The study aimed to examine whether Kurdish-Persian early Bilingual university students (EBL) and Persian Monolingual university students (ML) differ on tasks of executive function (EF). Thirty male EBL and 30 male ML students from Ferdowsi University of Mashhad completed a Persian Stroop Color-Word task (SCWT), Backward Digit Span Test (BDST),…

The maze task is a psycholinguistic experimental procedure that measures real-time incremental sentence processing. The task has recently been tested as a language learning tool with promising results. Therefore, the present study examines the merits of a contextualized version of this task: the story maze. The findings are consistent with…

How are languages learned, and to what extent are learning mechanisms similar in infant native-language (L1) and adult second-language (L2) acquisition? In terms of vocabulary acquisition, we know from the infant literature that the ability to discriminate similar-sounding words at a particular age does not guarantee successful word-meaning…

A commonly held belief among educators, researchers, and students is that high-quality texts are easier to read than low-quality texts, as they contain more engaging narrative and story-like elements. Interestingly, these assumptions have typically failed to be supported by the literature on writing. Previous research suggests that higher quality…

A commonly held belief among educators, researchers, and students is that high-quality texts are easier to read than low-quality texts, as they contain more engaging narrative and story-like elements. Interestingly, these assumptions have typically failed to be supported by the literature on writing. Previous research suggests that higher quality…

Research in automated creation of test items for assessment purposes became increasingly important during the recent years. Due to automatic question creation it is possible to support personalized and self-directed learning activities by preparing appropriate and individualized test items quite easily with relatively little effort or even fully…

Curricula are one of the most widely used educational inputs, yet few are developed and evaluated scientifically with a dearth of programs targeting academic language. This manuscript describes an iterative approach to the development of a tiered academic language curriculum supplement for prekindergarten (pre-K) and kindergarten (K) students. A…

An ontology is an effective formal representation of knowledge used commonly in artificial intelligence, semantic web, software engineering, and information retrieval. In open and distance learning, ontologies are used as knowledge bases for e-learning supplements, educational recommenders, and question answering systems that support students with…

This paper introduces a method of extending natural language-based processing of qualitative data analysis with the use of a very quantitative tool--graph theory. It is not an attempt to convert qualitative research to a positivist approach with a mathematical black box, nor is it a "graphical solution". Rather, it is a method to help qualitative…

Many cognitive scientists regard language as a rich source of evidence about the human mind. Much research over the past forty years has been driven by the assumption that words reveal underlying concepts. At the same time, cross-linguistic work has shown that languages differ dramatically in how they partition the world by name. To maintain the…

The construction industry is a knowledge intensive industry. Thousands of documents are generated by construction projects. Documents, as information carriers, must be managed effectively to ensure successful project management. The fact that a single project can produce thousands of documents and that a lot of the documents are generated in a…

Whereas most previous studies on emotion in language have focussed on single words, we investigated the influence of the emotional valence of a word on the syntactic and semantic processes unfolding during sentence comprehension, by means of event-related brain potentials (ERP). Experiment 1 assessed how positive, negative, and neutral adjectives…

Efficient reading relies on expertise in the visual word form area, with abnormalities in the functional specialization of this area observed in individuals with developmental dyslexia. We have investigated event related potentials in print tuning in adults with dyslexia, based on their N170 response at 135-255 ms. Control and dyslexic adults…

The artificial language learning paradigm was used to investigate to what extent the use of prosodic features is universally applicable or specifically language driven in learning an unfamiliar language, and how nonnative prosodic patterns can be learned. Listeners of unrelated languages--Dutch (n = 100) and Korean (n = 100)--participated. The…

Categorical perception (CP) refers to the influence of category knowledge on perception and is revealed by a superior ability to discriminate items across categories relative to items within a category. In recent years, the finding that CP is lateralized to the left hemisphere in adults has been interpreted as evidence for a kind of CP driven by…