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The Critical Thinking Assessment Test (CAT) is a tool for evaluating students' critical thinking skills in various educational institutions within and outside the United States. While institutions regard the CAT as a high-stakes assessment, students may perceive it as a low-stakes test due to its lack of personal or academic repercussions. This study sought to explore the test-taking motivation of CAT takers by analyzing their test-taking efforts, specifically focusing on the predictive capabilities of two test-taking metrics, total word count and total response time, with the total CAT scores. The study revealed that total response time accounted for 9% of variability by itself but lost all its predictive power when paired with total word count. Conversely, total word count accounted for over a quarter of the variance in CAT scores. Additionally, results from the moderation analysis indicated that the moderation effect of student classification and gender on the relationship between total word count and total CAT scores was not statistically significant. Therefore, it can be inferred that regardless of their gender or the type of institution they attend, students who use more words in response to the CAT prompts tend to achieve better scores. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

Background: Laparoscopic cholecystectomy (LC) is one of the most frequently performed surgical procedures worldwide with occasional serious complications, including bile duct injuries, that may reflect surgeon misperception, rather than errors of skill and knowledge. Intraoperative cholangiography (IOC) is an imaging procedure that may prevent or identify these complications by defining biliary anatomy, identifying choledocholithiasis, and preventing or identifying common bile duct injury during LC. No formal curriculum exists for training surgical residents on how to perform and interpret IOCs; typically, residents rely on intraoperative guidance from attending surgeons and experience to develop the necessary skills. Since IOCs are not performed routinely, surgical residents have limited learning opportunities and therefore may have difficulty performing and interpreting them. Training programs based on perceptual learning (PL) principles, where learners experientially become more efficient and accurate at extracting valuable information from their environment, expedites the development of the necessary pattern recognition skills needed to improve image interpretation. To address the lack of a formal IOC curriculum, we designed a PL-based training module for surgical resident IOC, or cholangiogram, interpretation. Given PL benefits to other disciplines, there is an opportunity to leverage this approach to transform how we educate surgical residents to improve their pattern recognition abilities and subsequent surgical outcomes. Methods: Surgical residents from post-graduate year (PGY) 1 to 4 were assessed on their ability to identify cholangiogram completeness, differentiate between anatomic variants and abnormal findings, and provide diagnosis and management recommendations using a computer-based program. Pre- and post-training assessments were conducted, measuring residents' accuracy and response time, along with an evaluation of attending surgeons as a baseline. Confidence levels in cholangiogram interpretation were surveyed before and after the training. A subset of participants was interviewed to gather qualitative insights on their experience. Additionally, we explored the impact of combining simulator-based training for performing IOCs with the online interpretation module on residents' accuracy, response time, and confidence. First-year residents who were not exposed to the previous training modules participated in a pre/post control group design study. Results: 23 residents participated in the initial training and assessment component. Most residents (95.7%) found the training helpful and effective. Significant improvements were observed in residents' confidence levels for identifying complete versus incomplete cholangiograms (p=0.024), anatomic variants (p<0.001), abnormal findings (p<0.001), and overall cholangiogram interpretation (p=0.016). The accuracy of residents' interpretations increased significantly from pre-training (mean accuracy 75.3 ± 10.7%) to post-training (mean accuracy 81.9 ± 6.1%, p<0.001). There was a reduction in average response time per question from 25 ± 12 seconds to 17 ± 12 seconds (p<0.001). In the combined procedural simulator and online interpretation training study, 20 first year residents participated. The training was found to be helpful by 88% of participating residents. The training group showed significant improvements in confidence levels, pre/post training, compared to the control group for various aspects of IOC interpretation: identifying complete versus incomplete cholangiograms (p <0.001), anatomic variants (p<0.001), abnormal findings (p=0.029), and overall cholangiogram interpretation (p=0.004). Although the training group demonstrated improved accuracy gains compared to the control group, the differences were not statistically significant. Both groups showed decreased average response times, with a greater, non-significant reduction observed in the training group. Conclusion: A perceptual learning-based training module is a viable approach to educate surgical residents on performing and interpreting IOCs effectively. Further research is necessary to establish the validity of the training module, assess long-term retention, and evaluate its impact on clinical practice. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

