Study 1: The present work examined the connection between language and conceptual development, investigating whether false-belief reasoning (FBR) and source-monitoring ability (SMA) abilities within the theory of mind (ToM) framework constrained the comprehension of semantic and pragmatic knowledge (evidential scalar implicatures) encoded in the…

How important is the ability to freely control eye movements for reading comprehension? And how does the parser make use of this freedom? We investigated these questions using coregistration of eye movements and event-related brain potentials (ERPs) while participants read either freely or in a computer-controlled word-by-word format (also known…

This paper discusses the explanatory possibilities and limitations of the concept of alienation within the framework of educational psychology studies. Research into various phenomena associated with alienation (frustration and burnout, extrinsic motivation, cynicism, etc.) is often limited by the ontological realm of the individual, whereas the…

Spanish generally shows a Sequence of Tense (SOT) phenomenon in subjunctive clauses: the tense of the embedded clause (present or past) must agree with the tense of the matrix clause. It has been reported, however, that one kind of violation sometimes occurs, in which a present tense subjunctive clause is embedded under a past tense matrix clause…

Nursery rhymes are quite important in terms of developing children's language skills. It was observed that there is a paucity of research looking at semantic fields and value regarding nursery rhymes; therefore, this study was intended to fill that gap in the literature by investigating nursery rhymes in terms of semantic fields and value. In this…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine the extent to which phonological competition and semantic priming influence lexical access in school-aged children with cochlear implants (CIs) and children with normal acoustic hearing. Method: Participants included children who were 5-10 years of age with either normal hearing (n = 41) or…

The aim of the present work was to investigate the processing of coreferential relations, focusing on their relationship with the working memory. In a reading process, it is essential that readers continuously perform mental operations that involve the working memory, such as storing, retrieving, and manipulating information. For this reason, it…

Learning to paraphrase supports both writing ability and reading comprehension, particularly for less skilled learners. As such, educational tools that integrate automated evaluations of paraphrases can be used to provide timely feedback to enhance learner paraphrasing skills more efficiently and effectively. Paraphrase identification is a popular…

Stance is a feature of academic writing that refers to how writers interact and engage with their readers by means of linguistic devices. This study focuses on the grammatical devices--and semantic distinctions thereof--that are employed by academic writers of English to express stance in research article abstracts in the areas of applied…

The ability to automatically assess the quality of paraphrases can be very useful for facilitating literacy skills and providing timely feedback to learners. Our aim is twofold: a) to automatically evaluate the quality of paraphrases across four dimensions: lexical similarity, syntactic similarity, semantic similarity and paraphrase quality, and…

The present dissertation investigated the impact of scales/scoring methods and prompt linguistic features on the measurement quality of L2 English elicited imitation (EI). Scales/scoring methods are an important feature for the validity and reliability of L2 EI test, but less is known (Yan et al., 2016). Prompt linguistic features are also known…

The processing of structurally ambiguous sentences has proven resourceful in understanding the human parser. In particular, the resolution of globally and temporarily ambiguous relative clauses (RC) preceded by a complex noun phrase (NP) such as "Someone shot [the servant]NP1 of [the actress]NP2 [who was on the balcony]RC" has been found…

When learning a language, typically-developing infants face the daunting task of learning both the sounds and the meanings of words. In this dissertation, we focus on a source of variability that complicates the one-to-one relationship between words and their meanings: wordform variability. In Chapter 1 we make a distinction between the micro…

This article explores how multiple linguistic cues interact in predictive processing among second language (L2) learners. In a visual-world eye-tracking experiment, we investigated whether learners of German use case and prosody cues together to assign thematic roles and predict post-verbal arguments. During the experiment, participants listened…

This research study aims at drawing a comparison between some internet emerging applications used for machine translation (MT) and a human translation (HT) to two of Alphonse Daudet's short stories: "The Siege of Berlin" and "The Bad Zouave." The automatic translation has been carried out by four MT online applications (i.e.…