Listeners make use of contextual cues during continuous speech processing that help overcome the limitations of the acoustic input. These semantic, grammatical, and pragmatic cues facilitate prediction of upcoming words and/or reduce the lexical search space by inhibiting activation of contextually inappropriate words that share phonological…

Reading comprehension is one of the essential skills for students as they make a transition from learning to read to reading to learn. Over the last decade, the increased use of digital learning materials for promoting literacy skills (e.g., oral fluency and reading comprehension) in K-12 classrooms has been a boon for teachers. However, instant…

Student plagiarism has challenged educators for decades, with heightened paranoia following the advent of the Internet in the 1980's and ready access to easily copied text. But plagiarism will look like child's play next to new developments in AI-based natural-language processing (NLP) systems that increasingly appear to "write" as…

Prior research has shown that various types of conventional multiword chunks are processed faster than matched novel strings, but it is unclear whether this processing advantage extends to variant multiword chunks that are less formulaic. To determine whether the processing advantage of multiword chunks accommodates variations in the canonical…

Cyberbullying (CB) is classified as one of the severe misconducts on social media. Many CB detection systems have been developed for many natural languages to face this phenomenon. However, Arabic is one of the under-resourced languages suffering from the lack of quality datasets in many computational research areas. This paper discusses the…

Language processing is an extremely important, uniquely human cognitive ability. For well over a century, researchers have sought to understand how the human brain implements a system for instantaneously recognizing and generating complex linguistic patterns. Left perisylvian regions are considered to have certain computational abilities that are…

Readers build a mental representation of text during reading. The coherence building processes readers use to build a mental representation during reading is key to comprehension. We examined the effects of self- explanation on coherence building processes as undergraduates (n =51) read five complementary texts about natural selection and…

Educational technology innovations leveraging large language models (LLMs) have shown the potential to automate the laborious process of generating and analysing textual content. While various innovations have been developed to automate a range of educational tasks (eg, question generation, feedback provision, and essay grading), there are…

Digital systems are pervasive in modern societies -- augmenting personal and commercial driving, detecting cancer, and exploiting transitory events in financial markets. Attacks on these systems are growing in number, sophistication, and impact. Current cyber defenses are proving inadequate against some of these attacks. Cyber defense tools that…

The increasing prevalence of Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) technologies has led to a surge in the popularity of AI application tools, particularly chatbots, in various fields, including education. This research explores the factors influencing undergraduate students' inclination to embrace AI application tools, specifically chatbots, for…

It has been well documented that formulaic language (such as collocations; e.g., "provide information") enjoys a processing advantage over novel language (e.g., "compare information"). In natural language use, however, many formulaic sequences are often inserted with words intervening in between the individual constituents…

"Purpose:" ASD is associated with relative strengths in the visuospatial domain but varying abilities in the linguistic domain. Previous studies suggest parallels between spatial language and spatial cognition in older autistic individuals, but no research to date has examined this relationship in young autistic children. Therefore, the…

The proliferation of artificial intelligence (AI) technology has brought both innovative opportunities and unprecedented challenges to the education sector. Although AI makes education more accessible and efficient, the intentional misuse of AI chatbots in facilitating academic cheating has become a growing concern. By using the indirect…

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) has rapidly increased capacity for producing textual, visual and auditory outputs, yet there are ongoing concerns regarding the quality of those outputs. There is an urgent need to develop students' evaluative judgement - the capability to judge the quality of work of self and others - in recognition of this…

Purpose: Processing real-world sounds requires acoustic and higher-order semantic information. We tested the theory that individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) show enhanced processing of acoustic features and impaired processing of semantic information. Methods: We used a change deafness task that required detection of speech and…