Distributional models of semantics learn word meanings from contextual co-occurrence patterns across a large sample of natural language. Early models, such as LSA and HAL (Landauer & Dumais, 1997; Lund & Burgess, 1996), counted co-occurrence events; later models, such as BEAGLE (Jones & Mewhort, 2007), replaced counting co-occurrences…

Computer based analyses offer a possibility for objective methods to assess semantic-linguistic quality of narratives at the text level. The aim of the present study is to investigate whether a semantic language impairment index (SELIMI) based on latent semantic analysis (LSA) can discriminate between children with developmental language disorder…

One perennially important question for theories of sentence comprehension is whether the human sentence processing mechanism is "parallel" (i.e., it simultaneously represents multiple syntactic analyses of linguistic input) or "serial" (i.e., it constructs only a single analysis at a time). Despite its centrality, this question…

Adults adjust the informativeness of their utterances to the needs of their addressee. For children, however, relevant evidence is mixed. In this article we explore the communicative circumstances under which children offer informative descriptions. In Experiment 1, 4- and 5-year-old children and adults described a target event from a pair of…

Theories of discourse argue that comprehension depends on the coherence of the learner's mental representation. Our aim is to create a reliable automated representation to estimate readers' level of comprehension based on different productions, namely self-explanations and answers to open-ended questions. Previous work relied on Cohesion Network…

This dissertation adopts an experimental approach to studying lie judgments. It focuses on lie judgments to different types of meaning within a pragmatic framework -- namely bare linguistic meaning, explicature, and implicature -- to study whether the (in)directness of communicated false content affects the extent to which an utterance is judged…

Machine Translation (MT) has the potential to provide instant translation in times of crisis. MT provides real solutions that can remove borders between people and COVID-19 information. The widespread of MT system makes it worthy of scrutinizing the capacity of the most prominent MT system, Google Translate, to deal with COVID-19 texts into…

This article proposes a novel account for the overuse of free morphemes and underuse of bound morphemes in English as a second language (L2) based on the framework of Distributed Morphology. It will be argued that an Economy Principle 'Do everything in Narrow Syntax (DENS)' operates in the L2 learner's computational system. Consequently,…

This study explored the Turkish language teaching curriculum (TLTC, Grades 1-8) outcomes through an interactionist framework. Two points framed the analysis of the outcomes: learning demand and social discussions of the meanings. This study concluded that particularly for the learning areas such as reading, speaking, and writing, sixth- to…

Modern researchers focus on spiritual and moral education only of children, particularly in the humanities. In this study, we develop and implement a program for the spiritual and moral education of 24 mathematics teachers aged between 30 and 65 years and assess its effectiveness. The program's effectiveness was assessed based on previously…

The relevance of the study is due to the need to identify the position of teachers in their professional activities, the manifestation of its reflective activity. A special attitude of the teacher to his own activity, when the very content of this activity is for the teacher as an object of analysis, reflection and evaluation, characterizes the…

We investigate effects of prosodic cues on interpretation of ambiguous sentences containing relative clauses (RCs) in English by Spanish-speaking learners. English and Spanish differ in default preference for RC attachment: English has a weak low attachment (LA) preference (RC modifies NP2); Spanish has a stronger high attachment (HA) preference…

The concept of sustainability includes many different definitions and diversified perspectives with its ecological, economic, social, and cultural dimensions. However, building positive attitudes towards sustainability is important to fulfill broad and comprehensive sustainability goals. The present study aimed to determine the meanings that…

An increasing number of studies have explored the process of how subjects solve problems through remote association. Most research has investigated the relationship between an individual's response to semantic search during the think-aloud operation and the individual's reply performance. Few studies, however, have examined the process of…

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…