All communication systems rely on sets of rules that must generally be followed for successful communication to be possible; in the case of human language, these rules are given by the grammar. However, despite these rules, there is considerable variation that has been noted across the grammar. In this dissertation, I explore one understudied factor that may contribute to this variability, namely print exposure, and argue that print exposure is related to spoken language at multiple levels of the grammar. In Chapter 1, I present evidence that individuals with higher levels of print exposure provide more polarized ratings on a standard syntactic acceptability judgment task and argue that this is due to greater evidence for licit syntactic structures because of additional input due to exposure to print. In Chapter 2, I provide further evidence for this argument by examining the relationship between print exposure and participants' resolution preferences when confronted with sentences exhibiting quantifier scope ambiguity. I find that individuals with higher print exposure give lower ratings to sentences exhibiting quantifier scope ambiguity and have significantly longer reaction times for inverse items in particular, than lower print exposure participants. From this, I conclude that high print exposure may strengthen expectations for the dominant surface scope interpretation, again because of greater evidence for the more common or preferred structure. Finally, in Chapter 3, I explore the phenomenon of variability in scalar implicature, specifically with respect to the accessibility of stronger alternatives. I suggest two novel methods: one for generating scales for use in tasks on scalar implicature, and one for testing whether an implicature has occurred. I find some evidence that accessibility is an important factor in the computation of scalar implicature, but also note various improvements that should be considered with respect to the task design for the two new methods introduced in this study. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

The development of emergent literacy, a precursor to formal reading, has been linked to subsequent conventional literacy skills in Chinese children. The factors important for acquiring Chinese reading skills, such as phonological and morphological awareness, have primarily been studied in primary school children rather than preschoolers. The complete picture of factors contributing to early reading skills in Mandarin-speaking Chinese preschool children remains unclear. Objectives: The aim of this study was to explore emergent literacy and early reading skills in preschool and early school-aged children and investigate the connections between them to address gaps in existing literature. Methodology: A cross-sectional design was used to collect data from a sample of 66 children, including 35 in their second year of kindergarten and 31 first-grade children. Assessments were conducted on phonological awareness (syllable deletion), morphological awareness (lexical compounding, homophone judgment, and homophone generation), orthographic awareness (character judgment), vocabulary, and rapid automatized naming (RAN) of numbers. Reading outcomes were measured by character naming and word recognition. Results: The MANOVA findings showed a significant grade group effect on all measures, except for RAN accuracy. Specifically, first-grade children outperformed second-year kindergarten children in syllable deletion, lexical compounding, homophone generation, homophone judgment, character judgment, and vocabulary. Additionally, first-grade children named numbers faster than kindergarten children in RAN. The correlation and regression analyses suggest that advanced emergent literacy skills in children improve word reading, but the associations between emergent literacy and reading vary by grade level. Syllable deletion and lexical compounding are particularly important for kindergarten children at the initial stage of learning to read, while character judgment plays a prominent role in the reading development of primary school children. Homophone judgment develops early and expands progressively as children gain reading experience during their primary school years. The significance of homophone generation is minimal at preschool and early school ages. RAN response time may provide more informative insights than RAN accuracy, and the link between RAN and reading skills appears to weaken once children begin schooling. Additionally, maternal education level was a significant co-variate associated with character naming in preschool children. Implications: Findings carry implications for Chinese educators and parents. Incorporating metalinguistic awareness into classroom instruction can support children's early reading development. Moreover, parents are encouraged to foster a literacy-rich home environment through experiences like interactive reading and character recognition, especially for preschool children without formal literacy instructions. Further longitudinal research is recommended to predict early reading skills in a larger sample of Mandarin-speaking preschoolers and establish age-specific educational goals. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

The effects of fluency-based instruction and accuracy-based instruction on contingency adduction were assessed using an alternating treatments design. Stimulus equivalence tasks were used to measure contingency adduction. Stimulus classes were composed of arbitrary visual forms. One treatment condition consisted of teaching fast, fluent responding with mastery criteria that included both accuracy and speed. This condition provided learning experiences similar to those encountered when receiving precision teaching or fluency-based instruction. The other treatment condition consisted of teaching in a manner that required slow, constrained responding, with a mastery criterion that only included accuracy. This condition provided learning experiences similar to those encountered in a traditional classroom educational setting. After mastery criteria were met in either condition, contingency adduction was tested. The dependent variables were number of errors prior to contingency adduction, average errors by adduction complexity, total time in teaching trials prior to adduction, number of teaching blocks prior to mastery of adduction relation, number of adduction testing blocks prior to mastery, number of relations mastered in the first adduction testing block, and number of errors in adduction testing blocks prior to mastery. Results indicated that participants made more errors prior to contingency adduction in fluency-based teaching than in accuracy-based teaching. However, participants also took less total time in teaching trials prior to contingency adduction in fluency-based teaching than in accuracy-based teaching. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

