The majority of research in computational psycholinguistics on sentence processing has focused on word-by-word incremental processing within sentences, rather than holistic sentence-level representations. This study introduces two novel computational approaches for quantifying sentence-level processing: sentence surprisal and sentence relevance.…

Deverbal formations in Greek, e.g. "mi'razo" 'to distribute' < "'mirazma" 'distributing' are considered morphologically complex lexical items. Previous psycholinguistic studies in Greek and English already highlighted the importance of lexical category and argument structure of the base verb in the processing of deverbal…

It has been repeatedly found that idioms are processed faster than syntactically matched literal phrases, in both comprehension and production. This has led to debate about whether idioms are accessed as chunks or built compositionally, with different studies attempting to measure the effect of compositionality on processing, with differing…

Open-ended responses to surveys can be highly beneficial to higher education institutions, providing clarity and context that quantitative data can sometimes lack. However, analyzing open-ended responses typically takes time and manpower most institutional assessment offices do not have to spare. This study focused on finding a potential solution…

What makes some sentences more difficult to process, and why? Memory- and expectation-based theories both attempt to explain sentence processing difficulties, and decades of sentence processing literature have found evidence in support of both theories. This dissertation further investigates these theories of sentence processing by exploring…

Background: Adaptive educational systems have gained increasing attention due to their ability to personalise educational content based on individual learner progress. Prior research highlights that intelligent tutoring systems (ITSs) and adaptive courseware models improve learning outcomes by dynamically adjusting instructional materials.…

This chapter responds to the recent crisis surrounding developments in large language models (LLMs) and generative AI with a relational view of education informed by the emerging world-centered approach to education and a synthesis of personalist character formation with feminist care ethics. It proposes that the instinct to manage student use of…

This case study examines employee attrition, its detrimental effects on businesses, and the potential of data analytics to address this challenge. By employing Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), a sophisticated NLP technique, we delve into the underlying reasons for employee departures. Additionally, we explore using RapidMiner to develop…

The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) has made life and work easier; however, AI has also made it almost impossible to determine whether the information we consume is legitimate, AI-generated, or AI-manipulated. This paper examines how the use of artificial intelligence, specifically GPT-4, Gemini Advanced, and Claude Opus, can aid a user in…

Recent progress made in conversational AI lays emphasis on the need for development of language models that possess solid logical reasoning skills and further extrapolated capabilities. An examination into this phenomenon investigates how well the Capybara dataset can improve one's ability to reason using language-based systems. Multiple…

This study investigates the organization of the mental lexicon in Spanish as a foreign language in contrast to its structure in Spanish as a native language through semantic networks derived from lexical availability or semantic fluency tasks. To this end, we collected the responses of 75 American learners of Spanish and 75 native speakers in…

This paper assesses the potential for the large language models (LLMs) GPT-4 and GPT-3.5 to aid in deriving insight from education feedback surveys. Exploration of LLM use cases in education has focused on teaching and learning, with less exploration of capabilities in education feedback analysis. Survey analysis in education involves goals such…

To model behavioral and neural correlates of language comprehension in naturalistic environments, researchers have turned to broad-coverage tools from natural-language processing and machine learning. Where syntactic structure is explicitly modeled, prior work has relied predominantly on context-free grammars (CFGs), yet such formalisms are not…

This dissertation investigates how the abstract representation of vowels affects spoken word recognition in Brazilian Portuguese and American English by examining two issues in theoretical phonology and speech processing: underspecification theory, and underlying representation when there is alternation. Three experiments were conducted in…

The animacy effect refers to the memory advantage of words denoting animate beings over words denoting inanimate objects. Remembering animate beings may serve important evolutionary functions, but the cognitive mechanism underlying the animacy effect has remained elusive. According to the richness-of-encoding account, animate words stimulate…