"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…

We investigate the articulation between domain-general reasoning and interpretive processes in failures of deductive reasoning. We focus on illusory inferences from disjunction-like elements, a broad class of deductive fallacies studied in some detail over the past 15 years. These fallacies have received accounts grounded in reasoning processes,…

It has been widely accepted that developmental dyslexia (DD) exhibits deficits in reading and spelling. However, the role of phonology and semantics in reading and spelling in dyslexia has not been systematically investigated. In Experiment 1, 45 Chinese children with DD and 43 age-matched controls read two tests with Chinese characters. One test…

The level of arithmetic knowledge of a high school student was explored when solving additive word problems considering the semantic structure and syntactic component. The methodology was qualitative and developed in four stages: the first is the selection of the participant, the second is the design of a questionnaire with twenty additive…

The efficiency of cognitive component skills is typically assessed with speeded performance tests. Interpreting only effective ability or effective speed as efficiency may be challenging because of the within-person dependency between both variables (speed-ability tradeoff, SAT). The present study measures efficiency as effective ability…

The aim of this explanatory study is to identify the causes of intrinsic cognitive load in programming process. For this purpose, a method based on two dimensions; programming knowledge types (syntactic, semantic, and strategic) and programming constructs was proposed. The proposed method was tested with high school students enrolled in Computer…

The acquisition of quantifiers is a central topic in cognitive science. The present study investigated the emergence, frequency, and non-target-like production of the universal quantifiers "all," "every," and "each" in child English from a linguistic perspective, based on the data from longitudinal naturalistic…

The study explored the role of verbal fluency in determining reading and comprehension skills in Bengali among 10-year old typically developing Bengali children. Robust correlations were found between semantic fluency and word reading (0.63) as well as semantic fluency and comprehension (0.70). Good correlation was found between letter fluency and…

The goal of this paper is to tease apart two approaches to the source of children's consistent scope assignment in negative sentences containing logical connectives: the Semantic Subset Principle and the Semantic Subset Maxim. Previous developmental work has observed that four- to six-year-old children across languages have difficulty with…

Graded reading is one of the important ways of English learning. How to automatically judge and grade the difficulty of the English reading corpus is of great significance for precision teaching and personalized learning. However, the current rule-based readability assessment methods have some limitations, such as low efficiency and poor accuracy.…

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,…

In three studies, college student participants read a description of ambiguous (i.e., neither explicitly positive nor explicitly negative) academic feedback from a faculty member. Evaluations of the ambiguous feedback were compared across participants' gender identities and levels of social and intellectual belonging in their academic majors and…

The present dissertation intends to investigate the syntactic nature and L2-acquisition of passive sentence structure in two Romance varieties, Italian and Spanish. First, I will present an analytic proposal couched within the Generative Approach (Chomsky, 1957, and subsequent work); from there, and following Perlmutter and Postal's (1977)…

Purpose: This study sought to 1) identify linguistic features important for Chinese text complexity with a theory-based and systematic approach, and 2) address how feature sets and algorithms affect the performance of Chinese text complexity models. Method: Texts from Chinese language arts textbooks from Grades 1 to 6 (N = 1,478) in Mainland China…

This paper is based within the framework of step-by-step approach to teaching legal translation. The underlying philosophy behind this approach is that when specific aspects of legal translations are tackled in isolation and trainees become aware of the pitfalls involved and the possible solutions, this helps them in further training as well as in…