We discuss the causative-inchoative alternation in Turkish Sign Language (Türk Isaret Dili -- TID), and the age of acquisition effects on multi-predicate, complex constructions that are observed in both causative and inchoative events. We present a picture-description task performed by 24 adult signers, half of which were exposed to TID from birth…

This study examines effects of memory load on the processing of scalar implicature via a dual-task paradigm using reading span and self-paced reading. Results indicate that participants showed online sensitivity to underinformative sentences (e.g., "Some birds have wings and beaks") at the end of the sentence. This online sensitivity…

Simple sentence construction is a foundational writing skill that forms the building blocks of advanced writing. Many middle school students with disabilities struggle to consistently construct simple sentences, thereby hindering development of written expression. The present study used a single-case, multiple-baseline across participants design…

Previous research showed that verifying a pictured object mentioned in a preceding sentence takes less time when the pictured object shape is compatible with the described object location or spatial position. In the current work we asked if nonvisual information is integrated into the mental model when the target object shape is implied by virtue…

Seminal studies on negation revealed that negative sentences are difficult to process, as they require an extra mental step. Similarly, at the discourse level, concession has been repeatedly shown to be more complex than other relations such as result because it implies the denial of an inference. The affinity between negation and concession…

In this study, I investigated the simultaneous effects of the reader, the text, and the task factors, and their interactions, on reading comprehension, using explanatory item response models. Analyses of a large data set from a commercially available online assessment system with a wide range of readers (n = 10,547) and passages (n = 48) uncovered…

Graded reading is one of the important ways of English learning. How to automatically judge and grade the difficulty of the English reading corpus is of great significance for precision teaching and personalized learning. However, the current rule-based readability assessment methods have some limitations, such as low efficiency and poor accuracy.…

E-learning systems are transforming the educational sector and making education more affordable and accessible. Recently, many e-learning systems have been equipped with advanced technologies that facilitate the roles of educators and increase the efficiency of teaching and learning. One such technology is Automatic Essay Grading (AEG) or…

Due to the fact that both the subject and the topic can occupy the initial position of the sentence, English subject is always deemed as the UNMARKED TOPIC (Lambrecht, 1994), while the topic is not always the subject. In accordance with Rizzi's (1997) topicalization, both the subject and the topicalized constituents can be topics. Many other…

To examine whether children's acquisition of perspective-marking language supports development in their ability to reason about mental states, we conducted a longitudinal study testing whether proficiency with complement clauses around age 3 explained variance in false-belief reasoning 6 months later. Forty-five English-speaking 2- and 3-year-olds…

Negation is known to have inhibitory consequences for the information under its scope. However, how it produces such effects remains poorly understood. Recently, it has been proposed that negation processing might be implemented at the neural level by the recruitment of inhibitory and cognitive control mechanisms. On this line, this manuscript…

Although the linguistic properties of polar questions have been extensively studied, comparatively little is known about how polar questions are processed in real time. In this paper, we report on three eye-tracking experiments on the processing of positive and negative polar questions in English and French. Our results show that in the early…

We studied English-learning children's ability to learn the meanings of novel words from sentences containing truth-functional negation (Exp1) and to use the semantics of negation to inform word meaning (Exp2). In Exp1, 22-month-olds (n = 21) heard dialogues introducing a novel verb in either negative-transitive "("Mary didn't blick the…

In successful communication, it is critical to have the ability to identify what a speaker is referring to from previously mentioned information. This ability requires the identification of the topic initially introduced by lexical forms and its continuity in discourse expressed by anaphora such as null and pronominal forms in the subsequent…

The present study investigates the role of three structural factors ("word order," "case-marking," and "verbal morphology") in the comprehension of the Korean suffixal passive by Korean-speaking children. To measure the relative impact of each factor on the comprehension of the passive, we devise a novel method where…