This dissertation focuses on when and how children learn about the meanings of the propositional attitude" verbs know" and "think". "Know" and "think" both express belief. But they differ in their veridicality: "think" is non-veridical and can report a false belief; but "know" can only…

The current study explores the effects of different types of voice-based chat on EFL students' negotiation of meaning according to proficiency levels. Participants included 123 Korean university students of English. They were divided into two voice-based chat groups: student-student voice-based chat and student-chatterbot voice-based chat. The…

Cross-situational word learning, like any statistical learning problem, involves tracking the regularities in the environment. However, the information that learners pick up from these regularities is dependent on their learning mechanism. This article investigates the role of one type of mechanism in statistical word learning: competition.…

Most current accounts of color word acquisition propose that the delay between children's first production of color words and adult-like understanding is due to problems abstracting color as a domain of meaning. Here we present evidence against this hypothesis, and show that, from the time children produce color words in a labeling task they use…

Kousta, Vigliocco, Del Campo, Vinson, and Andrews (2011) questioned the adequacy of dual coding theory and the context availability model as explanations of representational and processing differences between concrete and abstract words. They proposed an alternative approach that focuses on the role of emotional content in the processing of…

Focus structure has a profound effect on language production and processing. Yet, despite that focus has so much influence on an utterance, it still remains unclear what the meaning of focus is. Some theories consider focus to be entirely pragmatic, having no influence on the truth conditions or presuppositions of a focused sentence. Other…

This dissertation addresses the problems of program comprehension to support the evolution of large-scale software systems. The research concerns how software engineers locate features and concepts along with categorizing changes within very large bodies of source code along with their versioned histories. More specifically, advanced Information…

Much of the world's knowledge is encoded in natural language. Accessing this information would be invaluable for applications such as agent systems, question answering, the semantic web, expert systems, and many more. However, language is very ambiguous--each word in a natural language utterance can have a variety of meanings. Word sense…

The evolution of the Web brought new interesting problems to computer scientists that we loosely classify in the fields of social and semantic computing. Social computing is related to two major paradigms: computations carried out by a large amount of people in a collective intelligence fashion (i.e. wikis), and performing computations on social…

This study investigated the potential of comprehensive corrective feedback forms as editing and learning tools and examined their effect on learners' cognitive and attitudinal engagement. Low-intermediate second language writers (N = 139) were randomly assigned to four experimental conditions (direct corrections of grammatical errors,…

Although an abundant literature documents preliterate children's word learning success from shared storybook reading, a full synthesis of the factors which moderate these word learning effects has been largely neglected. This meta-analysis included 38 studies with 2,455 children, reflecting 110 effect sizes, investigating how reading styles, story…

Purpose: Early cognitive symptoms such as word-finding difficulty (WFD) in daily conversation are common in Parkinson's disease (PD), but studies have been limited by a lack of feasible, quantitative measures. Linguistic analysis, focused on pauses in speech, may yield markers of impairment of cognition and communication in PD. The objective of…

In vocabulary research there has been a shift from focusing on single words to considering multiword sequences, such as collocations. Despite the general consensus among language researchers that collocation is essential to effective language use in real-world communication, particularly oral communication, language-testing researchers have made…

Lecture videos are amongst the most widely used instructional methods within present Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and other digital educational platforms. As the main form of instruction, student engagement behaviour, including interaction with videos, directly impacts the student success or failure and accordingly, in-video dropouts…

A well-known challenge for language learners is that the input is typically produced by a variety of speakers, each with distinct vocal characteristics (Liberman, Harris, Hoffman, & Griffith, 1957). Accordingly, many studies have indicated that talker variability leads to processing costs for learners across the lifespan (Jusczyk & Pisoni,…