The leading versions of epistemic naturalism have attempted to make normative accounts of justification and knowledge in part dependent upon scientific psychology. Call this doctrine psychologistic naturalism. Psychologistic naturalism, it is thought, holds the promise of integrating normative questions about the relation between evidence and belief with a physicalist, causal conception of our mental life. In Part One of this essay I argue that psychologistic naturalism fails. My reasons for claiming this differ significantly from those advanced in the contemporary literature by epistemic non-naturalists, however. Non-naturalists have mistakenly accepted the terms of debate set by psychologistic naturalists, and thus they have argued that the empirical results of the science of the mind--as part of a merely descriptive causal account of natural systems--have no important place in epistemology. But psychologistic naturalism does not fail because psychology is causal and descriptive, as the non-naturalist alleges. It fails, instead, because psychology is not wholly or even primarily causal and descriptive. Psychology requires a robust normative account of rational inference in order to offer explanations within a cognitivist framework. The inadequacy of psychologistic naturalism may seem to invite a return to epistemology as first philosophy, where the primary methodology deploys a priori intuitions about cases. In Part Two, I argue that this is not the best response to the instability of psychologistic naturalism. If psychological explanations express an embedded normative component, then the non-naturalist's objections to a liaison between epistemology and psychology are misguided. I pursue an epistemology in the scientific image, where psychological explanations encode a normative epistemic component and where the states of natural cognizers are characterized at a finer resolution than beliefs. Psychological explanation involves an evaluation of the inferential cogency of each step in a cognitive process, and I replace the traditional methodology of epistemology with this more subtle and nuanced version of epistemic appraisal.

This study presents the theory that language comprehension involves analyzing sentences into phonological structures, syntactic structures, and semantic structures. The interaction between the three levels of linguistic representation accounts for four stages of parsing: (a) &phis;-phrasing (i.e., combining words into phonological phrases), (b) attachment (i.e., attaching a phrase to an existing structure), (c) thematic interpretation (i.e., interpreting thematic relations), and (d) clausal analysis (i.e., processing a sentence clause by clause). Syntactic ambiguities are resolved through the four stages of parsing. This theory explains why some locally ambiguous sentences cause garden path effects whereas others do not and why some globally ambiguous sentences cause pun effects whereas others do not.

Using the DRM paradigm and a short story format, elementary age children demonstrate immediate false recall and recognition effects. Results from using the DRM lists showed that, relative to adult false recall levels, older children falsely recalled fewer critical words from DRM lists, and younger children's false recall of critical words was near floor levels, suggesting that gist processing did not predominate during the free recall task. Developmental trends were not in the direction of increased accuracy in memory performance, but rather in the direction of increased false memory. Contradiction within a short story format increased levels of false memory in younger and older children to levels that were not reliably different from information that repeated sentence meaning. Results from both experiments demonstrate that increases in false memory occurred when gist memory representations were strengthened, i.e., when the meaning of words or sentences was repeated. False memory effects were more pronounced over a delay interval. Fuzzy trace theory's assumptions explain the preponderance of the memory testing results obtained in these two experiments. Results run counter to suggestibility studies, where younger children produce false memory that surpasses older children and adults.

The effects of visual experience on perception were examined using two classic research paradigms: visual deprivation and perceptual adaptation. The present study evaluates the extent to which children in the 5- to 14-year-old age range have the capacity for visual plasticity with respect to recovery from the effects of astigmatism-related visual deprivation and adaptation to spatially distorted visual input. Visual experience was altered through eyeglass correction of astigmatism, a condition of the eye that induces degraded (blurred) visual input and causes a form of visual deprivation. Lenses that correct astigmatism cause two changes in sensory input: they alleviate the deprivation effects of astigmatism, and cause spatial distortion. Perception was initially measured when the children first received eyeglass correction, and change in perception was measured after 1 month of wear, and after 1 year of wear. Measures included recognition acuity, resolution acuity, vernier acuity, contrast sensitivity, stereoacuity, and form perception. Baseline analyses of normal (non-astigmatic) subject data indicated that recognition acuity, resolution acuity, vernier acuity, and contrast sensitivity continue to develop within the 5- to 14-year-old age range. Baseline analyses also revealed that children who experienced astigmatism-related deprivation demonstrated perceptual deficits, in comparison to non-astigmatic children, on all measures of perception (although deficits within some measures depended on stimulus orientation (grating acuity and contrast sensitivity) and spatial frequency of the stimulus (for contrast sensitivity)), and demonstrated measurable distortions in form perception. However, primary outcome analyses revealed little evidence of plasticity with regard to recovery from the effects of deprivation and no evidence of plasticity with regard to perceptual adaptation to distortion. The results suggest that children in the 5- to 14-year-old age range may be beyond the sensitive period for recovery from astigmatism-related deprivation through simple restoration of clear visual input. Discussion focuses on theoretical views on conditions necessary for plasticity (Bedford, 1993a, 1993b, 1995, Banks, 1988), and their implications regarding another intervention, discrimination learning, that might be more effective at inducing plasticity in children and adults who are beyond the sensitive period for plasticity, and their implications for interpretation of data on adaptation to spatial distortion observed in the present study.

