Recent psycholinguistics research suggests that the executive function (EF) skill known as conflict resolution - the ability to adjust behavior in the service of resolving among incompatible representations - is important for several language processing tasks such as lexical and syntactic ambiguity resolution, verbal fluency, and common-ground assessment. Here, we discuss work showing that vari...

We address the problem of performing semantic transformations on strings, which may represent a variety of data types (or their combination) such as a column in a relational table, time, date, currency, etc. Unlike syntactic transformations, which are based on regular expressions and which interpret a string as a sequence of characters, semantic transformations additionally require exploiting t...

Researchers have established a relationship between beginning readers' silent comprehension ability and their prosodic fluency, such that readers who read aloud with appropriate prosody tend to have higher scores on silent reading comprehension assessments. The current study was designed to investigate this relationship in two groups of high school readers: Specifically Poor Comprehenders (SPCs...

Natural language is a pervasive human skill not yet fully achievable by automated computing systems. The main challenge is understanding how to computationally model both the depth and the breadth of natural languages. In this thesis, I present two probabilistic models that systematically model both the depth and the breadth of natural languages for two different linguistic tasks: syntactic par...

This study, framed by the component model of reading (CMR), examined the relative importance of kindergarten-entry predictors of first grade reading performance. Specifically, elements within the ecological domain included dialect, maternal education, amount of preschool, and home literacy; elements within the psychological domain included teacher-reported academic competence, social skills, an...