Over the past decade, social scientists have adapted computational methods for qualitative text analysis, with the hope that they can match the accuracy and reliability of hand coding. The emergence of GPT and open-source generative large language models (LLMs) has transformed this process by shifting from programming to engaging with models using…

Purpose: Children with hearing loss (CHL) who use hearing devices (cochlear implants or hearing aids) and communicate orally have trouble comprehending sentences with noncanonical order. This study explores sentence comprehension strategies in Spanish-speaking CHL, focusing on their ability to integrate morphosyntactic cues (word order,…

Generative AI (GenAI) is quickly becoming a valuable tool for sociological research. Already, sociologists employ GenAI for tasks like classifying text and simulating human agents. We point to another major use case: the extraction of structured information from unstructured text. Information Extraction (IE) is an established branch of Natural…

Educators and researchers are interested in ways that ChatGPT and other generative AI tools might move beyond the role of "cheatbot" and become part of the network of resources students use for writing. We studied how high school students used ChatGPT as a writing support while writing arguments about topics like school mascots. We…

Open-text responses provide researchers and educators with rich, nuanced insights that multiple-choice questions cannot capture. When reliably assessed, such responses have the potential to enhance teaching and learning. However, scaling and consistently capturing these nuances remain significant challenges, limiting the widespread use of…

The present study investigated whether children's difficulty with non-canonical structures is due to their non-adult-like use of linguistic cues or their inability to revise misinterpretations using late-arriving cues. We adopted a priming production task and a self-paced listening task with picture verification, and included three Mandarin…

As artificial intelligence and natural language processing methods rapidly develop, communication plays a pivotal role in every-day interactions. In this theoretical paper, we explore the overlap and commonalities between question-asking and prompt engineering. While seemingly distinct, these processes share a common foundation in essential skills…

Understanding language requires readers and listeners to cull meaning from fast-unfolding messages that often contain conflicting cues pointing to incompatible ways of interpreting the input (e.g., "The cat was chased by the mouse"). This article reviews mounting evidence from multiple methods demonstrating that cognitive control plays…

Purpose: Predictive language comprehension has become a major topic in psycholinguistic research. The study described in this article aims to investigate if German children with developmental language disorder (DLD) use grammatical gender agreement to predict the continuation of noun phrases in the same way as it has been observed for typically…

Large Language Models (LLMs) present a radically new paradigm for the study of "information foraging behavior." We study how LLM technology is used for pedagogical content creation by a sample of 25 participants in a doctoral-level Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Education course, and the role of computational-thinking skills in shaping…

We conducted two experiments to assess the alignment between Generative AI (GenAI) text personalization and hypothetical readers' profiles. In Experiment 1, four LLMs (i.e., Claude 3.5 Sonnet; Llama; Gemini Pro 1.5; ChatGPT 4) were prompted to tailor 10 science texts (i.e., biology, chemistry, physics) to accommodate four different profiles…

An increasing number of studies have investigated how ChatGPT can aid in written assessment and feedback provision. However, many studies overlook its conversational design and underlying architecture, raising concerns about the reliability and validity of their analytical outputs. Therefore, applying first principles thinking to prompt use, and…

A longstanding criticism of traditional high-stakes writing assessments is their use of static prompts in which test takers compose a single text in response to a prompt. These static prompts do not allow measurement of the writing process. This paper describes the development and validation of an innovative interactive writing task. After the…

This study investigates the effects of Processing Instruction (PI) on the acquisition of grammatical gender and gender-marked pronouns in German. PI was compared to Traditional Instruction, i.e. a traditional, vocabulary-oriented approach using color cues (TI) and a Categorization and Memorization task (CM). The results of an immediate posttest…

This article unfolds and argues for Biliteracy Metaphor Analysis (BMA), a methodology for examining the interpretation and use of metaphors in canon literature in a biliteracy context, in this case the canon of Danish literature read and interpreted by multilingual students in a ninth grade classroom. BMA combines Spradley's ethnographic framework…