Translation competence has been a heated topic in recent years. Yet, business English majors (BEMs), as non-translation bilingual majors, also need training in translation competence. The paper intends to construct translation competence for BEMs through four modules: schema based on business knowledge; information types; cognitive thinking and…

This chapter presents an innovative, cross-disciplinary methodological approach to systematically reviewing and comparing large bodies of literature using big data, Natural Language Processing, network analysis, and supplementary qualitative analysis. The approach is demonstrated through an analysis of the literature surrounding four common…

A distinguishing feature of English learners (ELs) centers on coming from homes in which a language other than or in addition to English is used, but bilingualism itself is not a risk factor for low academic achievement. Yet in the United States, ELs' reading achievement continues to lag behind that of their English-proficient peers. In this…

Drawing from research on revision competence and revision didactics, and based on the proposal of a multi-component revision competence model, a short-term revision course was offered in 2015 as part of a Specialized Translation module. During the course, students were also involved in an experimental study whose overall aim was to investigate the…

The representational product of sentence comprehension is the result of the interplay between episodic and semantic memory and our knowledge of the grammatical devices of our language which guide how we retrieve information from these systems. Past participles, being a part of speech derived from verbs but used in a prenominal position (e.g. words…

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…

The current research investigates interactions between lexical and structural processing in the construction and interpretation of transitive and dative sentence structures, and relates speakers' choice of structure in sentence production to STM processes and recent/long-term language experience conditioned on lexical information. Study 1…