Understanding cognitive effort expended during assessments is essential to improving efficiency, accuracy, and accessibility within these assessments. Pupil dilation is commonly used as a psychophysiological measure of cognitive effort, yet research on its relationship with effort expended specifically during language processing is limited. The…

Designing and constructing pedagogical tests that contain items (i.e. questions) which measure various types of skills for different levels of students equitably is a challenging task. Teachers and item writers alike need to ensure that the quality of assessment materials is consistent, if student evaluations are to be objective and effective.…

This study examined how linguistic complexity features contribute to second language (L2) processing effort by analyzing the Dutch English-L2 learners' eye movements from GECO and MECO, two eye-tracking corpora. Processing effort was operationalized as reading rate, mean fixation duration, regression rate, skipping rate, and mean saccade…

One of the basic tenets of predictive theories of language processing is that of misprediction cost. Post-N400 positive event-related potential (ERP) components are suitable for studying misprediction cost but are not adequately described, especially in older adults, who show attenuated N400 ERP effects. We report a secondary analysis of a…

It has been well documented that formulaic language (such as collocations; e.g., "provide information") enjoys a processing advantage over novel language (e.g., "compare information"). In natural language use, however, many formulaic sequences are often inserted with words intervening in between the individual constituents…

A new kind of reading platform supported by ChatGPT has quickly become a popular research assistant among students due to its instant natural language interaction and question-answering capabilities. This study explored the effects of ChatGPT-based reading platform on student's foreign language paper reading. A total of 64 undergraduate students…

Multiple Choice Questions (MCQs) are an important evaluation technique for both examinations and learning activities. However, the manual creation of questions is time-consuming and challenging for teachers. Hence, there is a notable demand for an Automatic Question Generation (AQG) system. Several systems have been created for this aim, but the…

Reading numbers aloud, a central aspect of numerical literacy, is a challenging skill to acquire, but the origins of this difficulty remain poorly understood. To investigate this matter, we examined the performance of 127 third- and fourth-grade children who read aloud, in Hebrew, numbers with 2-5 digits. We found several key observations. First,…

Automatic generation of math word problems (MWPs) is a challenging task in Natural Language Processing (NLP), particularly connecting it to real-life problems because it can benefit students in developing a higher level of mathematical thinking. However, most of the MWPs are presented within a scholastic setting in a decontextualized way. This…

In November 2022, ChatGPT, an Artificial Intelligence (AI) large language model (LLM) capable of generating human-like responses, was launched. ChatGPT has a variety of promising applications in education, such as using it as thought-partner in generating curricular resources. However, scholars also recognize that the use of ChatGPT raises…

"Hospital" can refer to a physical place or more figuratively to the people associated with it. Such place-for-institution metonyms are common in everyday language, but there remain several open questions in the literature regarding how they are processed. The goal of the current eyetracking experiments was to investigate how metonyms…

Decades of psycholinguistics research have shown that human sentence processing is highly incremental and predictive. This has provided evidence for expectation-based theories of sentence processing, which posit that the processing difficulty of linguistic material is modulated by its probability in context. However, these theories do not make…

This study focuses on the relationship between teacher-text-child interactions during shared picturebook reading and its effect on children's narrative comprehension. Using a micro-analytic approach, we studied nine large-group bookreading sessions of one experienced teacher and her classroom of 17 preschoolers from low-income backgrounds over a…

This work explores the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) custom chatbots in educational settings, with a particular focus on their applicability in the context of mathematics and physics. In view of the increasing deployment of AI tools such as ChatGPT in educational contexts, the present study explores their potential in generating…

One of the fundamental questions in the field of language acquisition is a learnability problem, which considers how learners acquire certain aspects of language which are not directly provided in the input or whose referents are not readily observable. This dissertation investigates Japanese children's acquisition of various linguistic phenomena,…