We report a replication and extension of Ferreira (2003), in which it was observed that native adult English speakers misinterpret passive sentences that relate implausible but not impossible semantic relationships (e.g., "The angler was caught by the fish") significantly more often than they do plausible passives or plausible or implausible…

This study examines how the cross-linguistic similarity of translation equivalents affects bilingual word recognition. Performing one of three tasks, Dutch-English bilinguals processed cognates with varying degrees of form overlap between their English and Dutch counterparts (e.g., "lamp-lamp" vs. "flood-vloed" vs. "song-lied"). In lexical…

While listeners are recognizing words from the connected speech stream, they are also parsing information from the intonational contour. This contour may contain cues to word boundaries, particularly if a language has boundary tones that occur at a large proportion of word onsets. We investigate how useful the pitch rise at the beginning of an…

There is mounting evidence that language users are sensitive to distributional information at many grain-sizes. Much of this research has focused on the distributional properties of words, the units they consist of (morphemes, phonemes), and the syntactic structures they appear in (verb-categorization frames, syntactic constructions). In a series…

This paper presents a tool for drawing dynamic geometric figures by understanding the texts of geometry problems. With the tool, teachers and students can construct dynamic geometric figures on a web page by inputting a geometry problem in natural language. First we need to build the knowledge base for understanding geometry problems. With the…

The present study focuses on examining the hypothesis that auditory temporal perception deficit is a basic cause for reading disabilities among dyslexics. This hypothesis maintains that reading impairment is caused by a fundamental perceptual deficit in processing rapid auditory or visual stimuli. Since the auditory perception involves a number of…

Odlin (2003) observes that there is no consensus among researchers regarding the importance of L1 transfer in second-language acquisition (henceforth SLA). To test whether L1 transfer is a significant factor in SLA of English relative clauses (RCs), an English-language acceptability judgment task (AJT) with a four-point rating scale was…

This paper examines the impact of task complexity on L2 production. The study increases task complexity by progressively removing pre-task planning time and increasing the number of elements. The combined effects of manipulating these two variables of task complexity simultaneously are also analyzed. Using a repeated measures design, 42…

We used computational linguistic and content analyses to explore the concept of project ownership for undergraduate research. We used linguistic analysis of student interview data to develop a quantitative methodology for assessing project ownership and applied this method to measure degrees of project ownership expressed by students in relation…

Minimal research has been conducted on the simultaneous influence of multiple metalinguistic, linguistic, and processing skills that may impact literacy development in children who are in the process of learning to read and write. In this study, we assessed the phonemic awareness, morphological awareness, orthographic awareness, receptive…

Learning disabilities (LD) are one of the most frequent problems for elementary school-aged children. In this paper, event-related EEG oscillations to semantically related and unrelated pairs of words were studied in a group of 18 children with LD not otherwise specified (LD-NOS) and in 16 children with normal academic achievement. We propose that…

Purpose: The present study was designed to investigate what linguistic variables best predict bilingual recognition of acoustically degraded sentences and how to identify bilingual individuals who might have more difficulty than their monolingual counterparts on such tasks. Method: Four hundred English speech-perception-in-noise (SPIN) sentences…

Purpose: This study explores the hypothesis that vocabulary growth can have 2 types of effects in morphosyntactic development. One is a general effect, where vocabulary growth globally determines utterance complexity, defined in terms of sentence length and rates of subordination. There are also specific effects, where vocabulary size has a…

In this study, we focus on the conditions which permit people to assert a conditional statement of the form "if p then q" with conversational relevance. In a broadly decision-theoretic approach, also drawing on hypothetical thinking theory [Evans, J. St. B. T. (2007). "Hypothetical thinking: Dual processes in reasoning and judgement". Hove, UK:…

In the current millennium, extensive use of computers and the internet caused an exponential increase in information. Few research areas are as important as information extraction, which primarily involves extracting concepts and the relations between them from free text. Limitations in the size of training data, lack of lexicons and lack of…