Translation ambiguity, which occurs commonly when one word has more than one possible translation in another language, causes language processing disadvantage. The present study investigated how Chinese--English bilinguals process translation-ambiguous words, and whether it is affected by the second language (L2) proficiency and sentence context,…

This article addresses some fundamental issues of concept mapping relevant to discipline-based education. The focus is on manufacturing knowledge representation from the viewpoints of both human and machine learning. The concept of new-generation manufacturing (Industry 4.0, smart manufacturing, and connected factory) necessitates learning factory…

Distributional models of semantics learn word meanings from contextual co-occurrence patterns across a large sample of natural language. Early models, such as LSA and HAL (Landauer & Dumais, 1997; Lund & Burgess, 1996), counted co-occurrence events; later models, such as BEAGLE (Jones & Mewhort, 2007), replaced counting co-occurrences…

Computer based analyses offer a possibility for objective methods to assess semantic-linguistic quality of narratives at the text level. The aim of the present study is to investigate whether a semantic language impairment index (SELIMI) based on latent semantic analysis (LSA) can discriminate between children with developmental language disorder…

One perennially important question for theories of sentence comprehension is whether the human sentence processing mechanism is "parallel" (i.e., it simultaneously represents multiple syntactic analyses of linguistic input) or "serial" (i.e., it constructs only a single analysis at a time). Despite its centrality, this question…

Adults adjust the informativeness of their utterances to the needs of their addressee. For children, however, relevant evidence is mixed. In this article we explore the communicative circumstances under which children offer informative descriptions. In Experiment 1, 4- and 5-year-old children and adults described a target event from a pair of…

Theories of discourse argue that comprehension depends on the coherence of the learner's mental representation. Our aim is to create a reliable automated representation to estimate readers' level of comprehension based on different productions, namely self-explanations and answers to open-ended questions. Previous work relied on Cohesion Network…

This dissertation adopts an experimental approach to studying lie judgments. It focuses on lie judgments to different types of meaning within a pragmatic framework -- namely bare linguistic meaning, explicature, and implicature -- to study whether the (in)directness of communicated false content affects the extent to which an utterance is judged…

Background: There is a clear predominance of programmes aimed at improving aspects related to language production in pupils with developmental language disorder (DLD). However, programmes aimed at improving their receptive skills are limited. Aims: The main aim was to assess the effectiveness of an intervention programme for oral language…

Morphological awareness, or sensitivity to units of meaning, is an essential component of reading comprehension development. Current neurobiological models of reading and dyslexia have largely been built upon phonological processing models, yet reading for meaning is as essential as reading for sound. To fill this gap, the present study explores…

Children with language disorder frequently experience difficulties with vocabulary acquisition, and these difficulties often persist into adolescence. The literature indicates that clinical studies tend to investigate phonological-semantic approaches, whereas educational studies focus on the derivation of meaning within a literacy context. Little…

No research article is imaginable without reporting verbs. They help the writer voice his/her own views against the backdrop of other community voices, while also serving to project his/her authority and expertise in the field. The vast variety of reporting verbs in academic discourse and their disciplinary specificity account for a huge challenge…

The lexical representation of compound words in speech production is still under debate. While most studies with healthy adult speakers suggest that a single lemma representation is active during compound production, data from neuropsychological studies point toward multiple representations, with activation of the compound's constituent lemmas in…

The present study aims to reveal the use of high-frequency verbs "make" and "do" when they occur in a verb+noun combination in the argumentative essays of Turkish learners of English. In this context, the present study investigated the grammatical and semantic patterns and erroneous productions in the learner corpus. The…

Semantic and phonological similarity effects provide critical constraints on the mechanisms underlying language production. In the present study, we jointly investigated effects of semantic and phonological similarity using the continuous naming task. In the semantic condition, Chinese Mandarin speakers named a list of pictures composed of 12…