The Q-diffusion model is a cognitive process model that considers decision making as an unobservable information accumulation process. Both item and person parameters decide the trace line of the cognitive process, which further decides observed response and response time. Because the likelihood function for the Q-diffusion model is intractable, standard parameter estimation techniques such as the maximum likelihood estimation is difficult to apply. This project applies Approximate Bayesian Computation (ABC) to estimate parameters of the Q-diffusion model. Different from standard Markov chain Monte Carlo samplers that require pointwise evaluation of the likelihood function, ABC builds upon a program for data generation and a metric on the data space to gauge the similarity between imputed and observed data. This project aims to compare the performance of two criteria for gauging the similarity or distance. The limited-information criterion measures the distance in suitable summary statistics (i.e., variances, covariances, and means) between imputed and observed data. The enhanced limited information criterion additionally considers the dependencies among persons' responses and response times. Bias, rooted mean squared error, and coverage of credible intervals were reported. Results show that when using posterior median as the point estimate, by jointly considering a person's responses and response time, the enhanced criterion yielded less biased estimation on population scale of person power and slightly better item parameters. This SMC-ABC algorithm informs researchers about key data features that should be captured when determining the stopping rule for the algorithm. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

Response time is an important research topic in the field of psychometrics. This dissertation tries to explore some response time properties across several item characteristics and examinee characteristics, as well as the interactions between response time and response outcomes, using data from a statewide mathematics assessment in two grades. Several methods were adopted to investigate the timing properties, including multilevel linear modeling, latent growth curve modeling, differential response time index, and visual techniques. Results indicated that item characteristics and examinee groups differ in response time across grades, and examinees paced through the assessment very differently. Considering the results, it is hoped to help improve testing practices from the perspectives of test construction and fairness. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

Item response theory (IRT) is currently the dominant methodological paradigm in educational and psychological measurement. IRT models are based on assumptions about the relationship between latent traits and observed responses, so the accuracy of the methodology depends heavily on the reasonableness of these assumptions. This dissertation consists of three studies, all of which focus on different scenarios where existing IRT models do not agree closely with reality and thus may provide misleading or insufficient characterizations of measurement phenomena. In the first study, I discuss anchoring, the tendency for respondents to select categories near the rating category used for the immediately preceding item in self-report rating scale assessments. I propose a psychometric model based on a multidimensional nominal model for response style that also simultaneously accommodates a respondent-level anchoring tendency. This model is applied to a real dataset measuring extraversion, and empirical results support attending to both anchoring and midpoint response styles as ways of assessing respondent engagement. In the second study, I examine the simultaneous relevance of content trait level and response styles as predictive factors of response time on noncognitive assessments, and the potential for omitted variable bias when ignoring either factor. Using response time data from several noncognitive assessments, I demonstrate how a multilevel model leads to consistent findings that support the simultaneous relevance of both factors. The average effects of response style consistently emerge as stronger, although also show greater respondent-level variability, than those of content traits. In the third study, test items whose scores reflect sequential or IRTree modeling outcomes are considered. For such items, I argue that item specific factors, although not empirically measurable, are often present across stages of the same item. A conceptual model that incorporates such factors is proposed and used to demonstrate how they create ambiguity in the interpretations of item and person parameters beyond the first stage. Various empirical applications show patterns of violations of item parameter invariance across stages that are highly suggestive of item specific factors. These studies reflect some recent advances in IRT modeling applied to practical issues, which hopefully will benefit both methodologists and practitioners. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

