Students in introductory programming classes often articulate their questions and information needs incompletely. Consequently, the automatic classification of student questions to provide automated tutorial responses is a challenging problem. This paper analyzes 411 questions from an introductory Java programming course by reducing the natural…

This study describes how young Spanish-speaking children become gradually more adept at encoding temporality using grammar and discourse skills in intra-conversational narratives. The research involved parallel case studies of two Spanish-speaking children followed longitudinally from ages two to three. Type/token frequencies of verb tense,…

Individuals' use of language in contexts emerges from second-to-second processes of activating and integrating traces of past experiences--an interactionist view compatible with the study of language as a complex adaptive system but quite different from the trait-based framework through which measurement specialists investigate validity, establish…

To examine the neural correlates of spoken idiom comprehension, we conducted an event-related functional MRI study with a "rapid sentence decision" task. The spoken sentences were equally familiar but varied in degrees of "idiom figurativeness". Our results show that "figurativeness" co-varied with neural activity in the left ventral dorsolateral…

Two experiments examined the role of syllables in writing Spanish words. In Experiment 1, participants had to write single words that were aurally presented. The interletter intervals (ILIs) between critical letters were measured. Longer ILIs were found in the intersyllabic than the intrasyllabic condition. In Experiment 2, the inputs were…

We present four experiments on the interpretation of pronouns and reflexives in picture noun phrases with and without possessors (e.g. "Andrew's picture of him/himself, the picture of him/himself"). The experiments (two off-line studies and two visual-world eye-tracking experiments) investigate how syntactic and semantic factors guide the…

This paper presents a "didactic triangulation" strategy to cope with the problem of reliability of NLP applications for computer-assisted language learning (CALL) systems. It is based on the implementation of basic but well mastered NLP techniques and puts the emphasis on an adapted gearing between computable linguistic clues and didactic features…

Foreign language learning contrasts with native language development in two key respects: It is unreliable and it is nonconvergent. At the same time, it is clear that foreign languages are languages. The fundamental difference hypothesis (FDH) was introduced as a way to account for the general characteristics of foreign language learning. The FDH…

The fundamental difference hypothesis (FDH), as formulated by Bley-Vroman (1990), claims that SLA tends to be nonconvergent because domain-specific linguistic mechanisms available in early childhood cannot be used for language learning in adulthood: Instead, second language (L2) learners deploy domain-general problem solving skills. I claim that…

Recent research has indicated that conceptual development in a specific domain may not be independent of the way it is mapped linguistically. We explore this claim in the semantic domain of evidentiality by considering various sets of data from Turkish-speaking children between one and a half to six years. We present evidence for (1) the…

Pre-linguistic sensory deficits, especially in "temporal" processing, have been implicated in developmental language impairment (LI). However, recent evidence has been equivocal with data suggesting problems in the spectral domain. The present study examined event-related potential (ERP) measures of auditory sensory temporal and spectral…

This paper considers the work of the Russian social philosopher and cultural theorist, Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin as a source of understanding for those involved in action learning. Drawing upon data gathered over two years during the evaluation of 20 action learning sets in the north of England, we will seek to work with the ideas of Bakhtin to…

The central question underlying this study revolves around how children process co-reference relationships--such as those evidenced by pronouns ("him") and reflexives ("himself")--and how a slowed rate of speech input may critically affect this process. Previous studies of child language processing have demonstrated that typical language…

This paper reports the results of three studies examining comprehension and real-time processing of pronominal (Experiment 1) and Wh-movement (Experiments 2 and 3) structures in agrammatic and unimpaired speakers using eyetracking. We asked the following questions: (a) Is off-line comprehension of these constructions impaired in agrammatic…

It has been known that lesions in the left inferior frontal gyrus (L. IFG) do not always cause Broca's aphasia, casting doubt upon the specificity of this region. We have previously devised a picture-sentence matching task for a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study, and observed that both pars triangularis (L. F3t) of L. IFG…