Meaning in language emerges from multiple words, and children are sensitive to multi-word frequency from infancy. While children successfully use cues from single words to generate linguistic predictions, it is less clear whether and how they use multi-word sequences to guide real-time language processing and whether they form predictions on the…

The thriving developer community has a significant impact on the widespread use of R software. To better understand this community, we conducted a study analyzing all R packages available on CRAN. We identified the most popular topics of R packages by text mining the package descriptions. Additionally, using network centrality measures, we…

A number of studies have found evidence for the so-called "ambiguity advantage," that is, faster processing of ambiguous sentences compared with unambiguous counterparts. While a number of proposals regarding the mechanism underlying this phenomenon have been made, the empirical evidence so far is far from unequivocal. It is compatible…

In Automated Essay Scoring (AES) systems, many previous works have studied group fairness using the demographic features of essay writers. However, individual fairness also plays an important role in fair evaluation and has not been yet explored. Initialized by Dwork et al., the fundamental concept of individual fairness is "similar people…

Although there is a broad consensus that both the procedural and declarative memory systems play a crucial role in language learning, use, and knowledge, the mapping between linguistic types and memory structures remains underspecified: by default, a dual-route mapping of language systems to memory systems is assumed, with declarative memory…

This study investigates the function and morphosyntax of English Embedded Language (EL) islands in Pashto-English bilingual data, using the Matrix Language Frame model to explore the role of the two languages in codeswitching and the pragmatic force behind the selection of EL islands. A dataset of 14 hours was collected from AVT Khyber, a YouTube…

While it is possible to express the same meaning in different ways ('bread and butter' versus 'butter and bread'), we tend to say things in the same way. As much as half of spoken discourse is made up of "formulaic language" or linguistic patterns. Despite its prevalence, little is known about how the processing system treats novel…

This study investigates whether there are different first-language-second-language (L1-L2) dependency resolutions by focusing on less-studied crosslinguistic variances in L2 acquisition of Chinese, a null-subject language, by speakers of English, a non-null-subject language. The overt subject pronoun of a Chinese main clause has free orientation…

We present computational modeling results based on a self-paced reading study investigating number attraction effects in Eastern Armenian. We implement three novel computational models of agreement attraction in a Bayesian framework and compare their predictive fit to the data using k-fold cross-validation. We find that our data are better…

When telling a story, a speaker needs to refer to story characters using appropriate expressions, which requires a mental model of the discourse. We hypothesize that, compared to those of adults, children's discourse models are based more on factors that are less cognitively demanding, such as animacy, and as they grow older, discourse factors…

Health translation has gotten considerable attention recently because language diversity in multilingual societies often leads to language barriers. The present study evaluates the linguistic comprehensibility of translations in the "Health Translations Website" from the Victorian Government of Australia using the patient-oriented and…

Among other things, learning to write entails learning how to use complex sentences effectively in discourse. Some research has therefore focused on relating measures of syntactic complexity to text quality. Apart from the fact that the existing research on this topic appears inconclusive, most of it has been conducted in English L1 contexts. This…

Learning to paraphrase supports both writing ability and reading comprehension, particularly for less skilled learners. As such, educational tools that integrate automated evaluations of paraphrases can be used to provide timely feedback to enhance learner paraphrasing skills more efficiently and effectively. Paraphrase identification is a popular…

The ability to automatically assess the quality of paraphrases can be very useful for facilitating literacy skills and providing timely feedback to learners. Our aim is twofold: a) to automatically evaluate the quality of paraphrases across four dimensions: lexical similarity, syntactic similarity, semantic similarity and paraphrase quality, and…

Choosing the right word to express meaning can be a challenge for English language learners (ELLs) in both English as second language and English as a foreign language settings, persisting through all proficiency levels in productive language use for several reasons. In order to make correct word choices, ELLs must master the various aspects of a…