When individuals read a narrative text, they construct a mental representation known as a situational model to comprehend the unfolding story. These models require updates at meaningful changes in the story to reflect current information accurately. Existing research highlights the attentional and working memory demands of these updating mechanisms. Surprisingly, there is a lack of exploration into the role of language proficiency in these processes. In this study, bilingual English and Spanish speakers read narratives depicting everyday activities in their dominant and non-dominant languages and intermittently performed a recognition task related to character or spatial information. The use of bilingual participants allowed for examining within-individual differences in reading proficiency and its potential impact on situational model updating. The results revealed different updating patterns based on attentional capacity and language proficiency levels. At low levels of attentional capacity, participants exhibited patterns inconsistent with incremental or global updating. However, participants engaged more in global updating at higher levels of attentional capacity. Similarly, lower language proficiency levels exhibited patterns inconsistent with incremental or global updating, suggesting difficulties in constructing and updating situational models. This was supported by findings of longer reaction times and lower accuracy in individuals with lower language proficiency levels. However, participants with higher language proficiency engaged in global updating of spatial information but reactivation (rather than updating) of character information any time a meaningful change in the text occurred, suggesting that in the current study, participants may have prioritized maintaining information about all characters represented in the stories. These findings underscore the influence of attentional capacity and language proficiency on situational model updating. Individuals build and update more cohesive situational models at higher language proficiency levels due to the reduced attentional demands of language processing. Additionally, the reduced demands for language processing at higher levels of language proficiency allow individuals to reallocate attentional resources to aspects of the story they deem relevant. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

Skill acquisition theorists conceptualize second language (L2) learning as the acquisition of a set of perceptual, cognitive, and motor skills. The dominant view in skill acquisition theory is to regard L2 skill acquisition as a three-stage process "from initial representation of knowledge through initial changes in behavior to eventual fluent, spontaneous, largely effortless, and highly skilled behavior" (DeKeyser, 2020, p. 83). While there is indirect evidence that indicates the existence of such developmental stages, the number and the nature of those stages are often assumed a priori, and whether or not these stages actually exist remains untested. My dissertation study was designed to test and validate the three-stage model of L2 skill acquisition derived from cognitive psychological research, namely, the cognitive, associative, and autonomous stage (Fitts & Posner, 1967), each of which draws on distinct cognitive processes for learning. Sixty-five adult learners deliberately learned and practiced a miniature language based on Japanese, called "Mini-Nihongo", for a total of 1,056 practice trials. The participants also took a battery of tests on three dimensions of cognitive abilities that are known to be active at each stage of skill acquisition: declarative memory, procedural memory, and psychomotor ability (Ackerman, 1988, 1992; Anderson, 1982). Comprehension practice took place in the form of a sentence-picture matching task, and production practice was implemented in the form a productive maze task. Accuracy, reaction time (RT), and the coefficient of variability (CV) of RT were analyzed as the dependent variables. There were six tests of cognitive abilities: the Continuous Visual Memory Task and LLAMA-B for declarative memory ability, an alternating serial reaction time task and a statistical learning task for procedural memory ability, and the alternating serial reaction time task and a two-choice RT task for psychomotor ability. I analyzed the data from the language practice and the battery of cognitive tests in two steps. First, I fitted a series of hidden Markov models (HMMs) to the RT data that represented different hypotheses regarding the number of skill acquisition stages (i.e., one, two, or three stages). This first step of the analysis revealed that the acquisition of comprehension skills can be best conceptualized as a three-stage process, whereas the acquisition of production skills encompassed two stages. Based on the best-fitting HMMs and the corresponding number of learning stages, I then utilized a series of generalized linear mixed models to investigate the nature of the identified skill acquisition stages. Specifically, I examined whether the three dependent variables, accuracy, RT, and the CV, could be predicted by the three dimension of cognitive abilities at each stage of skill acquisition. The results showed that different cognitive abilities variably predicted learning at each stage, with the trends largely consistent with the general skill acquisition theory (DeKeyser, 2020; Lyster & Sato, 2013; Y. Suzuki, 2022).Overall, the findings of the study lend support to the three-stage model of L2 skill acquisition, but its proposed mechanisms may have to be revised to suit the specific cognitive processes involved in L2 learning. In addition, when applying the skill acquisition theory (or variants thereof) to L2 learning, one may have to analyze the theory not only at the level of learning mechanisms and processes (e.g., declarative learning, proceduralization, and production tuning) but also at the level of cognitive processing (e.g., lexical and grammatical de/encoding, syntactic parsing, and monitoring) that are specific to L2 learning. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