This study aims to formulate a theory of L2 grammar adequate enough to account for the final L2 state. We argued that L 2 I-language was free of L1 properties, the basis of the CHL2 Uniformity Hypothesis (CUH), and that L1-related performance data were effects of the Relativized Transfer Condition (RTC), constituting the L2 performance systems. The English resultatives (Mary painted the house red), available in Mandarin and depictives (John ate the meat raw), unavailable in Mandarin, were used to examine the hypotheses. Nineteen Mandarin speakers of English and nineteen native speakers of English participated in the study. The L2 subjects had lived in the United States for an average of ten years and 5 months at the time of the experiments. The subjects were tested in four experiments: the Guided Production (GP) test, the Clause-combining (CC) test, the Grammaticality Judgment (GJ) test, and the Interpretation (IT) test. Results were processed through t-tests, one-way ANOVA, and factorial ANOVA procedures. Important findings emerged. First, L 2 subjects showed knowledge of both English resultatives and depictives, indistinct from that of the controls in some, but not all, tests. Second, while their knowledge of the canonical constructions resembled that of the controls, L2 subjects were more reluctant to construct resultatives and depictives than the native counterparts in some tests. We attribute such irregularities to the modality of measurements, which affected the L 2 subjects' performance, but not their grammatical knowledge. This speculation was confirmed in experiments (i.e., the CC, GJ, and IT tests), where L 2 subjects, when specifically directed to produce resultatives and depictives, performed just like the controls. We therefore conclude that the final L 2 state coincides with the final state attained by the native speakers. We further claim that it is logical to speculate that the linguistic and acquisitional mechanisms that led to the final L2 state must constitute exactly the same set as the one employed by the native speakers. Therefore, we conclude that the CUH (CHL2 Uniformity Hypothesis) is true of late L 2 speakers. By the same token, we also conclude that the RTC (Relativized Transfer Condition) consists of adult L2 development.

Listeners are sensitive to phonetic differences that correspond to phonemic contrasts in their native language, and they often exhibit difficulty discriminating sounds that are not contrastive in their native language. Although a large literature shows that learners can improve their perception of novel contrasts with exposure to a second language, there is still little understanding of how learners accomplish this. There are at least two possible sources of evidence that learners might use to acquire sensitivity to novel sound contrasts. First, learners might use their knowledge of minimal pairs in the language to determine which sounds are contrastive. For example, knowing the minimal pair toe-doe may provide learners with evidence that /t/ and /d/ are contrastive in English (Lexical-Contrast-Based Evidence). Second, learners might compute the statistical distributions of the acoustic-phonetic properties of their second language input. The logic is that two contrastive speech sounds will be represented by distinct distributions along a of a number of acoustic-phonetic dimensions (Distribution-Based Evidence). Although both are possible sources of the evidence learners use to acquire novel second language sound contrasts, the relative influence of these two types of information is not yet known. Experiments 1 and 2 of this dissertation employ a variety of training techniques to determine the relative influence of Lexical-Contrast-Based and Distribution-Based evidence on participants' sensitivity to a novel contrast. Results indicate that while both kinds of evidence affect sensitivity, Lexical-Contrast-Based evidence had a stronger influence on discrimination performance. While Experiments 1 and 2 tested learners' sensitivity to novel contrasts, it is not yet clear that improved discrimination ability is of benefit in subsequent second language learning. Experiment 3 examined the linguistic relevance of participants' improved discrimination ability by testing learners' lexical representations for new words that differed minimally with respect to the trained contrast. Regardless of training condition, participants did not record the new contrast distinctly in their lexical representations. That participants exhibited sensitivity to the novel contrast but were nonetheless unable to record the contrast lexically suggests a dissociation between learners' acoustic-phonetic knowledge of their second language and their ability to represent that knowledge contrastively in their lexicon.

