Language is the basis of human communication and is the most important key to complete mental development and thinking. Therefore, children must learn to communicate using appropriate language. For this to happen, the development of language in the child must be understood as a biological process, complete with internal laws and with marked stages…

A child's ability to understand text (reading comprehension) can greatly impact both their ability to learn in the classroom and their future contributions to society. Reading comprehension draws on oral language; behavioural measures of knowledge at the word and sentence levels have been shown to be related to children's reading comprehension. In…

Reading comprehension is key to knowledge acquisition and to reinforcing memory for previous information. While reading, a mental representation is constructed in the reader's mind. The mental model comprises the words in the text, the relations between the words, and inferences linking to concepts in prior knowledge. The automated model of…

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…

Linguistic alignment--the contingent reuse of our interlocutors' language at all levels of linguistic structure--pervades human dialogue. Here, we design unique measures to capture the degree of linguistic alignment between interlocutors' linguistic representations at three levels of structure: lexical, syntactic, and semantic. We track these…

The ability to spell correctly is a fundamental skill for participating in society and engaging in professional work. In the German language, the capitalization of nouns and proper names presents major difficulties for both native and nonnative learners, since the definition of what is a noun varies according to one's linguistic perspective. In…

Resultative constructions show a wide range of cross-linguistic variation, which may pose nontrivial challenges to L2 learners. This study investigates how syntactic and semantic differences between L1 and L2 affect L2 acquisition of resultatives. In particular, we investigate how L1-Korean learners project the syntax and semantics of L2-English…

This paper investigates the effect of sentence complexity, specifically lexical and syntactic surprisal, on L2 listening difficulty. Psycholinguistic studies revealed that surprisal cases correlate with textual comprehension difficulty. Based on surprisal theory, these cases are less probable or expected, considering the precedent context, thus…

COMPASS is an e-learning system that can visualize grammar errors during sentence production in German as a first or second language. Via drag-and-drop dialogues, it allows users to freely select word forms from a lexicon and to combine them into phrases and sentences. The system's core component is a natural-language generator that, for every new…

This study expands upon an existing model of students' reading comprehension ability within an intelligent tutoring system. The current system evaluates students' natural language input using a local student model. We examine the potential to expand this model by assessing the linguistic features of self-explanations aggregated across entire…

Unlike English, Standard Arabic has two forms of subject pronouns: Independent such as "?na" ("I"), and a pronominal suffix that is an integral part of the verb such as "katab-tu" ("I wrote"). Independent subject pronouns are commonly used in nominal sentences, not verbal sentences. Use of independent…

This report describes part of a longer study on sentence comprehension. The long range goal is to identify distinct levels of processing in terms of the types of linguistic and extralinguistic information each level uses. The focus of this part of the study is sentences with filler-gap relations, such as, "This is the girl the teacher wanted to…

A study tested the validity of a theory of count/mass syntax in word learning. The theory proposes that children infer one of two procedures, depending on whether the referent is an object or a non-solid substance. Subjects were 36 2-year-olds, divided according to three experimental conditions. All were taught a novel word with reference to…

The role of court judges as linguists is discussed. Linguistic issues arise in courts when lawyers attempt to convince a court that a statute, insurance policy, or contract should be interpreted as favoring their own client's interests, with respect to resolving a dispute that depends on the proper construal of a particular document. An…

A study investigating the independence of linguistic abilities from each other, specifically the separability of syntax and semantics and the autonomy of syntactic abilities, is described. In the study, 30 individuals with Alzheimer's disease produced spontaneous conversations, completed sentences eliciting 16 grammatical forms, and when possible,…