We investigate the processing of "wh" questions in Niuean, a VSO ergative-absolutive Polynesian language. We use visual-world eye tracking to examine how preference for subject or object dependencies is affected (a) by case marking of the subject (ergative vs. absolutive) and object (absolutive vs. oblique), and (b) by the transitivity…

The present study focuses on the development of Spanish pronominal processing. We investigate whether the "pronoun interpretation problem" (i.e., reflexive pronouns comprehension is resolved at an earlier age than that of personal pronouns, also known as the "Delay of the Principle B Effect"), which has been documented in other…

Background: Children and adults with neurotypical development employ linguistic information to predict and anticipate information. Individuals with Down syndrome (DS) have weaknesses in language production and the domain of grammar but relative strengths in language comprehension and the domain of semantics. What is not clear is the extent to…

The current study investigates how bilingual children encode and produce morphologically complex words. We employed a silent-production-plus-delayed-vocalization paradigm in which event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded during silent encoding of inflected words which were subsequently cued to be overtly produced. The bilingual…

It is widely acknowledged that fixed expressions such as idioms have a processing advantage over non-idiomatic language. While many idioms are metaphoric, metonymic, or even literal, the effect of varying nonliteralness in their processing has not been much researched yet. Theoretical and empirical findings suggest that metonymies are easier to…

The present study explores the issue of why ambiguous words are recognized faster than unambiguous ones during word recognition. To this end we contrasted two different hypotheses: the "semantic feedback" hypothesis (Hino and Lupker in J Exp Psychol Hum Percept Perform 22:1331-1356, 1996. https://doi.org/10.1037/0096-1523.22.6.1331), and…

Lexical inference refers to the ability to make informed guesses about the meaning of an unknown word. This inferencing ability is affected by learner-related (i.e., morphological awareness and vocabulary knowledge) and language-related (i.e., word semantic transparency) factors. Previous studies have shown that these factors play independent…

Purpose: The study aims to test whether children with specific language impairment (SLI) show weaknesses in word retrieval and cognitive control and to find out whether impairments in the 2 domains are associated. Method: Thirty-one children with SLI (age: M = 8;11 years;months, SD = 1;1) and 31 age- and IQ-matched typically developing children…

Introduction. Taxonomy is an effective mean of managing and accessing a large amount of digital information. Various techniques have been developed to generate taxonomy automatically. The purpose of this study is threefold: (i) review methods and approaches adopted during taxonomy generation, (ii) identify the factors influencing the choice of a…

Variations in the accuracy and stability of a word's spelling can be used to gauge the quality of its underlying orthographic representation. The Lexical Quality Hypothesis (LQH) contends that words with higher quality cognitive representations should be accessed more efficiently than those with lower quality representations. If this is the case,…

The present research is a cross-linguistic study indicating that the timing of motor production not only depends on the shape of a letter and the activation of its motor program but also on the way the orthographic representations encode the letters for spelling retrieval. English and Italian-speaking participants wrote cognate words (e.g.,…

Misconceptions have been an important area of study in STEM education towards improving our understanding of learners' construction of knowledge. The advent of largescale tutoring systems has given rise to an abundance of data in the form of learner question-answer logs in which signatures of misconceptions can be mined. In this work, we explore…

We have used an unsupervised machine learning method called latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) to thematically analyze all papers published in the Physics Education Research Conference Proceedings between 2001 and 2018. By looking at co-occurrences of words across the data corpus, this technique has allowed us to identify ten distinct themes or…

Mentalising has long been suggested to play an important role in irony interpretation. We hypothesised that another important cognitive underpinning of irony interpretation is likely to be children's capacity for mental set switching -- the ability to switch flexibly between different approaches to the same task. We experimentally manipulated…

This article reviews two aspects of human learning: (1) people draw inferences that appear to rely on hierarchical conceptual representations; (2) some categories are much easier to learn than others given the same number of exemplars, and some categories remain difficult despite extensive training. Both of these results are difficult to reconcile…