Purpose: Following the Rehabilitation Treatment Specification System (RTSS) framework, the current study investigated the active ingredients in the modified semantic feature analysis (mSFA) targeting either noun or verb retrieval in Mandarin-English bilingual adults with aphasia (BWA). Method: Twelve Mandarin-English BWA completed mSFA treatment…

This dissertation explores the role of memory in language processing, and specifically how interference during lexical encoding can result in downstream interference during retrieval. The dissertation merges insights from both the sentence processing literature as well as the study of memory in non-sentential contexts and focuses on two factors…

"Hospital" can refer to a physical place or more figuratively to the people associated with it. Such place-for-institution metonyms are common in everyday language, but there remain several open questions in the literature regarding how they are processed. The goal of the current eyetracking experiments was to investigate how metonyms…

Three experiments test the theory that verb meanings are more malleable than noun meanings in different semantic contexts, making a previously seen verb difficult to remember when it appears in a new semantic context. Experiment 1 revealed that changing the direct object noun in a transitive sentence reduced recognition of a previously seen verb,…

Subject relative clauses (SRCs) are typically processed more easily than object relative clauses (ORCs), but this difference is diminished by an inanimate head-noun in semantically non-reversible ORCs ("The book that the boy is reading"). In two eye-tracking experiments, we investigated the influence of animacy on online processing of…

Effects of semantic versus syntactic constraints on resolution of Hebrew heterophonic-homographic words were examined at three reading skill levels. Fourth-and sixth-grade students and a group of adults read aloud sentences containing two types of heterophonic-homographs: noun-noun (e.g., BYCH [Hebrew characters] is read as beitsa 'egg' and bitsa…

This study investigated how well second language (L2) readers of English use context to identify proper names as such. It represents a first step in exploring a widely held assumption that L2 readers of English can easily identify proper names by their form and function. The study isolates the issue of function to investigate whether context alone…

We present a self-organizing approach to sentence processing that sheds new light on notional plurality effects in agreement attraction, using pseudopartitive subject noun phrases (e.g., "a bottle of pills"). We first show that notional plurality ratings (numerosity judgments for subject noun phrases) predict verb agreement choices in…

The syntactic complexities of English sentence structures induced the Indonesian students' sentence-level accuracies blurred. Reciprocally, the meanings conveyed are left hanging. The readers are increasingly at sixes and sevens. The Sentence Crimes were, therefore, the major essences of diagnosing the students' sentence-level inaccuracies in this…

We examined whether the position of modifiers in English influences how words are encoded and subsequently retrieved from memory. Compared with premodifiers, postmodifiers might confer more perceptual significance to the associated head nouns, are more consistent with the "given-before-new" information structure, and might also be easier…

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…

Most current models of sentence comprehension assume that the human parsing mechanism (HPM) algorithmically computes detailed syntactic representations as basis for extracting sentence meaning. These models share the assumption that the representations computed by the HPM accurately reflect the linguistic input. This assumption has been challenged…

This paper reports on an experimental study addressing second language acquisition of English quantifiers by Arabic speakers. Due to several differences found between Arabic and English regarding types, meanings and functions of quantifiers, Arabic learners encounter challenges in mastering them properly. Unlike English, Arabic does not make lots…

Purpose: With Aim 1, we compared the comprehension of and sensitivity to canonical and noncanonical word order structures in school-age children with specific language impairment (SLI) and same-age typically developing (TD) children. Aim 2 centered on the developmental improvement of sentence comprehension in the groups. With Aim 3, we compared…

The topic of this dissertation concerns the ways that (IN)ANIMACY distinctions interact with various sub-systems of the human language faculty, in particular, morpho-syntax. In Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), morpho-syntax and ANIMACY can be pit against each other directly on the same set of target words, allowing a close inspection of the…