Recent neuroimaging research has shown that perceptual and conceptual processing share a common, modality-specific neural substrate, while work on modality switching costs suggests that they share some of the same attentional mechanisms. In three experiments, we employed a modality detection task that displayed modality-specific object properties…

Plagiarism has become a serious problem in education, and several plagiarism detection systems have been developed for dealing with this problem. This study provides an empirical evaluation of eight plagiarism detection systems for student essays. We present a categorical hierarchy of the most common types of plagiarism that are encountered in…

A central topic in cognitive neuroscience concerns the representation of concepts and the specific neural mechanisms that mediate conceptual knowledge. Recently proposed modal theories assert that concepts are grounded on the integration of multimodal, distributed representations. The aim of the present work is to complement the available…

Reading span as a measure of L1 or L2 working memory capacity is shown to be related to L2 reading comprehension. Albeit limited, there is research on the relationship between both L1 and L2 reading spans and their roles in L2 reading comprehension, yet these studies take reading as a global construct rather than delving into its multi-level…

Pedagogic Conversational Agents are computer applications that can interact with students in natural language. They have been used with satisfactory results on the instruction of several domains. The authors believe that they could also be useful for the instruction of Secondary Physics and Chemistry Education. Therefore, in this paper, the…

This study examined syntactic comprehension in French children with dyslexia in both listening and reading. In the first syntactic comprehension task, a partial version of the Epreuve de Comprehension syntaxico-semantique (ECOSSE test; French adaptation of Bishop's test for receptive grammar test) children with dyslexia performed at a lower level…

The research in this dissertation describes a Grounded Theory approach to identifying critical knowledge components of Teacher Content Knowledge (TCK) and Teacher Pedagogical Knowledge (TPK) for ESL teachers who must teach reading to young English language learners, often with little literacy training The research explored how professional…

This volume celebrates the life and groundbreaking work of Richard Schmidt, the developer of the influential Noticing Hypothesis in the field of second language acquisition. The 19 chapters encompass a compelling collection of cutting­-edge research studies exploring such constructs as noticing, attention, and awareness from multiple perspectives,…

The present study examines the effect of negotiated interaction on Mongolian-nationality EFL learners' spoken production, focusing on the teacher-learner interaction in a story-telling task. The study supports the hypothesis that interaction plays a facilitating role in language development for learners. Quantitative analysis shows that Mongolian…

English as a Second Language (ESL) students often have problems progressing in their acquisition of the language and frequently do not know how to solve this dilemma. Many of them think of their second language studies as just another school subject that they must pass in order to move on to the next level, so few of them realize the metacognitive…

Natural Language Generation (NLG) systems can make data accessible in an easily digestible textual form; but using such systems requires sophisticated linguistic and sometimes even programming knowledge. We have designed and implemented an environment for creating and modifying NLG templates that requires no programming knowledge, and can operate…

Independent learning is a buzz word that is often used in connection with computer technologies applied to the area of foreign language instruction. This chapter takes a critical look at some of the stereotypes that exist with regard to computer-assisted language learning (CALL) as a money saver and an easy way to create an "independent"…

This paper argues that we know too little of the mental processes in which a listener engages during an academic lecture; and that a better understanding of these processes would assist EAP instructors on pre-sessional courses to target their teaching more precisely. The account provides insights into listener behaviour from three possible…

Second language learners are faced with the challenging task of remembering many new words. Exactly how learners are supposed to accomplish that task is disputed. Research on lexical processing that has been carried out in cognitive psychology showed that rehearsing words in expanded patterns, that is, with a delay between each rehearsal, leads to…

This paper reports three studies of bilingual lexical processing, using the semantic competitor priming (SCP) method of Lee and Williams (2001). Study 1 found a trend of within-language SCP effect for Chinese-English bilinguals with both higher and lower levels of vocabulary knowledge. There was also a cross-language SCP effect, but this was…