This study examined the within-language and cross-language relationships between orthographic processing and word reading in French and English across Grades 1 and 2. Seventy-three children in French Immersion completed measures of orthographic processing and word reading in French and English in Grade 1 and Grade 2, as well as a series of control…

Relative to print reading, braille-reading finger movements are held to be of more constant speed, with continuous and exhaustive contact with all words. However, the continuity of movements is intermittent in two distinct ways: (a) readers reverse direction and reread material already encountered and (b) the continual fluctuations of velocity…

Three experiments on structural priming in Mandarin-speaking 5-year-olds were conducted to test the priming as implicit learning hypothesis. It describes a learning mechanism that acts on a shared abstract syntactic representation in response to linguistic input using an equi-biased Mandarin SVO-"ba" alternation. The first two…

Schizophrenia is a complex mental disorder that results in language-related symptoms at various discourse levels, ranging from semantics (e.g. inventing words and producing nonsensical strands of similar-sounding words) to pragmatics and higher-level functioning (e.g. too little or too much information given to interlocutors, and tangential…

This study measures whether number and type of morphemes in an elicited imitation string results in a greater number of modifications with L2 experience. Rationale is drawn from L2 working memory processing limitations at distinct levels of proficiency. 38 subjects (L2 Spanish university students) comprise three proficiency groups: beginning,…

In the current study, we utilize natural language processing techniques to examine relations between the linguistic properties of students' self-explanations and their reading comprehension skills. Linguistic features of students' aggregated self-explanations were analyzed using the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) software. Results…

This research aims to discover interpersonal trust in online communities. Two novel trust models are built to explain interpersonal trust in online communities drawing theories and models from multiple relevant areas, including organizational trust models, trust in virtual settings, speech act theory, identity theory, and common bond theory. In…

This thesis argues that rhythmic well-formedness preferences contribute to conditioning morphosyntactic choices, providing evidence from patterns in language use that constraints on phonological constructs are at work in the assessment of competing morphosyntactic variants. The results of the thesis call into question a fundamental empirical…

What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) reviews in this topic area focus on early childhood education (ECE) interventions designed for use in school- or center-based settings with 3- to 6-year-old children who are not yet in kindergarten and are attending a center-based program. The primary focus for early childhood education interventions is on cognitive,…

The current article examined patterns of adult responding to arbitrary more-than and less-than relations across a range of real-world tasks. Previous research had reported weak performances on specific types of comparative relations presented in an automated task but also demonstrated that these could be significantly improved with feedback and…

Open source projects do have requirements; they are, however, mostly informal, text descriptions found in requests, forums, and other correspondence. Understanding such requirements provides insight into the nature of open source projects. Unfortunately, manual analysis of natural language requirements is time-consuming, and for large projects,…

In conversation, speakers produce some words with greater intensity, longer duration, and higher fundamental frequency (F0) than other words. By making different words in a sentence more prominent than other words, a speaker can change the meaning implied by a sentence. This thesis explores the relationship between processing in the language…

Background: In recent years there has been significant interest in the differential processing of nouns and verbs in people with aphasia, but more limited consideration about whether the differences have implications for therapy. It remains unclear whether verbs can be treated in a similar way to nouns or should be treated using approaches that…

Several empirical lines of investigation support the idea that syllable-sized units may be involved in visual word recognition processes. In this perspective, the present study aimed at investigating further the nature of the process that causes syllabic effects in reading. To do so, the syllable frequency effect was investigated in French using…

There is an ongoing debate whether deaf individuals access phonology when reading, and if so, what impact the ability to access phonology might have on reading achievement. However, the debate so far has been theoretically unspecific on two accounts: (a) the phonological units deaf individuals may have of oral language have not been specified and…