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…

This study traced different types of distractor effects in the picture-word interference (PWI) task across repeated naming. Starting point was a PWI study by Kurtz et al. (2018). It reported that naming a picture (e.g., of a duck) was slowed down by a distractor word phonologically related to an alternative picture name from a different taxonomic…

Background: Artificial intelligence, particularly natural language processing (NLP), enables automating the formative assessment of written task solutions to provide adaptive feedback automatically. A laboratory study found that, compared with static feedback (an expert solution), adaptive feedback automated through artificial neural networks…

The COVID-19 pandemic significantly disrupted higher education. The sudden and profound transformations it necessitated had a direct and negative impact on higher education students, as evidenced by the widely reported instances of academic disengagement, decreased motivation, and lower performance. This was often due to student burnout caused by…

Second language (L2) grammar learning is difficult. Two frameworks--the psycholinguistic lexical bottleneck hypothesis and the neurocognitive declarative/procedural model--predict that faster L2 lexical processing should facilitate L2 incidental grammar learning. We tested these predictions in a pretest-posttest syntactic adaptation study of…

This study examined the effect of antecedents of artificial intelligence (AI) on the productivity of academics in higher education. The study was guided by the pragmatic epistemic perspective predicated on the concurrent integrated mixed-method design used with the support of a Google softcopy version of the semi-structured questionnaire (closed…

Antilocality effects provide strong evidence for expectation-based sentence parsing models. Previous discussion of the antilocality effect, however, largely focused on the argument-verb dependencies in verb-final constructions, for which a memory retrieval-based account has been argued to be equally adequate. To test whether the principles of…

ChatGPT has become a prominent tool for fostering personalized and interactive learning with the advancements in AI technology. This study analyzes 212 academic research articles indexed in the Scopus database as of July 2023. It maps the trajectory of educational studies on ChatGPT, identifying primary themes, influential authors, and…

Aim/Purpose: The purpose of this systematic review is to identify and analyze the current findings of empirical research on the use of ChatGPT in school and higher education. Background: As AI reshapes education, the adoption of ChatGPT has the potential to revolutionize teaching and learning in school and higher educational settings. Meanwhile,…

AI is changing the way writing is learnt at university and taught in schools. Different institutions hence call for integrating programs on writing with AI in teacher education. These must be based on the needs of the participants, which are, however, still unexplored. This article fills this gap with findings from a February 2024 questionnaire…

A number of studies have found evidence for the so-called "ambiguity advantage," that is, faster processing of ambiguous sentences compared with unambiguous counterparts. While a number of proposals regarding the mechanism underlying this phenomenon have been made, the empirical evidence so far is far from unequivocal. It is compatible…

Generative AI technologies such as large language models show novel potential to enhance educational research. For example, generative large language models were shown to be capable of solving quantitative reasoning tasks in physics and concept tests such as the Force Concept Inventory (FCI). Given the importance of such concept inventories for…

There is now a well-established literature showing that people anticipate upcoming concepts and words during language processing. Commonsense knowledge about typical event sequences and verbal selectional preferences can contribute to anticipating what will be mentioned next. We here investigate how temporal discourse connectives…

Since ChatGPT-3.5 has been available to the public, the potentials and challenges regarding chatbot usage in education have been widely discussed. However, little evidence exists whether and for which purposes students even apply generative AI tools. The first main purpose of the present study was to develop and test scales that assess students'…

In two visual-world eye-tracking experiments, we explore the extent to which conflicting first-language (L1) based grammatical parses influence second-language (L2) learners' on-line and off-line interpretation of sentences in the L2. We used cross-linguistic structural priming to potentially boost competition from the L1 grammar during the…