Native speakers understand familiar idioms (e.g., "over the moon") and conventional metaphors (e.g., describing time as a doctor) quickly and easily. In two eye-tracking studies we considered how native speakers are able to make sense of fundamentally "unfamiliar" figurative expressions. In Experiment 1 compared with literal…

When and how do infants learn color words? It is generally supposed that color words are learned late and with a great deal of difficulty. By examining infant language surveys in British English and 11 other languages, this study shows that color word learning occurs earlier than has been previously suggested and that the order of acquisition of…

Many studies investigated metaphors in news; however, few of them focused specifically on headlines. By investigating metaphors in 133 collected NBA news headlines written in Chinese, this paper analyzes the creativity in them. Conceptual Metaphor Theory, including conceptual metonymy, is adopted to discuss creative linguistic metaphors and their…

A large body of evidence shows an animacy effect on memory in that animate entities are better remembered than inanimate ones. Yet, the reason for this mnemonic prioritization remains unclear. In the survival processing literature, the assumption that richness of encoding is responsible for adaptive memory benefits has received substantial…

We investigated whether Tagalog-speaking children incrementally interpret the first noun as the agent, even if verbal and nominal markers for assigning thematic roles are given early in Tagalog sentences. We asked five- and seven-year-old children and adult controls to select which of two pictures of reversible actions matched the sentence they…

An intelligent textbook may be considered to be an interaction layer that lies between the text and the student, helping the student to master the content in the text. The Mobile Fact and Concept Training System (MoFaCTS) is an adaptive instructional system for simple content that has been developed into an interaction layer to mediate textbook…

Many phenomena in psycholinguistics have been studied using artificial paradigms due to laboratory limitations. Code-switching may be one of the phenomena experimentally studied with the most egregious disregard for the environment it appears in and purposes it serves. Our research group has emphasized the necessity of introducing these factors…

In light of the ever-increasing capability of computer technology and advancement in speech and natural language processing techniques, automated speech scoring of constructed responses is gaining popularity in many high-stakes assessment and low-stakes educational settings. Automated scoring is a highly interdisciplinary and complex subject, and…

Using vocabulary learning strategies allows learners to gain vocabulary autonomously. This study presents data from a self-report survey of Korean university students comparing meaning discovery strategies they employ to comprehend unknown singleword items and unknown idioms. Survey data recorded strategies used by learners, and effectiveness of…

Even though the impact of the position of response options on answers to multiple-choice items has been investigated for decades, it remains debated. Research on this topic is inconclusive, perhaps because too few studies have obtained experimental data from large-sized samples in a real-world context and have manipulated the position of both…

Purpose: Language production, a dynamic process involving real-time language processing, is crucial for children's language and communication development. To explore the early development of children's real-time language production, this study investigated Chinese preschool children's pausing strategies in narratives and their associations with…

This study investigated the effects of processing three types of texts, namely expository texts, narrative texts, and a combination of both known as twin texts, on incidental vocabulary acquisition and retention in L2 learners. College freshmen (N = 109), who were lower to upper intermediate learners of English, were assigned into a control group…

Recent developments in machine translation (MT) might have led some people to believe that soon professional translation will not be needed, but most translator trainers are aware of the high demand for the quality that MT systems cannot deliver without human intervention. It is thus important that professional translators, trainers and their…

Considering noticeable improvements in the accuracy of Google Translate recently, the aim of this study was to examine second language (L2) learners' ability to use post-editing (PE) strategies when applying AI tools such as the neural machine translator (MT) to solve their lexical and grammatical problems during L2 writing. This study examined 57…

To improve students' learning performance through review learning activities, we developed a personalized intervention tutoring approach that leverages learning analysis based on artificial intelligence. The proposed intervention first uses text-processing artificial intelligence technologies, namely bidirectional encoder representations from…