Purpose: Adults with mild-to-moderate age-related hearing loss typically exhibit issues with speech understanding, but their processing of syntactically complex sentences is not well understood. We test the hypothesis that listeners with hearing loss' difficulties with comprehension and processing of syntactically complex sentences are due to the…

Although text readability has traditionally been measured based on simple linguistic features, recent studies have employed natural language processing techniques to develop new readability formulas that better represent theoretical accounts of reading processes. This study evaluated the construct validity of different readability formulas,…

Purpose: Background noise has been categorized as energetic masking due to spectrotemporal overlap of the target and masker on the auditory periphery or informational masking due to cognitive-level interference from relevant content such as speech. The effects of masking on cortical and sensory auditory processing can be objectively studied with…

Research employing psycholinguistic techniques to assess the on-line processing of collocation by native and non-native speakers has flourished in the past few years. This line of research aims (among other things) at exploring actual performance in real time as opposed to the traditional paper-and-pencil testing techniques that have been…

Implicit causality (IC) is a well-known phenomenon whereby certain verbs appear to create biases to remention either their subject or object in a causal dependent clause. This study investigated to what extent Korean learners of English made use of IC information for predictive processing at a discourse level, and whether L2 proficiency played a…

Cultural experiences can influence how people attend to different emotional cues. Whereas semantic content explicitly describes feelings, vocal tone conveys implicit information regarding emotions. This cross-cultural study examined children's attention to emotional cues in spoken words. The sample consisted of 121 European American (EA) and 120…

Attraction effects arise when a comprehender erroneously retrieves a distractor instead of a target item during memory retrieval operations. In Korean, considerable processing difficulties occur in the agreement relation checking between a subject and an honorific-marked predicate when an intervening distractor carries a non-honorific feature. We…

Background: A growing body of literature has demonstrated the importance of discourse assessment in patients who suffered from brain injury, both in the left and right hemispheres, as discourse represents a key component of functional communication. However, little is known about the relationship between gray matter density and macrolinguistic…

It is often assumed that all languages are fundamentally the same. This assumption has been challenged by research in linguistic typology and language evolution, but questions of language learning and use have largely been left aside. Here we review recent work on Danish that provides new insights into these questions. Unlike closely related…

Recent studies of appositives have turned up differences between sentence-medial appositives and sentence-final appositives, for instance, in their availability for discourse continuations. Three experiments investigated whether medial appositives are more difficult to comprehend than final appositives and if so why. Experiment 1 tested…

In conversation, production and comprehension processes may overlap, causing interference. In 3 experiments, we investigated whether repetition priming can work as a supporting device, reducing costs associated with linguistic dual-tasking. Experiment 1 established the rate of decay of repetition priming from spoken words to picture naming for…

This review scrutinizes the evidence concerning the factors that affect the ease with which multilinguals learn additional languages. First, I focus on language learning experiences that could help multilinguals acquire new languages (e.g., consequences of exposure, use of prior knowledge, biliteracy). I then discuss how multilinguals manage…

In contrast to simple feedback, which provides students with the correct answer, elaborated feedback provides an explanation of the correct answer with respect to the student's error. Elaborated feedback is thus a challenge for AI in education systems because it requires dynamic explanations, which traditionally require logical reasoning and…

Digitalization and automation of test administration, score reporting, and feedback provision have the potential to benefit large-scale and formative assessments. Many studies on automated essay scoring (AES) and feedback generation systems were published in the last decade, but few connected AES and feedback generation within a unified framework.…

Providing consistent, individualized feedback to teachers is essential for improving instruction but can be prohibitively resource intensive in most educational contexts. We develop an automated tool based on natural language processing to give teachers feedback on their uptake of student contributions, a high-leverage teaching practice that…