Here we report findings from a cross-sectional study of morphosyntactic processing in native German speakers and native English speakers enrolled in college-level German courses. Event-related brain potentials were recorded while participants read sentences that were either well-formed or violated German subject-verb agreement. Results showed that…

This research revealed both similarities and striking differences in early language proficiency among infants from a broad range of advantaged and disadvantaged families. English-learning infants ("n" = 48) were followed longitudinally from 18 to 24 months, using real-time measures of spoken language processing. The first goal was to…

We present an evaluation of the Writing Pal (W-Pal) intelligent tutoring system (ITS) and the W-Pal automated writing evaluation (AWE) system through the use of computational indices related to text cohesion. Sixty-four students participated in this study. Each student was assigned to either the W-Pal ITS condition or the W-Pal AWE condition. The…

The present work aims to contribute to our understanding of the underlying dimensions of language learning strategies in foreign language contexts. The study analyzes alternative factor structures underlying a recently developed instrument (Tragant and Victori, 2012) and it includes the age factor in the examination of its construct validity. The…

This study investigates the roles of collaborative output, the modality of output, and word engagement in vocabulary learning and retention by Chinese-speaking undergraduate EFL learners. The two treatment groups reconstructed a passage that they had read in one of two ways: (1) dyadic oral interaction while producing a written report (Written…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of explicit, direct, and generative strategy training and working memory capacity (WMC) on mathematical word problem-solving accuracy in elementary schoolchildren. In this study, children in third grade ("N" = 82) identified as at risk for math difficulties (MD) were randomly…

There remains a lack of published empirical data on the substantive outcomes of higher learning and the establishment of quality processes for determining them. Studies that do exist are nationally focused with available rankings of institutions reflecting neither the quality of teaching and learning nor the diversity of institutions. This article…

In this article, education is regarded as a medium (Salomon, 2000). i.e. a channel for the transmission of knowledge with its specifically and historically defined form and content. From a media ecology perspective, media are not neutral, transparent or value-free channels for transporting information. Instead, the inherent physical structures and…

In five experiments, I investigated how readers and listeners generate relevant contrasts in comprehending and remembering discourse. Past work has suggested that prominent words promote encoding of salient alternatives and that this benefits later memory, but it is unclear exactly which alternatives are considered or how consistent these benefits…

Learning to read is a complex process that develops normally in the majority of children and requires the mapping of graphemes to their corresponding phonemes. Problems with the mapping process nevertheless occur in about 5% of the population and are typically attributed to poor phonological representations, which are--in turn--attributed to…

Natural language processing (NLP) is a field of computer science and linguistics devoted to creating computer systems that use human (natural) language as input and/or output. The authors propose that NLP can also be used for game studies research. In this article, the authors provide an overview of NLP and describe some research possibilities…

This self-paced reading study first tested the prediction that the garden path effect previously observed during the processing of subject-object ambiguities in native English would not obtain in a null subject language like Spanish. The investigation then further explored whether the effect would be evident among near-native readers of Spanish…

Few studies have examined connected speech in demented and non-demented patients with Parkinson's disease (PD). We assessed the speech production of 35 patients with Lewy body spectrum disorder (LBSD), including non-demented PD patients, patients with PD dementia (PDD), and patients with dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB), in a semi-structured…

This article explores the widely documented difficulty with object clitics in the acquisition of French. The study investigates the effects of L1 transfer and processing limitations on the production and comprehension of object clitics in child L2 learners of French with different L1 backgrounds (Chinese, Spanish). The Spanish-speaking learners…

We used structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and voxel based morphometry (VBM) to investigate whether the efficiency of word processing in the non-native language (lexical efficiency) and the number of non-native languages spoken (2+ versus 1) were related to local differences in the brain structure of bilingual and multilingual speakers.…