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…

Writing achievement is a complex skill set as characterized by the sociocognitive writing framework, including writing domain knowledge (e.g., sentence structure), general cognitive skills (e.g., critical thinking) and intra- (e.g., interest) and interpersonal (e.g., collaboration) subfactors. During students' postsecondary careers, they need to…

Linggle is a pattern-based referencing tool that assists in collocation learning. In this ongoing project, we aimed to improve its performance further. First, many of the example sentences are long and difficult for students to understand, so we used a machine learning method and trained a classifier to help select dictionarylike example…

Text complexity has received increased attention due to the CCSS, which call for students to comprehend increasingly more complex texts as they progress through grades. Quantitative text complexity (or readability) indices are based on text attributes (e.g., sentence lengths, and lexical, syntactic, & semantic difficulty), quantified by…

The current study examined the degree to which the quality and characteristics of students' essays could be modeled through dynamic natural language processing analyses. Undergraduate students (n = 131) wrote timed, persuasive essays in response to an argumentative writing prompt. Recurrent patterns of the words in the essays were then analyzed…

In this research paper, we present a novel language learning/training and assessment system that helps people to learn and practice a new language independently at low cost. To achieve an independent-learning workflow, we explore the use of real-time speech recognition, language translation, speech synthesis, and language intelligibility…

This article will focus on sociolinguistic aspects in Terry Pratchett's "The Wee Free Men." In particular we will deal with the interplay of standard and non-standard British English by which the writer highlights cultural stereotypes as well as narrative ones; creating a children's tale with a distinctively adult-like character set.…

Speakers in conversation typically repeat and modify earlier comments. In mathematics conversations, these repetitions, or poetic structures, can facilitate the collaborative discovery of mathematical relationships. A close analysis of 90 turns of an algebraic problem-solving conversation reveals eight types of poetic structures. This report…

Although a reader's text-level comprehension is affected by the comprehension of individual sentences in a text, little attention has been paid to the difficulty of sentences. This study investigates whether measures (features) of text difficulty affect the "gradience" observed in sentence difficulty judgments. We examine two traditional…

The aim of this study is to optimize CALL environments as a learning tool rather than a gloss, focusing on the learning of polysemous words which refer to spatial relationship between objects. A lot of research has already been conducted to examine the efficacy of visual glosses while reading L2 texts and has reported that visual glosses can be…

Five types of Verb Phrase (VP) anaphors which appear to exist in free variation actually have specific grammatical, semantic, and rhetorical functions which account for the existence of some to the exclusion of others in certain syntactic environments. The five anaphors are: "do so,""do it," Verb Phrase Deletion (VPD), VPD with…

This article focuses on the structural and semantic analysis of the sentences containing the pronoun "it" as a formal object. Although at first sight "it" seems to have no meaning whatsoever, it actually plays an important role in the semantic structure of the sentence. The formal object "it" changes the…

This study explores the relationship between question intonation patterns in French using dislocated questions and question-focus (Q- focus). A dislocated question is defined as an interrogative sentence whose sequence is interrupted by the topicalization of a constituent at the left ("Toi, tu viens?"), at the right (Tu viens,…

This paper describes how a constraint dependency grammar (CDG) parser performs a syntactic analysis of a single sentence (as part of a speech recognition system). The paper extends an existing CDG (developed by H. Maruyama) to process a lattice or graph of sentence hypotheses instead of separate text strings. The paper also describes how the CDG…

This paper examines the basic properties of subject and object in Arabic and characterizes them through their grammatical manifestation in a relational network. The study also investigates the relational properties of subject and object with respect to other grammatical notions such as relativization, reflexivization, and passivization. Data for…