Studies using the lexical decision task with English stimuli have demonstrated that homophones are responded to more slowly than nonhomophonic controls. In contrast, several studies using Chinese stimuli have shown that homophones are responded to more rapidly than nonhomophonic controls. In an attempt to better understand the impact of homophony,…

Serial attention models of eye-movement control during reading were evaluated in an eye-tracking experiment that examined how lexical activation combines with visual information in the parafovea to affect word skipping (where a word is not fixated during first-pass reading). Lexical activation was manipulated by repetition priming created through…

One of the words that readers of English skip most often is the definite article "the". Most accounts of reading assume that in order for a reader to skip a word, it must have received some lexical processing. The definite article is skipped so regularly, however, that the oculomotor system might have learned to skip the letter string…

The present study investigated the relationships between lexical access, reading fluency, and comprehension. Two components of speed of lexical access were studied: phonological and semantic. Previous studies have mainly investigated these components of lexical access separately. The present study examined both components in naming tasks--with…

This thesis explores how predictions about upcoming language inputs are computed during real-time language comprehension. Previous research has demonstrated humans' ability to use rich contextual information to compute linguistic prediction during real-time language comprehension, and it has been widely assumed that contextual information can…

This paper presents a new approach to automated identification of human emotions based on analysis of body movements, a recognition of gestures and poses. Methodology, models and automated system for emotion identification are considered. To characterize the person emotions in the model, body movements are described with linguistic variables and a…

This study reports 2 eye-tracking experiments investigating form interference during sentence-level silent reading. The items involved reduced and unreduced relative clauses (RCs) with words that were orthographically and phonologically similar "(injection-infection"; O+P+, Experiment 1) as well as with words that were orthographically…

Reading comprehension is an essential academic skill (Nash & Snowling, 2006;National Reading Panel, National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, 2000).Yet, among students in the eighth grade, approximately 64% of all students and 91% of students with disabilities do not read at proficient levels (National Center for Education…

This study presents the results from a computer-assisted language learning (CALL) system of Runyakitara (RU_CALL). The major objective was to provide an electronic language learning environment that can enable learners with mother tongue deficiencies to enhance their knowledge of grammar and acquire writing skills in Runyakitara. The system…

This study investigates how syntactic complexity affects speaking performance in first (L1) and second language (L2) in terms of speaking fluency. Participants (30 Dutch native speakers with an average to advanced level of English) performed two speaking experiments, one in Dutch (L1) and one in English (L2). Syntactic complexity was…

When both members of a phonemic contrast in L2 (second language) are perceptually mapped to a single phoneme in one's L1 (first language), L2 words containing a member of that contrast can spuriously activate L2 words in spoken-word recognition. For example, upon hearing cattle, Dutch speakers of English are reported to experience activation…

A theoretical framework which considers the verbal functions of the brain under a multivariate and comprehensive cognitive model was statistically analyzed. A confirmatory factor analysis was performed to verify whether some recognized aphasia constructs can be hierarchically integrated as latent factors from a homogenously verbal test. The Brief…

The present article examines production and on-line processing of definite articles in Turkish-speaking sequential bilingual children acquiring English and Dutch as second languages (L2) in the UK and in the Netherlands, respectively. Thirty-nine 6-8-year-old L2 children and 48 monolingual (L1) age-matched children participated in two separate…

Mining social web data is a challenging task and finding user interest for personalized and non-personalized recommendation systems is another important task. Knowledge sharing among web users has become crucial in determining usage of web data and personalizing content in various social websites as per the user's wish. This paper aims to design a…

Semantic priming, a well-established technique to study conceptual representation, has thus far produced variable fMRI results, both regarding the type of priming effects and their correlation with brain activation. The aims of the current study were (a) to investigate two types of semantic relations--categorical versus associative--under…