Background and aims: A substantial minority of autistic individuals score within typical ranges on standard language tests, suggesting that autism does not necessarily affect language acquisition. This idea is reflected in current diagnostic criteria for autism, wherein language impairment is no longer included. However, some work has suggested…

Background: Core lexicon (CL) analysis is a time efficient and possibly reliable measure that captures discourse production abilities. For people with aphasia, CL scores have demonstrated correlations with aphasia severity, as well as other discourse and linguistic measures. It was also found to be clinician-friendly and clinically sensitive…

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is believed to impact the language patterns, particularly the lexico-semantic abilities among children which retards their communicative abilities. This study aims to evaluate the lexical-semantic aspects of spoken language in preschool-aged children with ASD. The methodology involved assessing both expressive and…

In this thesis, I use a combination of simulations and empirical data to demonstrate that a small set of structural and functional principles - the basic tenets of predictive coding theory - succinctly accounts for a very wide range of properties in the language processing system. Predictive coding approximates hierarchical Bayesian inference via…

We analyze here how pre-service teachers explicate their views about the wave-particle duality of photons and what role it plays in their arguments supporting the quantum nature of light. The data for the analysis is provided by 12 written reports about the double-slit experiment with feeble light. The analysis is based on constructing semantic…

Children learn words in a social environment. In my dissertation, I examine how caregivers' social cues facilitate young children's word learning in settings that mirror their typical, dynamic learning environments. In Chapter 1, I overview prior work examining how social cues may support word learning, focusing on possible mechanisms underlying…

Automatic essay scoring (AES) is an essential educational application in natural language processing. This automated process will alleviate the burden by increasing the reliability and consistency of the assessment. With the advances in text embedding libraries and neural network models, AES systems achieved good results in terms of accuracy.…

CCTV plays a prominent role in public security, health and safety. Monitoring large arrays of CCTV camera feeds is a visually and cognitively demanding task. Arranging the scenes by geographical proximity in the surveilled environment has been recommended to reduce this demand, but empirical tests of this method have failed to find any benefit.…

In order for feedback to effectively facilitate learning and development, it needs to feed-forward from one assignment to the next. Yet, it is not always clear how to determine if feedback is actually feeding forward. This paper, therefore, presents a translation device, using Legitimation Code Theory, and specifically, semantic gravity, to help…

Temporarily ambiguous sentences that are disambiguated in favor of a less preferred parse are read more slowly than their unambiguous counterparts. This slowdown is referred to as a "garden path effect." Recent self-paced reading studies have found that this effect decreased over the course of the experiment as participants were exposed…

In the property listing task (PLT), participants are asked to list properties for a concept (e.g., for the concept "dog," "barks," and "is a pet" may be produced). In conceptual property norming (CPNs) studies, participants are asked to list properties for large sets of concepts. Here, we use a mathematical model of…

Manually determining concepts present in a group of questions is a challenging and time-consuming process. However, the process is an essential step while modeling a virtual learning environment since a mapping between concepts and questions using mastery level assessment and recommendation engines is required. In this article, we investigated…

Young children can exploit the syntactic context of a novel word to narrow down its probable meaning. But how do they learn which contexts are linked to which semantic features in the first place? We investigate if 3- to 4-year-old children (n = 60) can learn about a syntactic context from tracking its use with only a few familiar words. After…

To compare the influences of concreteness and imageability on Chinese two-character (2C) word recognition, two experiments were conducted in a primed task on a cohort of skilled readers. In addition to PRIME (2C words or their transposed constituent characters) and DIRECTION (forward or backward collocations between prime words and targets),…

Poverty of the stimulus has been at the heart of ferocious and tear-filled debates at the nexus of psychology, linguistics, and philosophy for decades. This review is intended as a guide for readers without a formal linguistics or philosophy background, focusing on what poverty of the stimulus is and how it's been interpreted, which is…