In this quantitative study, a shortened version of the Attitude toward the Subject of Chemistry Inventory (ASCI) created by Bauer (2008) was used to identify the chemistry attitudes of two populations of general chemistry students at two universities. The ASCIv2 contained just two factors from the original instrument. These factors measured…

Visual culture studies have become the focus of research in recent years mainly due to the frequent use of art applications in Visual Arts courses in primary schools and the inadequate content of discipline based art education for the interpretation of today's multiple stimulants. By interrogating students' semantic stratums related to visuals,…

The quasi-experimental field study with 174 advanced engineering students analysed the possibilities to assist the requirement analysis when solving design problems. Technical check lists are in common practice for assisting the requirement analysis. We wondered if a generic question answering system (GQAS) aiming at the "semantic relationships"…

This paper evaluates two classes of hypotheses about how people prosodically segment utterances: (1) meaning-based proposals, with a focus on Watson and Gibson's (2004) proposal, according to which speakers tend to produce boundaries before and after long constituents; and (2) balancing proposals, according to which speakers tend to produce…

Although the hippocampus is not considered a key structure in semantic memory, patients with medial-temporal lobe epilepsy (mTLE) have deficits in semantic access on some word retrieval tasks. We hypothesized that these deficits reflect the negative impact of focal epilepsy on remote cerebral structures. Thus, we expected that the networks that…

In this review, we lay the groundwork for an interdisciplinary conversation between literacy education research and relevant neuroscience research. We review recent neuroscience research on correlates of proposed cognitive subprocesses in text decoding and reading comprehension and analyze some of the methodological and conceptual challenges of…

A fundamental question in psycholinguistic research concerns the universality of comprehension strategies. We investigated this issue by examining the so-called "subject preference" in Turkish, a language which allows for a natural (unmarked) object reading of an initial ambiguous argument. Using event-related brain potentials (ERPs), we observed…

Nowadays, a wide range of initiatives are focused on providing solutions relating to the integration and reuse of different types of learning objects. This paper deals with the assembly of learning objects, one of the most difficult components for reuse. Our proposal takes into account the requirements and competencies defined for each learning…

The Critical Period Hypothesis aims to investigate the reason for significant difference between first language acquisition and second language acquisition. Over the past few decades, researchers carried out a series of studies to test the validity of the hypothesis. Although there were certain limitations in these studies, most of their results…

This thesis aims to define and extend a line of computational models for text comprehension that are humanly plausible. Since natural language is human by nature, computational models of human language will always be just that--models. To the degree that they miss out on information that humans would tap into, they may be improved by considering…

This dissertation investigates Control phenomena in three distinct domains of the grammar of Modem Greek (subjunctive complements, "V-ondas" adjuncts and ke-complements) and proposes a unifying syntactic account of Control by appealing to the tense properties of these domains. I argue that Control in Greek is best analyzed as an instance of…

This study tracks changes in three primary characteristics of Early New High German (ENHG) publications from 1499 to 1710: the complexity of the syntactic system of the language, the pictorial saturation of the publications, and the relationship between verbal text and illustrations on the ENHG printed page. Drawing on findings from literary…

Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS) are effective tools for education. However, developing them is a labour-intensive and time-consuming process. A major share of the effort is devoted to acquiring the domain knowledge that underlies the system's intelligence. The goal of this research is to reduce this knowledge acquisition bottleneck and better…

Spoken language comprehension is known to involve a large left-dominant network of fronto-temporal brain regions, but there is still little consensus about how the syntactic and semantic aspects of language are processed within this network. In an fMRI study, volunteers heard spoken sentences that contained either syntactic or semantic ambiguities…

The current study tested the assumption that bilinguals with dementia regress to using primarily the dominant language. Spanish-English bilinguals with probable Alzheimer's disease (AD; n = 29), and matched bilingual controls (n = 42) named Boston Naming Test pictures in their dominant and nondominant languages. Surprisingly, differences between…