Play areas of entertainment and development are new recourses for modern city children, but at the same time, they produce risks of road traffic accidents, deviation, social inequality and social exclusion. Playgrounds in city/town yards are free zones of children's pastime, where children communicate and play together. The aim of this article is…

This research explores the impact of accuracy and meaning maintaining miscues on the comprehension of complex texts. The issue is explored through fourth graders' readings and retellings. Two types of reading behaviors are examined: (a) portions of text read with no miscues, and (b) portions of text read with meaning-maintaining miscues. Findings…

This study compared the lexical-semantic organization skills of bilingually developing deaf children in American Sign Language (ASL) and English with those of a monolingual hearing group. A repeated meaning-association paradigm was used to assess retrieval of semantic relations in deaf 6-10-year-olds exposed to ASL from birth by their deaf…

Two visual-world eye-tracking experiments investigated the role of prediction in the processing of repair disfluencies (e.g., "The chef reached for some salt uh I mean some ketchup ..."). Experiment 1 showed that listeners were more likely to fixate a critical distractor item (e.g., "pepper") during the processing of repair…

Previous analyses of the Spanish deictic verbs "venir" "to come", "ir" "to go", traer "to bring" and "llevar" "to take" have drawn upon Fillmore's (1975) series of lectures on deixis in noting that speakers of Spanish forbid the use of the verbs "venir" and…

We examined how reading mode (i.e., silent vs. oral reading) influences parafoveal semantic and phonological processing during the reading of Chinese sentences, using the gaze-contingent boundary paradigm. In silent reading, we found in 2 experiments that reading times on target words were shortened with semantic previews in early and late…

The paper presents the results of the pre-research conducted under the project entitled "Seniors in the Eyes of Children". The main objective of the project was to create and test a research tool in order to establish what the attitudes of pupils to old age and seniors were. Semantic differential was chosen for these purposes. Semantic…

Metonymic words have multiple related meanings, such as "college", as in the building ("John walked into the college") or the educational institution ("John was promoted by the college"). Most researchers have found support for direct access models of metonymy but one recent study, Lowder and Gordon (2013), found…

This study investigates how cohesion manifests in readers' thought processes while reading texts when they are instructed to engage in self-explanation, a strategy associated with deeper, more successful comprehension. In Study 1, college students (n = 21) were instructed to either paraphrase or self-explain science texts. Paraphrasing was…

This project used Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) to explore neurophysiological brain responses to prepositional phrases involving concrete and abstract reference nouns (e.g., "plate" and "moment," respectively) after the presentation of objects with varying spatial features. Prepositional phrases were headed by "in"…

The creation of crowd-sourced content in learning systems is a powerful method for adapting learning systems to the needs of a range of teachers in a range of domains, but the quality of this content can vary. This study explores linguistic differences in teacher-created problem content in ASSISTments using a combination of discovery with models…

The creation of crowd-sourced content in learning systems is a powerful method for adapting learning systems to the needs of a range of teachers in a range of domains, but the quality of this content can vary. This study explores linguistic differences in teacher-created problem content in ASSISTments using a combination of discovery with models…

The recent increase in the number of English translations of the Quran has led to problematic misrepresentations, misinterpretations and even textual discrepancies in the translations of a number of Islamic concepts, principles and norms. This paper is an attempt to evaluate five different English versions of the translation of the Quran using…

Semantic priming effects at a short prime-target stimulus onset asynchrony are commonly explained in terms of an automatic spreading activation process. According to this view, the proportion of related trials should have no impact on the size of the semantic priming effect. Using a semantic categorization task ("Is this a living…

Previous studies suggest that people with aphasia have incomplete lexical-semantic representations with decreased low-importance distinctive (LID) feature knowledge. In addition, decreased LID feature knowledge correlates with ability to discriminate among semantically related words. The current study seeks to replicate and extend previous…