This study replicates Felser and Roberts (2007), which used a cross-modal picture priming task to examine indirect-object dependency processing in classroom L2 learners. The replication focuses on early L2 learners with extensive naturalistic L2 exposure (n = 22)--an understudied group in the literature--and investigates whether these learners, in…

Background: Teachers often rely on the use of open-ended questions to assess students' conceptual understanding of assigned content. Particularly in the context of mathematics; teachers use these types of questions to gain insight into the processes and strategies adopted by students in solving mathematical problems beyond what is possible through…

Higher education students with specific learning disorders (SLD) often experience difficulties in basic learning skills, including typing on computers, which has become the most common writing mode for academic purposes. This may affect their academic performance. We compared the typing performance, product, and technique (screen gaze, finger use)…

When individuals read a narrative text, they construct a mental representation known as a situational model to comprehend the unfolding story. These models require updates at meaningful changes in the story to reflect current information accurately. Existing research highlights the attentional and working memory demands of these updating…

Purpose: This study examines whether differences in acquisition exist among the inflectional constructions of number, gender, possessive pronouns, and tense. Moreover, the study investigates whether these inflectional patterns develop with age. Method: The participants were 1,020 Arabic-speaking kindergartners from K2 and K3. Children were…

Older adults show a progressive cognitive decline, and although language processing appears to resist advancing age, studies in word retrieval report that elders show important difficulties. Previous research reports that such failures increase from age 70 years, which suggests that during the fourth age word retrieval would exhibit even stronger…

This paper systematically explores how Large Language Models (LLMs) generate explanations of code examples of the type used in intro-to-programming courses. As we show, the nature of code explanations generated by LLMs varies considerably based on the wording of the prompt, the target code examples being explained, the programming language, the…

Speech is highly variable and systematic, governed by the internal linguistic system and socio-indexical factors. The systematic relationship of socio-indexical factors and variable phonetic forms, referred to here as "socio-indexical structure," has been the cornerstone of sociophonetic research over the last several decades. Research…

When readers are asked to detect a target letter while reading for comprehension, they miss it more frequently when it is embedded in a frequent function word than in a less frequent content word. This missing-letter effect has been used to investigate the cognitive processes involved in reading. A similar effect, called the missing-phoneme effect…

In Krashen's theory of second-language acquisition he claims that there is distinction between language acquisition and language learning, a distinction which other second-language acquisition researchers have called "perhaps the most important conceptualization" in the field and which has made possible the most productive models of SLA.…

Self-directed learning and self-assessment require student responsibility over learning needs, goals, processes, and outcomes. However, this student-led learning can be challenging to achieve in a classroom limited by a one-to-many teacher-led instruction. We, thus, have designed and prototyped a generative artificial intelligence chatbot…

Multiple choice questions are traditionally expensive to produce. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have led to fine-tuned LLMs that generate questions competitive with human-authored questions. However, the relative capabilities of ChatGPT-family models have not yet been established for this task. We present a carefully-controlled…

This paper describes the results of an archival desk-study that analyzed worksheets produced by four students using ChatGPT as a coach. ChatGPT is a Generative Pre-Trained Large Language model that can write comprehensively in various languages and styles. It was discovered that it could pass university level physics exams and perform at the level…

The ability to process plural marking of nouns is acquired early: at a very young age, children are able to understand if a noun represents one item or more than one. However, little is known about how the segmental characteristics of plural marking are used in this process. Using eye-tracking, we aim at understanding how five to twelve-year old…

Statistical learning (SL) plays a key role in literacy acquisition. Studies have increasingly revealed the influence of distributional statistical properties of words on visual word processing, including the effects of word frequency (lexical level) and mappings between orthography, phonology, and semantics (sub-lexical level). However, there has…