather"), although it has sometimes also been interpreted in other ways such as "only" or "surely". These various meanings have been applied…

This dissertation explores co-construction of a situated activity in a current unit by mainly focusing on hearers' actions. The "co-construction" involves a process of interaction in which speakers and hearers jointly construct the form and the meaning of ongoing utterances even when they disagree with each other (Jacoby & Ochs,…

The purpose of this dissertation study is to investigate how Korean-English bilinguals process compound words in both English and Korean. The major research question is: when Korean-English bilinguals process Korean or English compound words, what information is used to segment compound words into their constituents and, in particular, does…

The goal of this dissertation is to explore the phonetic bases of intervocalic lenition--specifically, voicing and spirantization of intervocalic stops. A traditional understanding of phonological patterns like these is that they involve articulatory effort reduction, in that speakers substitute an easy sound for a hard one. Experiment 1 uses a…

Clause connectives are linguistic forms that convey relations between clauses in a sentence. They are typically compared, whether within a language or across languages, on the basis of a shared syntactic category, such as coordination and subordination, or a semantic one, such as sequence, cause, or addition. While the inadequacy of the…

This thesis investigates children's acquisition of exhaustivity across four structures: quantifiers, single questions, multiple questions and clefts. Two languages, English and German, are probed. Exhaustivity needs some sort of plural set to be mentioned without leaving out a member of that set. This dissertation provides experimental data…

The existing literature views the phenomenon of language shift mostly on the societal, or macro, level, which takes the focus away from individual cases. This investigation provides an alternative perspective to the currently prevalent view. The purpose of this phenomenological study is to develop an understanding of the role of personal choice in…

This study is a sociolinguistic investigation of the use of four English generic pronouns ("he," "she," "he or she," singular "they") by Arabic-speaking second language learners of English. This study takes a different approach to the investigation of second language (L2) acquisition and use by examining the…

This thesis offers a systematic treatment of discontinuous exponence, a pattern of inflection in which a single feature or a set of features bundled in syntax is expressed by multiple, distinct morphemes. This pattern is interesting and theoretically relevant because it represents a deviation from the expected one-to-one relationship between…