This dissertation presents and evaluates the hypothesis that event structure information such as telicity is used during language comprehension. A verb or verb phrase is telic if it denotes an event that necessarily progresses towards an endpoint. The major experimental finding presented in this dissertation is that garden pathing is less severe in reduced relative clause sentences with telic embedded verbs than in those with atelic embedded verbs. For example, in the structurally ambiguous sentence 'The actress awakened/sketched by the writer left in a hurry', less comprehension difficulty occurs on the word 'by' when the embedded verb is telic ('awakened') than when it is atelic ('sketched'). On-line measures of comprehension difficulty in three different experimental paradigms showed this result at the earliest disambiguation point (on the by-phrase). Two of these paradigms involved comprehension in reading, and the third one involved spoken language comprehension. These experiments also included the factor of obligatory transitivity: whether or not the verb requires a direct object. The results show that telicity and obligatory transitivity both immediately affect the severity of the garden path independently of each other. In order to address the issue of how to categorize verb phrases as telic or atelic, I conducted a computerized study which collected semantic judgments and grammaticality judgments on verb phrases used in three classic telicity tests from the event structure literature. The participants in the study were 24 English-speaking students in an introductory linguistics course. The results provide preliminary evidence that sentence frames, such as the adverbials 'for an hour' and 'in an hour', provide an objective means of categorizing verb phrases as telic or atelic. The research strongly suggests that verb telicity information should be included in models of human language comprehension. I discuss means of including telicity in several pre-existing comprehension models. The account that best explains the telicity and transitivity effects taken together is based on identifying canonical sentence patterns associated with thematic roles, as proposed by Townsend and Bever (2001). The information that a verb is inherently telic activates the use of an NV(N) template with an obligatory theme role.

It has become increasingly important for individuals to understand infections disease, as there has been a tremendous rise in viral and bacterial disease. This research examines systematic misconceptions regarding the characteristics of viruses and bacteria present in individuals previously educated in biological sciences at a college level. 90 pre-nursing students were administered the Knowledge Acquisition Device (KAD) which consists of 100 True/False items that included statements about the possible attributes of four entities: bacteria, virus, amoeba, and protein. Thirty pre-nursing students, who incorrectly stated that viruses were alive, were randomly assigned to three conditions. (1) exposed to information about the ontological nature of viruses, (2) Information about viruses, (3) control. In the condition that addressed the ontological nature of a virus, all of those participants were able to classify viruses correctly as not alive; however any items that required inferences, such as viruses come in male and female forms or viruses breed with each other to make baby viruses were still incorrectly answered by all conditions in the posttest. It appears that functional knowledge, ex. If a virus is alive or dead, or how it is structured, is not enough for an individual to have a full and accurate understanding of viruses. Ontological knowledge information may alter the functional knowledge but underlying inferences remain systematically incorrect.

<p> The goal of this study was to demonstrate that warmth and attachment are two inherently distinct systems by showing how trust is connected more closely to attachment than warmth. Measures of attachment, interpersonal warmth, and trust were taken from CSULB undergraduates. Participants watched an empathetic video or a non-emotional control video before engaging in the economic investment game. Participants were given the choice to send a whole dollar amount of zero to four to another participant as an indication of their level of trust. It was predicted that there would be no correlation between either trust measures with the measures of empathic response. Although weak correlations were found, results showed interpersonal warmth items did not correlate with trust items and the emotional video did not have an impact on the amount of money sent, supporting the theory that attachment and interpersonal warmth may be separated if one examined trust.</p>

<p> Much evidence exists in support of the notion known as a bilingual advantage, the idea that some bilinguals benefit from an executive functioning system superior to monolinguals. The majority of research investigating the bilingual advantage lies in metalinguistic awareness, conflict resolution, and inhibition; however, this thesis examines working-memory abilities by comparing the performance of English monolingual and Spanish-English bilingual groups in a dual task paradigm, taxing lexical retrieval and memory maintenance and manipulation. Participants were asked to perform a lexical retrieval task eliciting high-frequency abstract nouns or adjectives while simultaneously memorizing an accumulating list of target abstract words to be later recalled. Although no difference in immediate recall between language groups was found, bilinguals remembered significantly more target words 5 days after testing. Evidence suggests that bilinguals may build new memory representations that are more resistant to decay than monolingual memory representations.</p>