Although traditional analytical techniques can characterize learners' internal cognitive abilities laterally and indirectly, it is difficult to present learners' learning development characteristics and changes comprehensively and dynamically. Epistemic network analysis, on the other hand, is an emerging educational research method that integrates…

AI-based simulations for educational and assessment purposes are gaining global recognition. Informed by cultural comparison research, this study investigates cross-country variations in users' utilization and perceptions of a simulation-based assessment. Specifically, we conducted a comparative analysis between a sample of South African and…

Large scale product and service reviews proliferate and are commonly found across the web. The ability to harvest, digest and analyze a large corpus of reviews from online websites is still however a difficult problem. This problem is referred to as "opinion mining." Opinion mining is an important area of research as advances in the…

This paper offers an analytical procedure for identifying phraseological variation within "concgrams" (Cheng et al. 2006), which are sets of words that co-occur regardless of constituency variation (e.g. AB and A * B), positional variation (e.g. AB and BA), or both. It argues that examining concgrams takes us closer to more fully appreciating and…

Purpose: Language and speech are difficult to assess in newly arrived internationally adopted children. The purpose of this study was to determine if assessments completed when toddlers were first adopted could predict language outcomes at age 2. Local norms were used to develop early intervention guidelines that were evaluated against age 2…

Summary of author's doctoral dissertation, "Syntactic and Semantic Elements of Students' Oral and Written Discourse: Implications for Teaching Composition, Stanford Univ., 1967.

Evaluates various explanations for the fact that Chinese writing has remained at the ideographic stage for several thousand years. Reasons include dialect differences, social and political unrest, and attempts by the ruling class and men of letters to preserve complex character writing as an indication of class superiority. (Author/DB)

Examined effects of counselor use of exclusive versus inclusive language (using generic pronouns to describe both genders) on evaluations of the counselor. Results with 88 female and 44 male college students indicated that language style affected evaluations, with participants rating counselors using exclusive language as more sexist. (SLD)

A study of the free speech pronoun usage of 15 normal and 15 language-delayed children (2-5 years old) showed that it is possible to distinguish between children at five different levels of language development by considering linguistically relevant pronoun properties. (Author)

Mothers and fathers of 43 middle-class families were observed interacting separately during a paper-folding task with either their only or middle child in order to assess parental use of evaluation and task-facilitative behaviors with preschoolers. Results indicate that parent behaviors vary with parent gender, child gender, and family…

A cloze procedure test presents a written passage in which every fifth word is deleted. The student must fill in the blanks with the words originally used in the passage. This article discusses the usefulness of the procedure as a diagnostic tool and for evaluating the suitability of instructional materials. (GC)

A useful device in revising technical reports is the metaphor of entropy, which refers to the amount of disorder that is present in a system. Applied to communication theory, high entropy would correspond to increased amounts of unfamiliar or useless information in a text. Since entropy in rhetorical systems increases with the unfamiliarity of…