This study reports on findings from two experiments investigating the interpretive patterns of overt pronouns in an embedded subject position with three types of matrix subjects (i.e. a referential NP, a quantified NP, or a "wh"-phrase) in Mandarin, English, and Japanese. According to the Overt Pronoun Constraint (OPC), overt pronouns in…

Indirect questioning techniques such as the randomized response technique aim to control social desirability bias in surveys of sensitive topics. To improve upon previous indirect questioning techniques, we propose the new Cheating Detection Triangular Model. Similar to the Cheating Detection Model, it includes a mechanism for detecting…

This study investigated how comfortable and secure heritage Spanish speakers feel about communicating in Spanish in public spaces of San Diego County, as well as the geographic distribution of Spanish use there. The goal was to determine the prevalence of Spanish use in the public sphere. Adult heritage Spanish speakers completed a survey about…

Background: Although most prevalent in childhood, the acquisition of new words in oral vocabulary takes place right across the lifespan. Of the many factors that influence oral vocabulary learning, one extrinsic factor is the listening environment. The current study aimed to examine whether the presence of noise impacts oral vocabulary learning in…

Corpus evidence suggests that in contexts in which the presence of multiple antecedents might favor plural reference, the disadvantage observed for singular reference may disappear if the potential antecedents are combined in a group-like plural entity. We examined the relative salience of antecedents in conditions where the context either made a…

A fictional story is always narrated from a certain narrative voice and mode of focalization. These core narrative techniques have a major impact on how readers interpret the narrative plot and connect with the characters. This study used eye-tracking to investigate how classic narrative reading is affected by narrative voice and focalization. The…

When remembering over the short-term, long-term knowledge has a large effect on the number of correctly recalled items and little impact on memory for order. This is true, for example, when the effects of semantic category are examined. Contrary to what these findings suggest, Poirier et al. in 2015 proposed that memory for order relies on the…

People learn language variation through exposure to linguistic interactions. The way we take part in these interactions is shaped by our lexical representations, the mechanisms of language processing, and the social context. Existing work has looked at how we learn and store variation in the ambient language. How this is mediated by the social…

It remains an open question whether second language (L2) learners can process linguistic properties at the syntax-discourse interface. This study examines this issue in the context of the L2 processing of Korean dative sentences under different information structure requirements. Given that discourse constraints associated with information…

Korean is a classifier language in which bare nouns are not obligatorily number-marked. Children learning other classifier languages like Japanese and Mandarin are late in learning the plural morpheme. In this paper, we present two datasets that suggest that Korean plural marker "-tul" is acquired much earlier, in contrast to what has…

Emojis have become a ubiquitous part of everyday text communication worldwide. Cohn et al. (Cognit Res Princ Implic 4(1):1-18, 2019) studied the grammatical structure of emoji usage among English speakers and found a correlation between the sequence of emojis used and English word order, tending towards an subject-verb-object (SVO) sequence.…

This paper seeks to explain the migration decisions of minority language speakers by investigating motivating factors. Viewed through a language planning lens, the study pushes the parameters of some of the discipline's more recent agency concepts within the context of migration. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 60 Welsh speakers…

This dissertation investigates the interplay between the implicit knowledge that learners have of a nonnative language and their processing of that language, examining two types of relative clauses (RCs) in English: gapped RCs (e.g., "the man that they hired") and resumptive RCs (e.g., *"the man that they hired him").…

This exploratory study investigated the self-reported reading difficulties and compensatory strategies of monolingual and bilingual adults with dyslexia. Twenty monolinguals and six bilinguals answered a questionnaire that collected socio-demographic data as well as information regarding their reading difficulties, experiences, and possible…

How early do children produce multiword utterances? Do children's early utterances reflect abstract syntactic knowledge or are they the result of data-driven learning? We examine this issue through corpus analysis, computational modeling, and adult simulation experiments. Chapter 1 investigates when children start producing multiword utterances;…