In the education sector, teachers are often faced with an influx of technology, and various factors affect how and when to use it (perceived usefulness). Various research showed that teachers with high self-efficacy perform better in the classroom, and their students achieve greater gain compared to teachers with low self-efficacy. Additionally, research also showed that teachers who spend time in professional development, and those that receive quick responses from technology support exhibit a higher sense of self-efficacy and are therefore more likely to use various technologies in their classroom. The current research explored the relationship between teacher self-efficacy and classroom use of technology using correlation analysis as well as the relationship between classroom usage, PD, and speed of technology response using a multiple regression. The results of the research indicated that there was a positive correlation between self-efficacy and classroom usage of technology. The regression results indicated that increase in PD and/or quick response from technology support resulted in an increase in self-efficacy. There was a positive impact on self-efficacy. Implications on the participating district included targeted PD and technology integration coaches to increase self-efficacy among teachers, and streamline systems in technology support to reduce response time. Another implication and recommendation was that the participating district explore the different ways to increase self-efficacy based on the sources of self-efficacy discussed. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

In this dissertation, I investigated how cognitive resources as well as formal, and informal language experience impact language learning in two studies. In the first study (Chapter 2), I examined the learning of Spanish grammatical gender by Chinese international students who were studying abroad in the US. The goal of that study was to uncover whether being immersed in their non-dominant language (English) to varying degrees and having ambient exposure to other languages in their environment would impact new language learning and modulate the relationship between cognitive control resources and learning. For the learning of grammatical gender, individual differences in the international students' degree of exposure to English predicted higher accuracy in learning. Moreover, international students' active use of an additional Chinese language modulated the relationship between cognitive control and reaction times for learning and generalization of grammatical gender in Spanish. These results suggest that both the learners' current immersion context, their past language knowledge, and their cognitive resources come to shape new language learning in a third language. In the second study (Chapter 3), I investigated whether prior knowledge of a tone language as an L1, individual differences in cognitive control and musical experience predicted the ability to perceive tones in a new language. Speakers of tonal native languages (Vietnamese or Bantu languages) and speakers of non-tonal native languages (English or Dutch) were asked to identify Mandarin tones. Critically, Vietnamese has a tone system that is similar to Mandarin because it uses the same two tonal cues as Mandarin (pitch height and pitch direction). On the other hand, Bantu languages are more dissimilar because they only use one of the tonal cues from Mandarin (pitch height). All participants had no prior knowledge of Mandarin, but all were L2 speakers of English, also a non-tonal language. L1 speakers of a tone system that was similar to that of Mandarin (Vietnamese) were more accurate in identifying the Mandarin tones relative to speakers of nontonal languages (Spanish or Dutch). However, L1 speakers of Bantu languages, which have a more dissimilar tone system to that of Mandarin, were less accurate in identifying Mandarin tones compared to speakers of nontonal languages. Higher levels of musical experience also predicted higher Mandarin tone identification, but only for Spanish and Vietnamese groups. Cognitive control abilities, as indexed by performance on the Simon task, did not predict tone identification. These findings are consistent with the claim that speech L2 perception is largely influenced by native language tuning to L1 phonetic cues and with previous research showing that experience tracking pitch in music confers benefits to tracking pitch in a linguistic context. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

It has long been suggested that contextual facilitation effects (hereafter, context effects) reflect the interaction between the construction of an internal representation of context and the processing of a semantically related word (Kuperberg & Jaeger, 2016; Stanovich, 1980). Listening and reading studies have constantly replicated the findings that individuals' processing of a word with a predictable context is faster and more accurate that of an unpredictable context (Huettig & Mani, 2016; Rayner & Well, 1996). Moreover, reading studies show that, compared to skilled readers, less-skilled readers rely heavily on context to recognize words due to weaknesses in reading skills (Stanovich, 1984). In the current study, 177 third-to-sixth-grade children in Honduras were administered a sentence listening task and a sentence reading task and were assessed on their reading and cognitive skills. The main goal was to examine the presence of context effects and whether these effects vary as a function of reading and cognitive skills. The results indicated the presence of robust contextual facilitation effects on both reaction times and accuracy in both listening and reading. Reaction time data showed that, although the difference between reading and listening was larger for unpredictable words, the facilitation prompted by predictable contexts reduced the processing cost between reading and listening. In addition, the magnitude of context effects on reaction time diminished with development. Accuracy data revealed that less skilled readers showed larger context effects than skilled readers, and this seems to be related to lower reading and cognitive skills. Collectively, these findings indicated that less-skilled readers rely on context more than skilled readers to process words. Findings are discussed in the context of theoretical accounts on language processing and comprehension, as well as the context of the interactive-compensatory model of reading. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

