The purpose of this research is to explore three English synonyms, namely critical, serious, and crucial, with a particular focus on meanings, degrees of formality, collocations, and semantic preferences. Two dictionaries, namely the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary and the Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary online, as well as the Corpus…

Background: Dementia is a cognitive decline that leads to the progressive deterioration of an individual's ability to perform daily activities independently. As a result, a considerable amount of time and resources are spent on caretaking. Early detection of dementia can significantly reduce the effort and resources needed for caretaking. Aims:…

Multiple Choice Questions (MCQs) are a popular assessment method because they enable automated evaluation, flexible administration and use with huge groups. Despite these benefits, the manual construction of MCQs is challenging, time-consuming and error-prone. This is because each MCQ is comprised of a question called the "stem", a…

Amidst ongoing global debate about reproductive rights, questions have emerged about the role of language in reinforcing stigma around termination. Amongst some 'pro-choice' groups, the use of "pro-life" is discouraged, and "anti-abortion" is recommended. In UK official documents, "termination of pregnancy" is…

Corpus evidence suggests that in contexts in which the presence of multiple antecedents might favor plural reference, the disadvantage observed for singular reference may disappear if the potential antecedents are combined in a group-like plural entity. We examined the relative salience of antecedents in conditions where the context either made a…

Remembering facilitates future remembering. This benefit of practicing by active retrieval, as compared to more passive relearning, is known as the testing effect and is one of the most robust findings in the memory literature. It has typically been assessed using verbal materials such as word pairs, sentences, or educational texts. We here…

This paper contributes to the theorization of radical visible pedagogy by building upon Basil Bernstein's initial conceptualization and previous efforts to develop it. Alongside Bernstein's "classification" and "framing" we suggest that incorporating the concepts of "semantic gravity" and "semantic density"…

Negative yes-no (polar) questions in Colloquial Arabic (CA) are formed by intonation without adding yes-no question particles, in which case, a statement is uttered with a rising intonation, whether this polar question is negative or affirmative. This case is more common in CA than written MSA. Sometimes, the same negative polar question is…

The search for relevant scientific articles is a crucial step in any research project. However, the vast number of articles published and available online in digital databases (Google Scholar, Semantic Scholar, etc.) can make this task tedious and negatively impact a researcher's productivity. This article proposes a new method of recommending…

The goal of this study is to investigate the acquisition of causal relations with parce que "because" and temporal relations with quand "when" by children between age 3 and 5. We aim at identifying whether different discourse type, conversation and narration, allow children to use quand and parce que with different semantic…

Studies on the lexical semantic abilities of children with autism have yielded contradicting results. The aim of the current review was to explore studies that have specifically focused on the lexical semantic abilities of children with ASD and try to find an explanation for these contradictions. In the 32 studies reviewed, no single factor was…

We examined whether and how the degree of meaning overlap between morphologically related words influences sentence plausibility judgment in children. In two separate studies with kindergarten and second-graders, English-speaking and French-speaking children judged the plausibility of sentences that included two paired target words. Some of these…

This article investigates how children acquire word order generalizations from ambiguous and infrequent input. We focus on verb placement in Norwegian relative and complement clauses. In two elicitation experiments we explore where children (age 3-7) place verbs in three embedded clauses types: one requiring a purely syntactic generalization and…

The vocabulary of human languages has been argued to support efficient communication by optimizing the trade-off between simplicity and informativeness. The argument has been originally based on cross-linguistic analyses of vocabulary in semantic domains of content words, such as kinship, color, and number terms. The present work applies this…

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to analyze from multiple perspectives, so as to form an effective massive open online course (MOOC) personalized recommendation method to help learners efficiently obtain MOOC resources. Design/methodology/approach: This study introduced ontology construction technology and a new semantic association algorithm…