We used the boundary paradigm (Rayner, 1975) to test two hypotheses that might explain why no conclusive evidence has been found for the existence of n + 2 preprocessing effects. In Experiment 1, we tested whether parafoveal processing of the second word to the right of fixation (n + 2) takes place only when the preceding word (n + 1) is very…

Texts are routinely simplified for language learners with authors relying on a variety of approaches and materials to assist them in making the texts more comprehensible. Readability measures are one such tool that authors can use when evaluating text comprehensibility. This study compares the Coh-Metrix Second Language (L2) Reading Index, a…

This study was to investigate Chinese children's eye patterns while reading different text genres from a developmental perspective. Eye movements were recorded while children in the second through sixth grades read two expository texts and two narrative texts. Across passages, overall word frequency was not significantly different between the two…

In this study, a corpus of essays stratified by level (9th grade, 11th grade, and college freshman) are analyzed computationally to discriminate differences between the linguistic features produced in essays by adolescents and young adults. The automated tool Coh-Metrix is used to examine to what degree essays written at various grade levels can…

While content words (e.g., 'dog') tend to carry meaning, function words (e.g., 'the') mainly serve syntactic purposes. Here, we ask whether 17-month old infants can use one language-universal cue to identify function word candidates: their high frequency of occurrence. In Experiment 1, infants listened to a series of short, naturally recorded…

Word properties like imageability and word frequency improve cued recall of verbal paired-associates. We asked whether these enhancements follow simply from prior effects on item-memory, or also strengthen associations between items. Participants studied word pairs varying in imageability or frequency: pairs were "pure" (high-high, low-low) or…

A word cloud is a special visualization of text in which the more frequently used words are effectively highlighted by occupying more prominence in the representation. We have used Wordle to produce word-cloud analyses of the spoken and written responses of informants in two research projects. The product demonstrates a fast and visually rich way…

The present study explored how average- and high-skilled second-grade readers (as identified by their Woodcock-Johnson III Test of Academic Achievement Broad Reading scores) differed on behavioral measures of reading related to comprehension: eye movements during silent reading and prosody during oral reading. Results from silent reading implicate…

This study created a medical word list (MWL) to bridge the gap between non-technical and technical vocabulary. The researcher compiled a corpus containing 155 textbooks across 31 medical subject areas from e-book databases (totaling 15 million running words) and examined the range and frequency of words outside the most frequent 3,000-word…

This study presents the processes of developing and establishing reliability and validity of a reading test by administering an integrative approach as conventional reliability and validity measures superficially reveals the difficulty of a reading test. In this respect, analysing vocabulary frequency of the test is regarded as a more eligible way…

Vocabulary is an essential component of language. It is central to reading ability, writing ability and listening ability, and the most important aspect of second-language (L2) knowledge for academic achievement. The aim of this paper is to investigate quantitatively some of the factors that make some L2 words more difficult to learn and retain…

An eye movement experiment was conducted to investigate whether the processing of a word can be affected by its higher frequency neighbor (HFN). Target words with an HFN (birch) or without one (spruce) were embedded into 2 types of sentence frames: 1 in which the HFN (birth) could fit given the prior sentence context, and 1 in which it could not.…

Word-segmentation, that is, the extraction of words from fluent speech, is one of the first problems language learners have to master. It is generally believed that statistical processes, in particular those tracking "transitional probabilities" (TPs), are important to word-segmentation. However, there is evidence that word forms are stored in…

This dissertation investigates the effects of phonological neighborhoods on pronunciation variation in conversational speech. Phonological neighbors are defined as words that are different in one and only one phoneme by addition, deletion and substitution. Phonological neighborhood density refers to the number of neighbors a certain word has. …

In response to ongoing concerns about financial ethics, this study analyzes the speech of company executives in quarterly earnings conference calls to understand strategic usage of ethics-related language. Against the backdrop of the recent global financial crisis, the Aristotelian concept of ethos provides a framework to investigate linguistic…