The goal of this study is to provide better empirical insight into the licensing conditions of a large set of NPIs in German so that they can be used as reliable diagnostics in future research on negation-related phenomena. Experiment 1 tests the acceptability of 60 NPIs under semantic operators that are expected to license superstrong, strong,…

Teacher education enables students to grow from 'novice' into 'starting expert' teachers. In this study, students' textual peer feedback on video recordings of their teaching practice was analysed to determine the growth of their expertise in relation to blended curriculum design. The degree to which curriculum and literature influenced their…

Considerable work during the past two decades has focused on modeling the structure of semantic memory, although the performance of these models in complex and unconstrained semantic tasks remains relatively understudied. We introduce a two-player cooperative word game, Connector (based on the boardgame Codenames), and investigate whether…

Text summarization is an effective reading comprehension strategy. However, summary evaluation is complex and must account for various factors including the summary and the reference text. This study examines a corpus of approximately 3,000 summaries based on 87 reference texts, with each summary being manually scored on a 4-point Likert scale.…

Prospective memory (PM) refers to memory for future intentions (e.g. remembering to press a button when you see an animal word). Researchers classify PM intentions in the laboratory as focal or nonfocal primarily in two ways. One way, task-appropriateness, refers to how the processing for the intention relates to the processing required for an…

To date, there have been relatively few studies of semantic prosody in languages other than English. This study primarily aims to implement the two major approaches to semantic prosody in the literature on the Thai language for the first time in order to set out the parameters for subsequent research in this area. Three Thai words were selected…

The purpose of the study was to examine the confluence of agricultural literacy, what it means to be agriculturally literate, and if a gap between agricultural literacy and being agriculturally literate existed. Two primary research questions framed this study: 1) How do agriculture professionals define agricultural literacy? 2) What does it mean…

Scholars interested in the function of language in mathematical learning often draw on Vygotsky, whose early work on word meaning has shaped many research studies. However, near the end of a rather short life, Vygotsky heavily critiqued his own previous work and began to sketch a radical theory revision, which overturns much of what he had done…

The present dissertation intends to investigate the syntactic nature and L2-acquisition of passive sentence structure in two Romance varieties, Italian and Spanish. First, I will present an analytic proposal couched within the Generative Approach (Chomsky, 1957, and subsequent work); from there, and following Perlmutter and Postal's (1977)…

Natural languages contain systematic relationships between verb meaning and verb argument structure. Artificial language learning studies typically remove those relationships and instead pair verb meanings randomly with structures. Adult participants in such studies can detect statistical regularities associated with words in these languages and…

Evidence from neuropsychological studies of individuals with brain damage post-stroke has supported the separation of working memory (WM) capacities for semantic (word meaning) and phonological (speech sound) information. These separate capacities have been shown to play different roles in supporting multiword language production, with semantic WM…

Purpose: This study sought to 1) identify linguistic features important for Chinese text complexity with a theory-based and systematic approach, and 2) address how feature sets and algorithms affect the performance of Chinese text complexity models. Method: Texts from Chinese language arts textbooks from Grades 1 to 6 (N = 1,478) in Mainland China…

Mathematics education research has been slow to adopt inclusive practices concerning Queer students. In this study, two doctoral dissertations highlight responsible research approaches to advance inclusivity. Ambiguous use of the terms "sex" and "gender" and using only binary statistical methods can lead to erroneous…

Age of Acquisition (AoA) scores approximate the age at which a language speaker fully understands a word's semantic meaning and represent a quantitative measure of the relative difficulty of words in a language. AoA word lists exist across various languages, with English having the most complete lists that capture the largest percentage of the…

Japanese is an international language subject offered as an additional language in secondary schools in Malaysia. Japanese language subject begins from Form 1 to Form 5 at the age of 13 to 17. However, composition writing often becomes a problem among students in Japanese language classes due to insufficient mastery of vocabulary and sentence…