Acquiring syntactic variation: regularization in wh-question production. ABSTRACT: Children are often exposed to language-internal variation. Studying the acquisition of variation allows us to understand more about children’s ability to acquire probabilistic input, their preferences at choice points, and factors contributing to such preference. Using wh-variation as a case study, this dissertation explores the acquisition of […]

Selection in Written Language Production: Evidence from Aphasia ABSTRACT: Most models of word production assume that in the process of producing a target word, multiple distractors also get activated, both other words (at the lexical level) and other phonemes/letters (at the segmental level). Thus, a selection mechanism is needed to select the targets at each […]

Pragmatic inference in spatial language. ABSTRACT: Spatial prepositions left, right, above, below, in, on, and others belong to a closed lexical class, meaning that the same spatial term frequently describes a wide range of spatial relations. As a result, speakers have to make generalizations about what kind of spatial relations can be described with the […]

Structural Representations in Online Syntactic Processing: An Artificial Neural Network Approach. ABSTRACT: Speakers of a language are able to effortlessly determine whether sentences abide by grammatical rules: we instantly know "The dog runs" is a good sentence, but "The dogs runs" is not. Work in syntactic theory suggests that it is necessary to represent complex […]