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…

We examined how noun frequency and the typicality of surrounding linguistic context contribute to children's real-time comprehension. Monolingual English-learning toddlers viewed pairs of pictures while hearing sentences with typical or atypical sentence frames ("Look at the…" vs. "Examine the…"), followed by nouns that were…

Artificial intelligence (AI) has become an integral component of human existence, with individuals employing AI tools in various facets of life. Among the most significant applications of AI is its role in facilitating communication among humans. The present study focuses on the use of AI in translating a crucial type of text that falls within the…

The last decade witnessed a spectacular rise in the volume of available textual data. With this new abundance came the question of how to analyze it. In the social sciences, scholars mostly resorted to two well-established approaches, human annotation on sampled data on the one hand (either performed by the researcher, or outsourced to…

Language learning is influenced by both neural development and environmental experiences. This work investigates the influence of early bilingual experience on the neural mechanisms underlying speech processing in 4-month-old infants. We study how an early environmental factor such as bilingualism interacts with neural development by comparing…

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…

This special issue revisits a classic topic in linguistic theory, A-bar movement, applied to developing and bilingual grammars. We claim that A-bar movement, or filler-gap dependencies, is still the quintessential linguistic phenomenon to illustrate the interaction between the biological endowment, the experience with language (past and present),…

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…

Early hype cycles surrounding new technologies may promote simplistic binary options of either adoption or rejection, but socio-historical analyses of technologies illuminate how they are worked into shape by human actors. Humans enact agency through many choices that result in adaptations and contextual variations. In this piece, we argue that…

Investigations of working memory advantages in bilinguals yield inconsistent findings. Even less is known about how the addition of languages beyond two (multilingualism) may affect working memory. Due to their experience with managing multiple languages, it is possible that multilinguals may be more practised in the use of their working memories.…

The present study aimed to develop an analytic assessment rubric for the consecutive interpreting course in the educational setting in the Iranian academic context. To this end, the general procedure of rubric development, including data preparation, selection, and refinement, was applied. The performance criteria were categorized into content,…

Code-switching (switching between languages) is a common linguistic behavior in bilingual speech directed to infants and children. In adult-directed speech (ADS), acoustic-phonetic properties of one language may transfer to the other language close to a code-switch point; for example, English stop consonants may be more Spanish-like near a switch.…

Much of the data produced and consumed by students, teachers, and educational managers is in textual format. Text Mining (TM) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) have been applied in the educational context in different ways. Ideally, such applications combine computational, linguistic, pedagogical, and psychological aspects. This article aims…

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…

Artificial intelligence (AI) in higher education is a complex issue that can be discussed from many different perspectives. There is currently a great need for ethical discussions about the use of AI in universities. For example, educational researchers and teachers are already talking a lot about fairness, accountability, transparency, bias,…