In acquiring a native language, the input children receive, to an unneglectable extent, shapes the rate of acquisition and the ultimate achievement. This in turn has cascading effects on many aspects of later development, including but not limited to language. Providing optimal input for early language development, therefore, is of major interest…

Poor metaphor comprehension was considered a hallmark of autism spectrum disorder (ASD), but recent research has questioned the extent and the sources of these difficulties. In this cross-sectional study, we compared metaphor comprehension in individuals with ASD (N = 29) and individuals with typical development (TD; N = 31), and investigated the…

Listeners make use of contextual cues during continuous speech processing that help overcome the limitations of the acoustic input. These semantic, grammatical, and pragmatic cues facilitate prediction of upcoming words and/or reduce the lexical search space by inhibiting activation of contextually inappropriate words that share phonological…

Reading comprehension is one of the essential skills for students as they make a transition from learning to read to reading to learn. Over the last decade, the increased use of digital learning materials for promoting literacy skills (e.g., oral fluency and reading comprehension) in K-12 classrooms has been a boon for teachers. However, instant…

Student plagiarism has challenged educators for decades, with heightened paranoia following the advent of the Internet in the 1980's and ready access to easily copied text. But plagiarism will look like child's play next to new developments in AI-based natural-language processing (NLP) systems that increasingly appear to "write" as…

Prior research has shown that various types of conventional multiword chunks are processed faster than matched novel strings, but it is unclear whether this processing advantage extends to variant multiword chunks that are less formulaic. To determine whether the processing advantage of multiword chunks accommodates variations in the canonical…

Cyberbullying (CB) is classified as one of the severe misconducts on social media. Many CB detection systems have been developed for many natural languages to face this phenomenon. However, Arabic is one of the under-resourced languages suffering from the lack of quality datasets in many computational research areas. This paper discusses the…

Language processing is an extremely important, uniquely human cognitive ability. For well over a century, researchers have sought to understand how the human brain implements a system for instantaneously recognizing and generating complex linguistic patterns. Left perisylvian regions are considered to have certain computational abilities that are…

This activity prompts students to go beyond the often reductionist responses to new technologies (e.g. technological determinism) by creating a media literacy-focused infographic about the role, uses, ethical concerns, and/or impact of generative AI (e.g. ChatGPT). Sample topics have included the role of AI in specific industries (e.g. film,…

The relative importance of phonological versus morphological processes in reading varies depending on the writing system's orthographic consistency and morphological complexity. This study investigated the interplay between phonology and morphology in Hebrew reading acquisition, a language offering a unique opportunity for such examination with…

Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) models have grown increasingly popular among pre-service teachers (PSTs) and have become their constant companions, primarily assisting them in scientific writing. This article presents a study that investigates the differences and benefits of GenAI in the scientific writing process. Essays generated by…

The COVID-19 pandemic significantly disrupted higher education. The sudden and profound transformations it necessitated had a direct and negative impact on higher education students, as evidenced by the widely reported instances of academic disengagement, decreased motivation, and lower performance. This was often due to student burnout caused by…

The breakthrough in generative artificial intelligence (AI) has unlocked new possibilities for higher education. There are many studies on educational chatbots in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics; however, studies on designing and leveraging chatbots in a multidisciplinary field like project management have been…

Background: The recent advent of powerful, exam-passing large language models (LLMs) in public awareness has led to concerns over students cheating, but has also given rise to calls for including or even focusing education on LLMs. There is a perceived urgency to react immediately, as well as claims that AI-based reforms of education will lead to…

In spoken languages, children acquire locative terms in a cross-linguistically stable order. Terms similar in meaning to in and on emerge earlier than those similar to "front" and "behind," followed by "left" and "right." This order has been attributed to the complexity of the relations expressed by…