In this paper we address the important task of automated discovery of speech act categories in dialogue-based, multi-party educational games. Speech acts are important in dialogue-based educational systems because they help infer the student speaker's intentions (the task of speech act classification) which in turn is crucial to providing adequate…

The Institute of Medicine has stated that legal structures and the authority vested in health agencies and other partners within the public health system are essential to improving the public's health. Variation between the laws of different jurisdictions within the United States allows for natural experimentation and research into their…

Emotion words are generally characterized as possessing high arousal and extreme valence and have typically been investigated in paradigms in which they are presented and measured as single words. This study examined whether a word's emotional qualities influenced the time spent viewing that word in the context of normal reading. Eye movements…

Recent research demonstrated that although 24-month-old infants do well on the initial pairing of a novel word and novel object in fast-mapping tasks, they are unable to retain the mapping after a 5 min delay. The current study examines the role of familiarity with the objects and words on infants' ability to bridge between the initial fast…

Eye movements of Chinese readers were monitored as they read sentences containing a critical character that was either a 1-character word or the initial character of a 2-character word. Due to manipulation of the verb prior to the target word, the 1-character target word (or the first character of the 2-character target word) was either plausible…

Patients with multimodal semantic impairment following stroke (referred to here as "semantic aphasia" or SA) fail to show the standard effects of frequency in comprehension tasks. Instead, they show absent or even "reverse" frequency effects: i.e., better understanding of less common words. In addition, SA is associated with poor regulatory…

We investigated the association between yes/no sentence comprehension and dysfunction in anterior and posterior left-hemisphere cortical regions in acute stroke patients. More specifically, we manipulated whether questions were Nonreversible (e.g., Are limes sour?) or Reversible (e.g., Is a horse larger than a dog?) to investigate the regions…

Phonation is a fundamental feature of human communication. Control of phonation in the context of speech-language disturbances has traditionally been considered a characteristic of lesions to subcortical structures and pathways. Evidence suggests however, that cortical lesions may also implicate phonation. We carried out acoustic and perceptual…

Two lexical decision experiments are reported that investigate whether the same segmentation strategies are used for reading printed English words and fingerspelled words (in American Sign Language). Experiment 1 revealed that both deaf and hearing readers performed better when written words were segmented with respect to an orthographically…

In this research the role of the RH in the comprehension of speech acts (or illocutionary force) was examined. Two split-screen experiments were conducted in which participants made lexical decisions for lateralized targets after reading a brief conversation remark. On one-half of the trials the target word named the speech act performed with the…

This article investigates the contextual components utilized to convey sarcastic verbal irony, testing whether theoretical components deemed as necessary for creating a sense of irony are, in fact, necessary. A novel task was employed: Given a set of statements that out of context were not rated as sarcastic, participants were instructed to either…

In this study we examined how the introduction of a parallel finger-tapping task influences second language (L2) speech encoding mechanisms and monitoring processes, and how the level of proficiency impacts the efficiency and accuracy of L2 performance under single and dual task conditions. The results indicate that imposing dual task demands had…

Significant progress has been made in the application of natural language processing (NLP) to augmentative and alternative communication (AAC), particularly in the areas of interface design and word prediction. This article will survey the current state-of-the-science of NLP in AAC and discuss its future applications for the development of next…

English receptive vocabulary scores from 797 monolingual and 808 bilingual participants between the ages of 17 and 89 years old were aggregated from 20 studies to compare standard scores across language groups. The distribution of scores was unimodal for both groups but the mean score was significantly different, with monolinguals obtaining higher…

Patients with letter-by-letter alexia may have residual access to lexical or semantic representations of words despite severely impaired overt word recognition (reading). Here, we report a multilingual patient with severe letter-by-letter alexia who rapidly identified the language of written words and sentences in French and English while he had…