The proliferation of large language models represents a paradigm shift in the landscape of automated essay scoring (AES) systems, fundamentally elevating their accuracy and efficacy. This study presents an extensive examination of large language models, with a particular emphasis on the transformative influence of transformer-based models, such as…

In this commentary on the Special Issue, I will address the question of what memory spans measure concerning language, as language has, at least, a linear and a hierarchical dimension. I suggest that if anything what is measured has to do with the linear dimension. Then, I will discuss the welcome results on bilingual children with language…

The war in Ukraine, which began on February 24, 2022, has led to a significant civilian involvement in Israel, particularly among immigrants from the former Soviet Union, who began to provide humanitarian assistance, including interpreting. Highlighting the interrelation between translation and migration, I argue that the war strongly affects…

This paper reviews three studies investigating the relationship between brain regions involved in executive control and those involved in reading comprehension in typically-developing teens. In the first study, three regions of posterior left lateral prefrontal cortex (i.e., precentral gyrus, inferior frontal junction, inferior frontal gyrus) were…

The relationship between language switching and task switching has been well studied in bilingualism literature. This study employs novel experiments involving magnitude-parity switching and transparency-orientation switching and compares the costs associated with these two types of task switching with language switching. Switching costs and the…

Writing development in early schooling can reveal much about the bigger picture of writing development. As any epoch in life, it presents its own dynamics that intersect with wider social, psychological, and language processes; follows on early epochs; and leads to later accomplishments. In addition, it is particularly strategic to untangle…

We propose a review of the literature of the studies investigating reading acquisition in intellectual deficiency (ID), with particular focus on the explanatory factors for reading difficulties. Indeed, we explore the role of intellectual efficiency, perceptual abilities, oral language development, phonological processing and memory. The study of…

Native speakers strongly disprefer novel formulations when a conventional alternative expresses the same intended message, presumably because the more conventional form competes with the novel form. In five studies, second language (L2) speakers were less influenced by competing alternatives than native speakers. L2 speakers accepted novel…

We address two important questions about the relationship between theoretical linguistics and psycholinguistics. First, do grammatical theories and language processing models describe separate cognitive systems, or are they accounts of different aspects of the same system? We argue that most evidence is consistent with the one-system view. Second,…

Socioeconomic status (SES) has been shown to influence language skills, with children of lower SES backgrounds performing worse on language assessments compared to their higher SES peers. While there is abundant behavioral research on the effects of SES, whether there are differences in the neural mechanisms used to support language skill is less…

The article focuses on defining how background knowledge impacts on second-language acquisition by giving a brief overview of schema theory, the interaction of the basic modes of information processing. A challenge of dealing with culturally specific texts in second language acquisition is also touched upon. Different research-supported views on…

Judea Pearl has argued that counterfactuals and causality are central to intelligence, whether natural or artificial, and has helped create a rich mathematical and computational framework for formally analyzing causality. Here, we draw out connections between these notions and various current issues in cognitive science, including the nature of…

Assessment in education allows for obtaining, organizing, and presenting information about how much and how well the student is learning. The current paper aims at analysing and discussing some of the most state-of-the-art assessment systems in education. Later, this work presents a specific use case developed for the Universitat Oberta de…

Schizophrenia is a complex mental disorder that results in language-related symptoms at various discourse levels, ranging from semantics (e.g. inventing words and producing nonsensical strands of similar-sounding words) to pragmatics and higher-level functioning (e.g. too little or too much information given to interlocutors, and tangential…

The growing consensus that language is distributed into large-scale cortical and subcortical networks has brought with it an increasing focus on the connectional anatomy of language, or how particular fibre pathways connect regions within the language network. Understanding connectivity of the language network could provide critical insights into…