The phenomenon of scalar diversity refers to the well-replicated finding that different scalar expressions give rise to scalar implicatures (SIs) at different rates. Previous work has shown that part of the scalar diversity effect can be explained by theoretically motivated factors. Although the effect has been established only in controlled…

Students with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are included in the general education classroom more often than ever before. Despite mathematical strengths and early success, these students experience poor outcomes (academic and employment) compared to their typically developing peers. The language of mathematics increases in complexity, use, and…

The growing implementation of Generative AI (GenAI) in education has implications on the representation of knowledge and identity across languages. In a context where content biases have been reported in AI-generated content, it becomes relevant to interrogate the ways in which AI technologies represent different linguistic identities. This…

It is standardly believed that some occurrences of expressions designate singularly, while other occurrences of expressions designate plurally. For instance, the singular expression the student may be used on an occasion to talk about one particular student, while the plural expression the students may be used on an occasion to talk about several…

Adults are skilled at using language to construct/negotiate identity and to signal affiliation with others, but little is known about how these abilities develop in children. Clearly, children mirror statistical patterns in their local environment (e.g., Canadian children using "zed" instead of "zee"), but do they flexibly…

Color terms divide the color spectrum differently across languages. Previous studies have reported that speakers of languages that have different words for light and dark blue (e.g., Russian "siniy" and "goluboy") discriminate color chips sampled from these two linguistic categories faster than speakers of languages that use…

We report the results of one visual-world eye-tracking experiment and two referent selection tasks in which we investigated the effects of information structure in the form of prosody and word order manipulation on the processing of subject pronouns "er" and "der" in German. Factors such as subjecthood, focus, and topicality,…

Generative artificial intelligence (GAI) programs such as ChatGPT and other large language models are designed to engage in complex, responsive dialogues that feel like human interactions. The dialogic and responsive nature of GAI signals the potential for users to form relationships with GAI platforms or digital personalities created on these…

The use of subordination enables language users to achieve syntactic efficiency by allowing them to connect ideas in temporal/logical relation. Although the importance of subordination has been recognized in previous research on second language (L2) writing, it has been typically assessed with global indices that measure overall ratio of…

Modals (e.g., "can," "must") vary along two dimensions of meaning: "force" (i.e., possibility or necessity), and "flavor" (i.e., possibilities relative to knowledge [epistemic], goals [teleological], or rules [deontic] …). Comprehension studies show that children struggle with both force and flavor…

Research has shown that speakers of different languages may differ in their cognitive and perceptual processing of reality. A common denominator of this line of investigation has been its reliance on the sensory domain of vision. The aim of our study was to extend the scope to a new sense-taste. Using as a starting point crosslinguistic…

The purpose of this follow-up study was to investigate further the expressed needs of Instructional Designers (IDers) from a large public Facebook group. Our previous original research (Abramenka-Lachheb et al., 2021a) reported that IDers expressed needs during the pandemic in several categories, including: (1) educational technology, (2)…

Explicable AI in education (XAIED) has been proposed as a way to improve trust and ethical practice in algorithmic education. Based on a critical review of the literature, this paper argues that XAI should be understood as part of a wider socio-technical turn in AI. The socio-technical perspective indicates that explicability is a relative term.…

As humans, we use language with ease and speed, solving the complex computational problem of processing form and meaning seemingly without effort. This dissertation studies how the properties of language enable us to achieve this, by investigating what is computationally difficult about language, and what is easy. We first investigate the…

In recent years, a multitude of datasets of human-human conversations has been released for the main purpose of training conversational agents based on data-hungry artificial neural networks. In this paper, we argue that datasets of this sort represent a useful and underexplored source to validate, complement, and enhance cognitive studies on…