The article shows how mind-mapping software can be used to help premedical students learn, apply and relate terminology sharing Greek and Latin roots. Mind-mapping software use a center, branches, and sub-branches to show connections between Greek and Latin roots generated on the mind map. Instruction with the mind-mapping software goes through…

This study investigates narrative comprehension and production in children with specific language impairment (SLI). Twelve children with SLI (mean age 5;8 years) and 12 typically developing children (mean age 5;6 years) participated in an eye-tracking experiment designed to investigate online narrative comprehension and production in Catalan- and…

An experiment examined whether beginning readers can successfully learn to detect and define homonyms, and whether this ability correlates with vocabulary and/or phonological awareness. First graders received ambiguity instruction involving homonyms in isolation, in riddles, and in text. A control group received reading lessons without a…

Purpose: The aim of this paper is to present a tool which uses semantic technologies for personnel performance and workplace learning assessment in outsourced information technology environments. Design/methodology/approach: The paper presents the tool from a technical perspective and introduces a use case that depicts the main features related to…

The present article addresses the following question: what variables condition syntactic transfer? Evidence is provided in support of the position that third language (L3) transfer is selective, whereby, at least under certain conditions, it is driven by the typological proximity of the target L3 measured against the other previously acquired…

Two studies were conducted to reexamine the psychometric properties of two major scales measuring attitudes toward older adults. The Kogan Attitudes Toward Old People Scale (Kogan OP Scale; Kogan, 1961b) was administered to a sample of 512 college students in Study One. The refined version (Polizzi & Millikin, 2002) of the Aging Semantic…

Existing models of laterality, while often successful at describing circumscribed domains, have not been successful as explanations of the overall patterns of hemispheric asymmetries. It is therefore suggested that a new approach is needed based on shared contributions to adaptive hemispheric roles rather than functional and structural…

Models of compensation for phonological variation in spoken word recognition differ in their ability to accommodate complete assimilatory alternations (such as run assimilating fully to rum in the context of a quick run picks you up). Two experiments addressed whether such complete changes can be observed in casual speech, and if so, whether they…

We used fMRI to investigate competition during language production in two word production tasks: object naming and color naming of achromatic line drawings. Generally, fMRI activation was higher for color naming. The line drawings were followed by a word (the distractor word) that referred to either the object, a related object, or an unrelated…

This article discusses the novel "Pygmalion" by George Bernard Shaw (1957) which depicts Eliza, a flower girl from East London, who became the subject of an "experiment" by a Professor of Phonetics who vowed to change the way she spoke. The story is an excellent example of a very real and contextual portrait of how language,…

Innovative computer technology has sparked a revolutionary change in the area of language analysis. Individual researchers are increasingly likely to access huge corpora containing several hundred million words and to analyze the data using highly developed language analyzers via the Internet. Sketch Engine is one of such online language…

Traditional theories of Semitic morphology hold that two abstract morphemic units, the root (e.g., "k-t-b") and the word pattern (e.g., "-i-aa-"), are the basis for word formation (e.g., "kitaab" [book]). Previous lexical processing studies in Hebrew and Arabic have confirmed the independent morphemic status of these two units, and the root in…

Educational standards alignment, which matches similar or equivalent concepts of educational standards, is a necessary task for educational resource discovery and retrieval. Automated or semi-automated alignment systems for educational standards have been recently available. However, existing systems frequently result in inconsistency in…

The deep semantic understanding necessary for complex natural language processing tasks, such as automatic question-answering or text summarization, would benefit from highly accurate word sense disambiguation (WSD). This dissertation investigates what makes an appropriate and effective sense inventory for WSD. Drawing on theories and…

Two experiments were conducted to determine whether explicit instruction focusing on metaphorical collocations would promote the incidental noticing of similar phrases by English learners during a subsequent reading task. Noticing was operationalized using the remember-know protocol and learning was measured on a fill-in-the-blanks test. In…