Studies have shown that vocabulary can be acquired in second language reading, but researchers have not explicitly examined which vocabulary coping strategies lead to higher rates of vocabulary learning. This study aims to fill this gap by examining the effect of various strategies using eye tracking and navigation tracking. The strategies…

This study underpinned the authentic materials using images for reading comprehension. It sought to determine the proficiency level of the respondents in reading comprehension skills along with vocabulary, making inferences, sequencing events, and drawing conclusions and proficiency level of the respondents in the comprehension of advertisements,…

The most widely used formal approach to culture, the cultural consensus theory (CCT) of Romney, Weller, and Batchelder, originally relied on a priori definitions of cultural groups to map their unity and diversity. Retaining key features of classical CCT, we provide techniques to identify two or more cultural subgroups in a sample, whether those…

Although preschoolers have strong expectations about the pedagogical nature of pointing gestures (Csibra & Gergely, 2006), more recent work has shown that preschoolers prefer to use informants' spoken language, not their pointing gestures, to make judgments about their reliability (Palmquist & Jaswal, 2015). Here, we explored children's…

Big data analytics are prevalent in fields like business, engineering, public health, and the physical sciences, but social scientists are slower than their peers in other fields in adopting this new methodology. One major reason for this is that traditional statistical procedures are typically not suitable for the analysis of large and complex…

Learners' ability to infer unknown words' meanings (lexical inferencing) plays a key role in word knowledge development for second language (L2) learners. It has recently been acknowledged that learners' sensitivity to word-internal structures (morphological awareness) makes an important contribution to L2 lexical inferencing. However, it remains…

A common motivation for adding control variables to statistical models is to reduce the potential for spurious findings when analyzing non-experimental data and to thereby allow for more reliable causal inferences. However, as I show here, unless "all" potential confounding factors are included in an analysis (which is unlikely to be…

Three experiments examined 4- to 6-year-olds' use of potential cues to geographic background. In Experiment 1 (N = 72), 4- to 5-year-olds used a speaker's foreign accent to infer that they currently live far away, but 6-year-olds did not. In Experiment 2 (N = 72), children at all ages used accent to infer where a speaker was born. In both…

Events such as curriculum changes or practice effects can lead to item parameter drift (IPD) in computer adaptive testing (CAT). The current investigation introduced a point- and weight-adjusted D[superscript 2] method for IPD detection for use in a CAT environment when items are suspected of drifting across test administrations. Type I error and…

Cluster sampling is common in survey practice, and the corresponding inference has been predominantly design-based. We develop a Bayesian framework for cluster sampling and account for the design effect in the outcome modeling. We consider a two-stage cluster sampling design where the clusters are first selected with probability proportional to…

Traditional pre-test (TpT)/post-test (PT) and retrospective pre-test (RpT)/post-test (PT) designs are used to collect data on self-reported measures to assess the magnitude of change that occurs from interventions. If measurement invariance does not exist across the measurement occasions within these research designs, it is inappropriate to…

It is generally agreed that first language (L1) morphological awareness, the ability to reflect upon, analyze and manipulate morphemes and morphological structure of words, can transfer and facilitate second language (L2) reading subskill acquisition. However, the facilitative role of L1 morphological awareness is unclear in the literature…

Purpose: The aim of this review is to illuminate the connection between inferential skills and spoken language idiom comprehension (SLIC) with a focus on autism. Idioms are frequently occurring figurative expressions, such as feeling blue, on cloud nine, and all tied up, that have literal and nonliteral meanings. Method: In this review article, an…

Researchers in many disciplines work with ranking data. This data type is unique in that it is often deterministic in nature (the ranks of items "k"-1 determine the rank of item "k"), and the difference in a pair of rank scores separated by "k" units is equivalent regardless of the actual values of the two ranks in…

This study utilized the Simple View of Reading (SVR) model cognitive subtypes to determine the impact of text-to-speech (TTS) software on the reading comprehension of 94 grade 8 students with reading difficulties. Method: paired samples t tests for all four SVR groups were conducted to examine reading comprehension scores under TTS and no-TTS…