The syntactic behaviour of human beings cannot be explained by analogical generalization on the basis of concrete exemplars: analogies in surface form are insufficient to account for human grammatical knowledge, because they fail to hold in situations where they should, and fail to extend in situations where they need to. [For Ben Ambridge's…

This study investigated the effects of construction types on Korean-L1 English-L2 learners' verb-construction integration in online processing by presenting the ditransitive and prepositional dative constructions and manipulating the verb's association strength within these constructions. Results of a self-paced reading experiment showed that the…

Purpose: This study analysed text mining from full-text articles and abstracts by postgraduate students in selected Nigeria universities. Design/methodology/approach: The study adopted a survey research design using a questionnaire as the instrument for data collection from 357 postgraduate students drawn using Raosoft sample size calculator. Six…

Domain restriction is a pervasive if often neglected part of discourse comprehension. Speakers and authors implicitly limit the domain of discourse of quantifiers (e.g., "everyone") and noun phrases (e.g., "the girls"). Our previous research shows that an initial temporal or locative prepositional phrase (PP), which introduces…

Learning from text is a "constructive" activity in which sentence-level information is combined by the reader to build coherent mental models. With increasingly complex texts, forming a mental model becomes challenging due to a lack of background knowledge, and limits in working memory and attention. To address this, we are taught…

15-month-olds behave as if they comprehend filler-gap dependencies such as "wh"-questions and relative clauses. On one hypothesis, this success does not reflect adult-like representations but rather a "gap-driven" interpretation heuristic based on verb knowledge. Infants who know that "feed" is transitive may notice…

As the disseminator of information, news media play a vital role in the public speech community. Especially the mainstream English media in China, which not only carefully design the topic, content, and framework of news to broadcast information but also construct cultural identity and build China's image. Exemplified by a piece of news from…

The present study examined whether Chinese-English bilinguals showed morphological sensitivity toward prefixed words. In the experiment, English monolinguals showed masked priming effects in a Transparent condition ("disagree-AGREE") and an Opaque condition ("mischief-CHIEF"), but not in a Form condition…

For decades, educators have relied on readability metrics that tend to oversimplify dimensions of text difficulty. This study examines the potential of applying advanced artificial intelligence methods to the educational problem of assessing text difficulty. The combination of hierarchical machine learning and natural language processing (NLP) is…

Word vectors are widely used as input features in natural language processing (NLP) tasks. Researchers have found that word vectors often encode the biases of society, and steps have been taken towards debiasing the vectors themselves. However, little has been said about the fairness of the methods used to evaluate the quality of vectors.…

Contribution: This research explores the benefits and challenges of developing, deploying, and evaluating a large language model (LLM) chatbot, MoodleBot, in computer science classroom settings. It highlights the potential of integrating LLMs into LMSs like Moodle to support self-regulated learning (SRL) and help-seeking behavior. Background:…

Listening is a major challenge for many English-as-a-foreign language (EFL) learners. Decoding training, which helps learners develop the ability to recognize words from speech, is frequently used to assist EFL learners. Although recent empirical studies on decoding training have provided positive evidence on its effectiveness in improving EFL…

With the advent of online learning, instructors are challenged to engage with students in asynchronous learning environments. This study explored Perusall, a social annotation tool (SAT), in an undergraduate introductory course in sign language interpreting. Despite the growing popularity of SATs, their impact on sign language interpreter…

Before infants can learn words, they must identify those words in continuous speech. Yet, the speech signal lacks obvious boundary markers, which poses a potential problem for language acquisition (Swingley, "Philos Trans R Soc Lond. Series B, Biol Sci" 364(1536), 3617-3632, 2009). By the middle of the first year, infants seem to have…

To directly investigate the reciprocal causal relationship of the conceptual and affective meaning of words, two priming experiments were conducted with the lexical decision task. In Experiment 1, the influence of semantic relatedness on the affective priming effect was explored by manipulating the semantic associative strength between the prime…