Including causal links in concept maps enables learners to meaningfully relate concepts to a larger context or problem in terms of how and where concepts apply within the chains of causal events that lead to a given goal or outcome. Given that higher quality maps are produced when students link and sequence events to flow temporally and…

The integration of semantic information of compound words with context is a crucial aspect of reading comprehension. In two eye-tracking experiments, we used two-character and four-character Chinese lexicalized and novel compound words to investigate how Chinese readers integrate semantic information of compound words with contexts in the present…

The ability to search memory for diverse contextual usages of words is proposed to play a role in creative idea generation. However, it is not yet known whether searching for more diverse contextual usages of words enhances the novelty of ideas during idea generation. In three experiments, participants were given a noun as a creativity prompt…

The semantics and pragmatics of polar questions remain undertheorized. Standard proposition-set accounts (Hamblin, 1976; Groenendijk and Stokhof, 1984), which take question meanings to be identifiable with the (appropriately defined) set of their answers, have been developed mostly for wh-questions; when applied to polar questions, they predict…

The goal of this study is to investigate whether or not Turkish has a particular preference in ambiguity resolution of relative clause attachment when two possible NPs are available as in "Someone shot [NP1 the servant] of [NP2 the actress] [RC who was on the balcony]". The relevant literature has showed that RC attachment…

Research on alphabetic reading presents conflicting findings concerning the timing of orthographic and meaning processes in reading morphologically complex words. Chinese characters offer distinct visual cues for morphemes, enabling straightforward manipulations to examine orthographic and meaning processes. Guided by the Character-Word Dual…

Cognitive tasks are seldom evaluated on their ability to provide valid and reliable measurements of the construct they intend to measure. This scarcity of psychometric evaluations makes it challenging to evaluate replications of experimental effects and to relate performance in cognitive tasks to other constructs of interest. In developmental…

Vocabulary is an important foundation for reading skills. Dual-route cascaded model believes that when form-sound correspondence is irregular, phonetic decoding is a necessary but not sufficient condition for word acquisition. Lexical access in syllabic scripts involves a morphological-phonetic-semantic approach, where phonological decoding is…

Definitions are an integral aspect of mathematics. In particular, they form the backbone of deductive reasoning and facilitate precision in mathematical communication. However, when multiple non-equivalent definitions for the same term exist, their ability to serve these purposes can be called into question. While ambiguity can be productive, the…

World university rankings have had an impact on academic competition worldwide. The comparability of ranking results depends on how data is collected within each university. When data concepts are interpreted differently, data variety is introduced and ranking results cannot be used in a meaningful manner. In this case study, the effect of…

Judgments of learning (JOLs) are often reactive on memory for cue-target pairs. This pattern, however, is moderated by relatedness, as related but not unrelated pairs often show a memorial benefit compared to a no-JOL control group. Based on Soderstrom et al.'s, "Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition" 41,…

This study traced different types of distractor effects in the picture-word interference (PWI) task across repeated naming. Starting point was a PWI study by Kurtz et al. (2018). It reported that naming a picture (e.g., of a duck) was slowed down by a distractor word phonologically related to an alternative picture name from a different taxonomic…

This two-part dissertation centers on a re-examination of the role of book indexes in information retrieval research on full-text digital book collections in digital libraries. Early research focused on information retrieval and book indexes (in addition to other parts of books) in the 2000s when the Google Books corpus was first released to the…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to determine if there are age-related differences in semantic processing with linguistic and nonlinguistic masking, as measured by the N400. Method: Sixteen young (19-31 years) and 16 middle-aged (41-57 years) adults with relatively normal hearing sensitivity were asked to determine whether word pairs were…

The purpose of this research is to explore three English synonyms, namely critical, serious, and crucial, with a particular focus on meanings, degrees of formality, collocations, and semantic preferences. Two dictionaries, namely the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary and the Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary online, as well as the Corpus…