Purpose: Analysis of spontaneous speech samples is important for determining patterns of language production in people with aphasia. To accomplish this, researchers and clinicians can use either hand coding or computer-automated methods. In a comparison of the two methods using the hand-coding NNLA (Northwestern Narrative Language Analysis) and…

Purpose: A major barrier to the wider use of language sample analysis (LSA) is the fact that transcription is very time intensive. Methods that can reduce the required time and effort could help in promoting the use of LSA for clinical practice and research. Method: This article describes an automated pipeline, called Batchalign, that takes raw…

Background: Learning to code is increasingly embedded in secondary and higher education curricula, where solving programming exercises plays an important role in the learning process and in formative and summative assessment. Unfortunately, students admit that copying code from each other is a common practice and teachers indicate they rarely use…

Due to benefits for teaching and learning, an increasing number of studies have focused on classroom dialogue and how to make it productive. Coding, in which the transcribed conversation is allocated to a set of features, is commonly employed to deal with the textual data arising from this dialogue. This is generally done manually and cannot…

Historically, first language acquisition research was a painstaking process of observation, requiring the laborious hand coding of children's linguistic productions, followed by the generation of abstract theoretical proposals for how the developmental process unfolds. Recently, the ability to collect large-scale corpora of children's language…

Recently, both sociology of science and policy research have shown increased interest in scientific uncertainty. To contribute to these debates and create an empirical measure of scientific uncertainty, we inductively devised two systems of classification or ontologies to describe scientific uncertainty in a large corpus of food safety risk…

Semantic memory is relatively stable across the lifespan (LaBarge, Edwards, & Knesevich, 1986). However, most research has been conducted at the single concept level (LaBarge et al., 1986, Spaniol et al., 2006). Few researchers have examined how semantic knowledge is used in discourse. The purpose of the study, then, was to determine the…

As texts enact historically situated ways of making knowledge, intertextual analysis through citation patterns can shed some light on a community's epistemologies. The present research seeks a deeper understanding of the theoretical trends, the influences, and the emerging disciplinary configuration of the writing studies community in Latin…

Purpose: In this study, we examined syntactic complexity in the spoken language samples of young adults. Its purpose was to contribute to the expanding knowledge base in later language development and to begin building a normative database of language samples that potentially could be used to evaluate young adults with known or suspected language…

One important socio-cultural medium through which young children's moral understanding is cultivated is parent/child discourse. Of particular interest to us was young children's use of basic ("thin") evaluative concepts ("good," "bad," "right" and "wrong"), which are ubiquitous in everyday…

This article contributes to typological plausibility of Processability Theory (PT) (Pienemann, 1998, 2005) by providing empirical data that show that the stages predicted by PT are followed in the second language (L2) acquisition of Spanish syntax and morphology. In the present article, the PT stages for L2 Spanish morphology and syntax are first…

Individuals with autism spectrum disorder demonstrate narrative (i.e. storytelling) difficulties which can significantly impact their ability to form and maintain social relationships. However, existing research has not comprehensively documented these impairments in more open-ended, emotionally evocative situations common to daily interactions.…

Dictionary studies have suggested that nearly half of the English lexicon have multiple meanings. It is not yet clear, however, if second language learners reading English texts will encounter words with multiple meanings to the same degree. This study investigates the use of words with multiple meanings in an authentic English novel. Two samples…

Predicting item difficulty is highly important in education for both teachers and item writers. Despite identifying a large number of explanatory variables, predicting item difficulty remains a challenge in educational assessment with empirical attempts rarely exceeding 25% of variance explained. This paper analyses 216 science items of key stage…

Previous work has shown that students have persistent difficulties in understanding how central dogma processes can be affected by a stop codon mutation. To explore these difficulties, we modified two multiple-choice questions from the Genetics Concept Assessment into three open-ended questions that asked students to write about how a stop codon…