Circuitry in ventral occipital-temporal cortex is essential for seeing words. We analyze the circuitry within a specific ventral-occipital region, the visual word form area (VWFA). The VWFA is immediately adjacent to the retinotopically organized VO-1 and VO-2 visual field maps and lies medial and inferior to visual field maps within motion…

The Common Core assessments emphasize short essay constructed response items over multiple choice items because they are more precise measures of understanding. However, such items are too costly and time consuming to be used in national assessments unless a way is found to score them automatically. Current automatic essay scoring techniques are…

This dissertation investigates the temporal relation identification task. The goal is to construct consistent temporal relations between temporal entities (e.g., events and time expressions) in a narrative. Constructing consistent temporal relations is challenging due to the exponential increase in the number of candidates for temporal relations…

In the face of underspecified utterances, listeners routinely and without much apparent effort make the right kinds of pragmatic inferences about a speaker's intended meaning. This dissertation investigates the processing of scalar implicatures as a way of addressing how listeners perform this remarkable feat. In particular, the role of context in…

The present study investigated the effects of visual complexity for kanji processing by selecting target kanji from different stroke ranges of visually simple (2-6 strokes), medium (8-12 strokes), and complex (14-20 strokes) kanji with high and low frequencies. A kanji lexical decision task in Experiment 1 and a kanji naming task in Experiment 2…

The present study sought to clarify whether phonological similarity of encoded information impairs free recall performance (the phonological similarity effect: PSE) for nonwords. Five experiments examined the influence of the encoding process on the PSE in a step-by-step fashion, by using lists that consisted of phonologically similar (decoy)…

Background: Deafness has an adverse impact on children's ability to acquire spoken languages. Signed languages offer a more accessible input for deaf children, but because the vast majority are born to hearing parents who do not sign, their early exposure to sign language is limited. Deaf children as a whole are therefore at high risk of language…

In order to understand variability in second language (L2) acquisition, this study addressed how individual differences in cognitive abilities may contribute to development for learners in different contexts. Specifically, we report the results of two short-term longitudinal studies aimed at examining the role of cognitive abilities in accounting…

Use of captioned video in classrooms has gained considerable attention in the second and foreign language learning. However, the effect of application of captioned video embedded with glosses on incidental vocabulary enhancement has not been explored. This study aims to examine the effect of video captions with glosses on EFL students' incidental…

This study aimed to elicit students' perceptions regarding their language-learning strategy preferences (LLSPs). A sample of 198 college-level students participated. Data were collected through a questionnaire and interviews. The findings reveal that language students tend to adopt a holistic view of the learning task and relate it to real-life…

Students acquiring American Sign Language (ASL) as a second language (L2) struggle with fingerspelling comprehension more than skilled signers. These L2 learners might be attempting to perceive and comprehend fingerspelling in a way that is different from native signers, which could negatively impact their ability to comprehend fingerspelling.…

Recent findings in the field of pragmatics have revealed that pragmatic accuracy (knowledge) and pragmatic speed (processing ability) function as two distinct and non-parallel components of pragmatic competence. Anderson's adaptive control of thought--rational (ACT-R) model, which emphasises the development of skill through repeated practice,…

Constructionist research on L2 learning has focused on the degrees to which skewed frequency (Goldberg, Casenhiser & White, 2007; Casenhiser & Goldberg, 2005; Goldberg, Casenhiser, & Sethuraman 2004) in a person's linguistic environment can facilitate "entrenchment," "schematization," and "contingency…

This paper discusses a model for structuring resources for automatic assessment in scientific education by means of textual descriptions. This study aims to support instructors in extending teaching strategies and expanding formative assessment in virtual communities of practice. The strategy to achieve these goals involves the implementation of a…

A number of studies have demonstrated strong links between students' language features (as found in spoken and written production) and their math performance. However, no studies have examined links between the students' language features and measures of their Math Identity. This project extends prior studies that use natural language processing…