Purpose: Persons with aphasia (PWA) experience differences in attention after stroke, potentially impacting cognitive/language performance. This secondary analysis investigated physiologically measured vigilant attention during linguistic and nonlinguistic processing in PWA and control participants. Method: To evaluate performance and attention in…

Purpose: Lexical processing impairments such as delayed and reduced activation of lexical-semantic information have been linked to syntactic processing disruptions and sentence comprehension deficits in individuals with aphasia (IWAs). Lexical-level deficits can also preclude successful lexical encoding during sentence processing and amplify the…

The aim of the study is to examine the effect of sentential context on lexical ambiguity resolution in Greek adults and typically developing children. Context and word frequency are factors that can affect lexical processing, however, the role of them has not been thoroughly examined in Greek. To this aim, we assessed sentence context effects in…

This dissertation investigates the interaction of developing extralinguistic cognitive systems with early language learning and processing through the case study of verb argument structure. The interaction of these systems with the linguistic system underpins fundamental theories of language learning and use: language does not exist in isolation.…

Purpose: Pupillary responses captured via pupillometry (measurement of pupillary dilation and constriction during the performance of a cognitive task) are psychophysiological indicators of cognitive effort, attention, arousal, and resource engagement. Pupillometry may be a promising tool for enhancing our understanding of the relationship between…

Background: Individuals with mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) may experience chronic cognitive-linguistic impairments that are difficult to evaluate with existing measures. Garden path sentences are linguistically complex sentences that lead readers down a path to an incorrect interpretation. Previous research indicates many individuals, with or…

Purpose: Speech recognition percent correct scores fail to capture the effort of mentally repairing the perception of speech that was initially misheard. This study measured the effort of listening to stimuli specifically designed to elicit mental repair in adults who use cochlear implants (CIs). Method: CI listeners heard and repeated sentences…

Rules and regularities of language are typically processed in an implicit and effortless way in the human brain. Individuals with developmental dyslexia have problems in implicit learning of regularities in sequential stimuli, but the neural basis of this deficit has not been studied. This study investigated extraction and utilization of a complex…

The present study investigated whether and how fast young children can use information encoded in morphological markers during real-time event representation. Using the visual world paradigm, we tested 35 adults, 34 5-year-olds and 33 3-year-olds. The results showed that the adults, the 5-year-olds and the 3-year-olds all exhibited eye gaze…

Empirical evidence collected so far has revealed that the bilingual advantage cannot be reduced to a single component of the executive functioning, and point to the need to understand the effects of bilingual experience on cognition as influencing a wider family of mental processes, including, but not limited to, cognitive control. The present…

Purpose: Brain imaging has provided puzzle pieces in the understanding of language. In neurologically healthy populations, the structure of certain brain regions is associated with particular language functions (e.g., semantics, phonology). In studies on focal brain damage, certain brain regions or connections are considered sufficient or…

Mikhail Bakhtin is a latecomer to the field of child development. His contributions emphasize the dialogic nature of language as a lived event of becoming for all and de-thrones any monologic truths that might be told otherwise. Dismantling any master theory that might determine the ways children are known (or know-able), Bakhtin offers a…

In this paper we investigated the real-time processing of epistemic modals in five-year-olds. In a simple reasoning scenario, we monitored children's eye-movements while processing a sentence with modal expressions of different force ("might/must"). Children were also asked to judge the truth-value of the target sentences at the end of…

Previous event-related potential (ERP) work has indicated that the neural processing of action sequences develops with age. Although adults and 9-month-olds use a semantic processing system, perceiving actions activates attentional processes in 7-month-olds. However, presenting a sequence of action context, action execution and action conclusion…

Developmental theory has long emphasized the importance of linking perception, cognition, and action. Techniques designed to record the spatial and temporal characteristics of hand movements (i.e., "manual dynamics") present new opportunities to study the nature of these links across development by providing a window into how perceptual,…