Anxiety in Children can develop into pervasive disorders in adulthood if not treated. Research shows dysfunctional Executive Function (EF) and anxiety are both shown to have a negative impact on math achievement in children and adolescents (Trezise & Reeve, 2018; Kalaycioglu, 2015; Owens, Stevenson, Hadwin & Norgate, 2012). Chung, Weyandt, and Swentosky (2014) found biological and neuropsychological support for EF as a unitary and multifaceted processor for regulating our emotional states as well as our daily procedures. Anderson's (2002) model of Executive Control System (ECS) allows the factors of EF to be examined usingM a developmental approach towards EF processes. He groups the EF skills into four domains: attentional control, cognitive flexibility, information processing and goal setting. The current study uses the factors inhibition, divided attention, verbal fluency, and planning to represent each domain, respectfully. We measured (n = 18) adolescent's EF skills, anxiety levels and math achievement by their scores from the DKEFs, BASC-2 and the BASC-3, the WIAT III and WJ IV- ACH, respectfully. With this small sample, the results suggest the EF domain attentional control via inhibition, as measured by the Color Work Interference Test (CWIT) from the DKEFs, mediated anxiety and math achievement. Future studies using a larger sample are necessary to replicate the current study's findings on the mediating relationship of EF between anxiety, and math achievement in adolescence due to the small sample size. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

Scalar inference, the process by which we infer meanings stronger than what was explicitly said, has long been a central topic of investigation in theoretical semantics-pragmatics, as well as in psycholinguistics. Upon encountering the sentence "Mary ate some of the deep dish", for instance, hearers regularly compute the pragmatic meaning that Mary ate some, but not all, of the deep dish. The standard assumption is that the inferential process that gives rise to this result involves hearers reasoning about what the speaker could have said, but did not (Grice, 1967). Further, Neo-Gricean accounts typically assume that hearers infer the negation of informationally stronger unsaid alternatives, e.g., because form a lexical scale, and "all" is stronger than "some", hearers derive "not all" upon encountering "some" (Horn, 1972; Katzir, 2007). In addition to involving the negation of unsaid alternatives, another crucial property of scalar inference is context-sensitivity (Van Kuppevelt, 1996). That is, whether a scalar inference-enriched meaning is derived depends partially on the discourse context. For instance, given a question such as "Did Mary eat any of the deep dish?", all that matters is whether Mary ate at least some of the deep dish. Therefore, in this context, an answer of "She ate some of the deep dish" is less likely to lead to scalar inference, since "She ate all of the deep dish" is no longer a relevant alternative. This dissertation is an experimental investigation into these two crucial properties of scalar inference: alternative- and context-sensitivity. In Chapter 2, I test whether alternatives such as "all", which are important in the theoretical modelling of scalar inference, are psychologically real. In a series of semantic priming with lexical decision experiments, I demonstrate that such lexical alternatives are indeed retrieved and activated in the processing of inference-triggering utterances. In Chapter 3, I turn to the much-investigated question of whether scalar inference calculation incurs a processing cost, operationalized as increased reaction times. In a sentence-picture verification experiment, I compare scalar inference with another pragmatic inference, it-cleft exhaustivity, and demonstrate that whether inference calculation is costly is a function of the discourse context, and not whether alternative-retrieval is involved.While much research has investigated the "some but not all" inference, there exist many other scales where a set of lexical items are ordered with respect to each other in terms of their logical strength. Similarly to, also form a scale; an utterance of "The movie is good" might give rise to the scalar inference that the movie is not excellent. An important recent finding, however, is that there is in fact considerable variation across such different scales in the likelihood of inference calculation: the "not excellent" inference, for instance, is much less likely to arise than "not all" (van Tiel et al., 2016). The second half of this dissertation investigates this phenomenon of scalar diversity. In Chapter 4, I ask whether the observed variation can be explained by differences in the alternatives themselves ("all" vs. "excellent"). My findings suggest that some (but definitely not all) properties of alternatives (e.g., accessibility) do indeed predict likelihood of inference calculation, yet scalar diversity remains largely unexplained. Lastly, in Chapter 5, I investigate whether scalar diversity can be modulated by a supportive discourse context vs. grammatically encoding the negation of alternatives, and show that uniformity in inference calculation is only achieved when these two factors align. Overall, the picture that emerges from this dissertation is that pragmatic meaning arises both as a function of global properties of context, and as a function of local properties of the scalar terms themselves. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]