Comprehension is a primary ingredient of reading success--but most educators aren't taught how to deliver structured comprehension instruction in their classrooms. K-8 teachers will find the guidance they need in this groundbreaking professional resource from Nancy Hennessy, former IDA President and an expert on reading comprehension. Meticulously…

This study was conducted to understand the reading challenges of underprepared college students. A sample of the participants was enrolled in supplemental literacy programs because they were deemed not ready for reading and writing in college. Community college participants completed a series of measures that assessed foundational skills for…

This study was conducted to understand the reading challenges of underprepared college students. A sample of the participants were enrolled in supplemental literacy programs because they were deemed not ready for reading and writing in college. Community college participants completed a series of measures that assessed foundational skills for…

The report is the first systematic evaluation of the sentence equivalence item type introduced by the "GRE"® revised General Test. We adopt a validity framework to guide our investigation based on Kane's approach to validation whereby a hierarchy of inferences that should be documented to support score meaning and interpretation is…

Prosodic boundaries can be used to guide syntactic parsing in both spoken and written sentence comprehension, but it is unknown whether the processing of prosodic boundaries affects the processing of upcoming lexical information. In 3 eye-tracking experiments, participants read silently sentences that allow for 2 possible syntactic interpretations…

When toddlers view an event while hearing a novel verb, the verb's syntactic context has been shown to help them identify its meaning. The current work takes this finding one step further to reveal that even in the absence of an accompanying event, syntactic information supports toddlers' identification of verb meaning. Two-year-olds were first…

This study investigated children's understanding of unfamiliar noun and verb definitions in tasks that were manipulated for syntactic and semantic properties of definitions. The study was also designed to examine the relation between understanding word definitions and the skills of syntactic awareness and making inferences. A total of 117 children…

We consider the problem of checking whether an organization conforms to a body of regulation. Conformance is studied in a runtime verification setting. The regulation is translated to a logic, from which we synthesize monitors. The monitors are evaluated as the state of an organization evolves over time, raising an alarm if a violation is…

Natural language poses several challenges to developing computational systems for modeling it. Natural language is not a precise problem but is rather ridden with a number of uncertainties in the form of either alternate words or interpretations. Furthermore, natural language is a generative system where the problem size is potentially infinite.…

It has been a matter of debate whether the specifically human capacity to process syntactic information draws on attentional resources or is automatic. To address this issue, we recorded neurophysiological indicators of syntactic processing to spoken sentences while subjects were distracted to different degrees from language processing. Subjects…

We examine how attention to animacy information may contribute to children's developing knowledge of language. This research extends beyond prior research in that children were shown dynamic events with novel entities, and were asked not only to comprehend sentences but to use sentence structure to infer the meaning of a new word. In a 4 x 3…