Automatic short answer grading (ASAG) is a challenging task that aims to predict a score for a given student response. Previous works on ASAG mainly use nonneural or neural methods. However, the former depends on handcrafted features and is limited by its inflexibility and high cost, and the latter ignores global word cooccurrence in a corpus and…

Although computational models can simulate aspects of human sentence processing, research on this topic has remained almost exclusively limited to the single language case. The current review presents an overview of the state of the art in computational cognitive models of sentence processing, and discusses how recent sentence-processing models…

This review describes a computational approach for modeling the development of speech motor control in infants. We address the development of two levels of control: articulation of individual speech sounds (defined here as phonemes, syllables, or words for which there is an optimized motor program) and production of sound sequences such as phrases…

Traxler, Pickering, and Clifton (1998) found that ambiguous sentences are read faster than their unambiguous counterparts. This so-called "ambiguity advantage" has presented a major challenge to classical theories of human sentence comprehension (parsing) because its most prominent explanation, in the form of the unrestricted race model…

Modern society demands renewed attention on the competencies required to best equip students for a dynamic and uncertain future. We present exploratory work based on the premise that metacognitive and reflective competencies are essential for this task. Bringing the concepts of metacognition and reflection together into a conceptual model within…

The modifier effect is the reduction in perceived likelihood of a generic property sentence, when the head noun is modified. We investigated the prediction that the modifier effect would be stronger for mutable than for central properties, without finding evidence for this predicted interaction over the course of five experiments. However…

Teaching scientific writing in biology classes is challenging for both students and instructors. This article offers and reviews several useful "toolkit" items that improve student writing. These include sentence and paper-length templates, funnelling and compartmentalisation, and preparing compendiums of corrections. In addition,…

This article examines the issue of using authentic speech data in an experimental research paradigm. We report exploratory studies to replicate a seminal investigation of listeners' abilities to predict sentence completion in constructed read-aloud data. Our initial intention was to see whether the same gating instrument used on authentic talk…

We report four experiments that examined whether bilinguals' production of one language is affected by the syntactic properties of their other language. Greek-English and English-Greek highly proficient fluent bilinguals produced sentence completions following subject nouns whose translation had either the same or different number. We manipulated…

We report three experiments on reference resolution in Dutch. The results of two off-line experiments and an eye-tracking study suggest that the interpretation of different referential forms--in particular, "emphatic" strong pronouns, weak pronouns, and demonstrative pronouns--cannot be satisfactorily explained in terms of a single…

Constraint-based lexical models of language processing assume that readers resolve temporary ambiguities by relying on a variety of cues, including particular knowledge of how verbs combine with nouns. Previous experiments have demonstrated verb bias effects only in structurally complex sentences, and have been criticized on the grounds that such…

Our study addresses the scope of phonological advance planning during sentence production using a novel experimental procedure. The production of German sentences in various syntactic formats (SVO, SOV, and VSO) was cued by presenting pictures of the agents of previously memorized agent-action-patient scenes. To tap the phonological activation of…

This paper evaluates two classes of hypotheses about how people prosodically segment utterances: (1) meaning-based proposals, with a focus on Watson and Gibson's (2004) proposal, according to which speakers tend to produce boundaries before and after long constituents; and (2) balancing proposals, according to which speakers tend to produce…

In responses time tasks, inhibitory neighborhood effects have been found for word pairs that differ in a transposition of two adjacent letters (e.g., "clam/calm"). Here, the author describes two eye-tracking experiments conducted to explore transposed-letter (TL) neighborhood effects within the context of normal silent reading. In…

This paper investigates the role of resource allocation as a source of processing difficulty in human sentence comprehension. The paper proposes a simple information-theoretic characterization of processing difficulty as the work incurred by resource reallocation during parallel, incremental, probabilistic disambiguation in sentence comprehension,…