It is widely acknowledged that fixed expressions such as idioms have a processing advantage over non-idiomatic language. While many idioms are metaphoric, metonymic, or even literal, the effect of varying nonliteralness in their processing has not been much researched yet. Theoretical and empirical findings suggest that metonymies are easier to…

The present study explores the issue of why ambiguous words are recognized faster than unambiguous ones during word recognition. To this end we contrasted two different hypotheses: the "semantic feedback" hypothesis (Hino and Lupker in J Exp Psychol Hum Percept Perform 22:1331-1356, 1996. https://doi.org/10.1037/0096-1523.22.6.1331), and…

Lexical inference refers to the ability to make informed guesses about the meaning of an unknown word. This inferencing ability is affected by learner-related (i.e., morphological awareness and vocabulary knowledge) and language-related (i.e., word semantic transparency) factors. Previous studies have shown that these factors play independent…

Purpose: The study aims to test whether children with specific language impairment (SLI) show weaknesses in word retrieval and cognitive control and to find out whether impairments in the 2 domains are associated. Method: Thirty-one children with SLI (age: M = 8;11 years;months, SD = 1;1) and 31 age- and IQ-matched typically developing children…

Introduction. Taxonomy is an effective mean of managing and accessing a large amount of digital information. Various techniques have been developed to generate taxonomy automatically. The purpose of this study is threefold: (i) review methods and approaches adopted during taxonomy generation, (ii) identify the factors influencing the choice of a…

Variations in the accuracy and stability of a word's spelling can be used to gauge the quality of its underlying orthographic representation. The Lexical Quality Hypothesis (LQH) contends that words with higher quality cognitive representations should be accessed more efficiently than those with lower quality representations. If this is the case,…

The present research is a cross-linguistic study indicating that the timing of motor production not only depends on the shape of a letter and the activation of its motor program but also on the way the orthographic representations encode the letters for spelling retrieval. English and Italian-speaking participants wrote cognate words (e.g.,…

Misconceptions have been an important area of study in STEM education towards improving our understanding of learners' construction of knowledge. The advent of largescale tutoring systems has given rise to an abundance of data in the form of learner question-answer logs in which signatures of misconceptions can be mined. In this work, we explore…

Exploring students' discourse in academic settings over time can provide valuable insight into the evolution of learner engagement and participation in online learning. In this study, we propose an analytical framework to capture topics and the temporal progression of learner discourse. We employed a Contextualized Topic Modeling technique on…

Background: Although there is a growing body of literature on cognitive and language processing in bilingual children with developmental language disorder (DLD), there is a major gap in the evidence for language intervention. Critically, speech-language therapists are often required to make clinical decisions for language intervention on specific…

Phonological interference during written-word meaning judgments occurs in both Chinese and English, suggesting that word-level phonological activation is universal rather than dependent on the sublexical structures that vary with writing systems. To accommodate this universality, we distinguish two sources of phonological congruence between a…

Recent research has shown that knowledge of second language (L2) collocations is important to learners for improving their language processing and production but also that acquiring L2-specific collocations is a very burdensome task for learners. Thus, bootstrapping knowledge of L2 collocations through generalization is highly desirable, but this…

This article revisits Lee and Mok (2018) and examines how the Cantonese learners in the study produced second language (L2) Japanese short vs. long consonants which are absent in their first language (L1). Specifically, our goal is to find out whether these learners were substituting real geminates (i.e. long consonants) with the improvised…

The new contexts in higher education, shifting from face-to-face to online scenarios, encourage the application of disruptive methodologies adapted to distance learning. Translation and interpreting (T&I) programmes ideally foster the acquisition of competencies such as self-study, which graduates need to enter a largely freelance and…

Recent advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) have sparked renewed interest in its potential to improve education. However, AI is a loose umbrella term that refers to a collection of methods, capabilities, and limitations--many of which are often not explicitly articulated by researchers, education technology companies, or other AI developers.…