Listeners interpret cues in speech processing immediately rather than waiting until the end of a sentence. In particular, prosodic cues in auditory speech processing can aid listeners in building information structure and contrast sets. Native speakers even use this information in combination with syntactic and semantic information to build mental…

Research shows that translation teachers with insufficient translation experience will become the bottleneck hindering the development of translation education. However, few studies have examined teachers' translation experience or factors motivating or demotivating them to practice translation. This study attempts to fill the gap by interviewing…

Purpose: Speech perception in noise becomes difficult with age but can be facilitated by audiovisual (AV) speech cues and sentence context in healthy older adults. However, individuals with Alzheimer's disease (AD) may present with deficits in AV integration, potentially limiting the extent to which they can benefit from AV cues. This study…

Providing both effective feedback applications and reliable assessment practices are two central issues in ESL/EFL writing instruction contexts. Giving individual feedback is very difficult in crowded classes as it requires a great amount of time and effort for instructors. Moreover, instructors likely employ inconsistent assessment procedures,…

The choice of word counting units (i.e. word family, flemma, or lemma) is of great importance in vocabulary list and test creation, as there are assumptions underpinning the use of each. Flemma-based counting assumes that if a learner can understand the meaning of a word in one part of speech (POS), they can also understand its meaning when the…

Vocabulary researchers have started expanding their assessment toolbox by incorporating timed tasks and psycholinguistic instruments (e.g., priming tasks) to gain insights into lexical development (e.g., Elgort, 2011; Godfroid, 2020b; Nakata & Elgort, 2020; Vandenberghe et al., 2021). These timed sensitive and implicit word measures differ…

Logic as a knowledge representation and reasoning language is a fundamental topic of an Artificial Intelligence (AI) course and includes a number of sub-topics. One of them, which brings difficulties to students to deal with, is converting natural language (NL) sentences into first-order logic (FOL) formulas. To assist students to overcome those…

During the temporal delay between the filler and gap sites in long-distance dependencies, the "active filler" strategy can be implemented in two ways: the filler phrase can be actively maintained in working memory ("maintenance account"), or it can be retrieved only when the parser posits a gap ("retrieval account").…

Background: Children with language comprehension difficulties are at risk of educational and social problems, which in turn impede employment prospects in adulthood. However, few randomized trials have examined how such problems can be ameliorated during the preschool years. Methods: We conducted a cluster randomized trial in 148 preschool…

The term "formulaic sequence" (FS) is used with a multiplicity of meanings in the SLA literature, some overlapping but others not, and researchers are not always clear in defining precisely what they are investigating, or in limiting the implicational domain of their findings to the type of formulaicity they focus on. The first part of…

Parents of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) report concerns with child compliance. The development of compliance in 24-, 30-, and 36-month-old high-risk children with ASD outcomes (n = 21), high-risk children without ASD (n = 49), and low-risk children (n = 41) was examined. The High-Risk/ASD group showed greater passive noncompliance…

We address the challenging task of "computational natural language inference," by which we mean bridging two or more natural language texts while also providing an explanation of how they are connected. In the context of question answering (i.e., finding short answers to natural language questions), this inference connects the question…

The sentence production system transforms preverbal messages in the mind of a speaker into coherent grammatical utterances. During this process, which unfolds rapidly, the system has to link meaning information from the speaker's message to appropriate lexical and grammatical information from the speaker's memory. It usually does so with fluency…

A number of theories exist to explain why people gesture when speaking, when they produce gesture, and the origin of their gestures. This dissertation focuses on four individual variables that can influence gesture: (i) familiarity, (ii) imageability, (iii) codability, and (iv) motor experience. Four experiments were designed to determine how each…

Lexical semantics provide many important resources in natural language processing, despite the recent preferences for distributional methods. In this dissertation we investigate an under-represented lexical relationship, that of scalarity. We define scalarity as it relates to adjectives and introduce novel methods to identify words belonging to a…