Understanding cognitive effort expended during assessments is essential to improving efficiency, accuracy, and accessibility within these assessments. Pupil dilation is commonly used as a psychophysiological measure of cognitive effort, yet research on its relationship with effort expended specifically during language processing is limited. The…

Recent studies have shown that the frequency effect, although long used as a guide to word difficulty, fails to explain all variance in learner word knowledge. As such, a "more than frequency" conclusion has been offered to explain how lexical sophistication accounts for word difficulty. This study presents a multiple regression model of…

The law of Non-Original Malappropriate Eponymous Nomenclature (NOMEN) states that no phenomenon is named after its discoverer. However, eponymous terms are rife in the anatomical and medical literature. In this viewpoint commentary, the authors discuss the history of anatomical eponyms, explain the additional cognitive load imposed by eponyms that…

This study investigates the development of lexico-grammatical complexity in two levels of graded readers, beginner and intermediate. Using the linguistic features described in Biber et al. (2011), 58 graded readers were analyzed. Biber et al. (2011) proposed a lexico-grammatical developmental sequence based on empirical research. In this study, 11…

The present study investigated the potential of writing in English as a foreign language (EFL) for language learning by manipulating cognitive task complexity based on related models and hypotheses. English essays written by 59 Chinese postgraduate EFL students from different subject areas were analysed with reference to writing complexity,…

A better understanding of how distractor features influence the plausibility of distractors is essential for an efficient multiple-choice (MC) item construction in educational assessment. The plausibility of distractors has a major influence on the psychometric characteristics of MC items. Our analysis utilizes the nominal categories model to…

Developing mathematics proficiency requires an understanding of mathematics vocabulary. Although previous research has developed several measures of mathematics vocabulary at different grade levels, no study focused solely on fraction vocabularies. We developed and tested a measure of fraction vocabulary for students in Grade 4 to determine the…

This study explores syntactic and lexical complexity in argumentative essays written by Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Humans (HS). First year Tswana second language (L2) learners of English in a South African University wrote the HS argumentative essays. The AI essays have been generated by ChatGPT-3.5 on the same topics. Using a…

Vocabulary development remains an active and robust research area, yet little is known about what students, particularly young students, think during vocabulary learning. A commonly held assumption is that young learners employ few, if any, cognitive and metacognitive strategies when engaged in literacy tasks. Conversely, decades of research…

The study examined 37 language samples of 37 Spanish-English kindergartners and first graders from a larger sample of the Multitudes Project in California. The focus was on investigating how these young English language learners produced narratives in English, what language elements they included, and whether these elements correlated or related…

Multiple-choice questions (MCQs) are popular in vocabulary software because they can be scored automatically and are compatible with many input devices (e.g., touchscreens). Answering MCQs is beneficial for learning, especially when learners retrieve knowledge from memory to evaluate plausible answer alternatives. However, such retrieval may not…

During the second year of life, children acquire words and expand their receptive and expressive vocabularies at a rapid pace. At this age, toddlers' phonological abilities are also developing rapidly. The current study investigated the effect of phonological complexity of words on the order in which they are acquired, receptively and…

This study reports the knowledge of text complexity held by preservice teachers prior to coursework. The goal of this research is to determine what strengths and what learning needs preservice teachers have related to text selection with the intention of informing programmatic redesign. In this preliminary component of a design-development study,…

Purpose: The goal of this study was to develop and validate a new corpus of sentences without semantic context to facilitate research aimed at isolating the effects of semantic context in speech perception. Method: The newly developed corpus contains nonsensical sentences but is matched in vocabulary and syntactic structure to the existing Basic…

This study aimed to reveal the differences in individuals' abilities, their standard errors, and the psychometric properties of the test according to the two methods of applying the test (electronic and paper). The descriptive approach was used to achieve the study's objectives. The study sample consisted of 74 male and female students at the…