Humans can attribute beliefs to others. However, it is unknown to what extent this ability results from an innate biological endowment or from experience accrued through child development, particularly exposure to language describing others' mental states. We test the viability of the language exposure hypothesis by assessing whether models…

Worked examples, which present an explained code for solving typical programming problems are among the most popular types of learning content in programming classes. Most approaches and tools for presenting these examples to students are based on line-by-line explanations of the example code. However, instructors rarely have time to provide…

The present study attempted to examine the effect of using the connectivist approach on developing secondary-stage students' cross-cultural awareness and translation performance. The study comprised thirty-two first-year secondary stage students enrolled in El-Jalawea Institute, Sohag Governorate. The study adopted the quasi-experimental design.…

This paper examines links between perfect rhymes and text readability and decoding using a measure of English rhymes called the Perfect Rhymes Dictionary (PeRDict). PeRDict is based on the Carnegie Mellon University Pronouncing Dictionary (the CMUdict) and provides rhyme counts for ~48,000 words in English and for the most frequent 1,000, 2,500,…

E-learning systems are transforming the educational sector and making education more affordable and accessible. Recently, many e-learning systems have been equipped with advanced technologies that facilitate the roles of educators and increase the efficiency of teaching and learning. One such technology is Automatic Essay Grading (AEG) or…

Since corpus linguistics gained popularity as a methodology in the latter half of the 20th century, second language acquisition research has seen the emergence of work investigating formulaic language, such as idioms, lexical bundles, and collocations. A collocation is a string of words that co-occur more routinely than probability would predict,…

The use of machine translation (MT) tools remains controversial among language instructors, with limited integration into classroom practices. While much of the existing research into MT and language education has explored instructor perceptions, less is known about how students actually use MT or how student use compares to instructor beliefs and…

Recent studies have accumulated to suggest that children, akin to adults, exhibit a processing advantage for formulaic language (e.g. "save energy") over novel language (e.g. "sell energy"), as well as sensitivity to phrase frequencies. The majority of these studies are based on formulaic sequences in their canonical form. In…

There is a general consensus in theories of human speech recognition that humans engage in predictive processing during online speech processing. There are also claims that predictive processing indicates the operation of a predictive coding (PC) mechanism (Rao & Ballard, 1999). Formally, PC is a generative model where top-down signals consist…

In recent years, machine translation post-editing (MTPE or PE for short) has been steadily gaining ground in the language industry. However, studies that examine translators' perceptions of, and attitudes towards, MTPE paint a somewhat negative picture, with PE pricing methods and rates being a major source of dissatisfaction. While the European…

This dissertation investigates how bilinguals use their two grammars to comprehend written intra-sentential codeswitches. I focus on adjective/noun constructions in Spanish and English where I manipulate the congruence of grammatical word order in the two languages across the codeswitch boundary. This allows me to test three codeswitching…

Mass adoption of neural machine translation (NMT) tools in the translation workflow has exerted a significant impact on the language services industry over the last decade. There are claims that with the advent of NMT, automated translation has reached human parity for translating news (see, e.g. Popel et al. 2020). Moreover, some machine…

We present computational modeling results based on a self-paced reading study investigating number attraction effects in Eastern Armenian. We implement three novel computational models of agreement attraction in a Bayesian framework and compare their predictive fit to the data using k-fold cross-validation. We find that our data are better…

Considering noticeable improvements in the accuracy of Google Translate recently, the aim of this study was to examine second language (L2) learners' ability to use post-editing (PE) strategies when applying AI tools such as the neural machine translator (MT) to solve their lexical and grammatical problems during L2 writing. This study examined 57…

This study seeks to contribute to addressing a gap in theory-driven corpus-based research focused on the so-called translation specific features (TSF) in Arabic translated texts. It provides a contrastive Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL)-informed analysis of concessive/contrastive connective markers in a selected comparable corpus made up of…