To model behavioral and neural correlates of language comprehension in naturalistic environments, researchers have turned to broad-coverage tools from natural-language processing and machine learning. Where syntactic structure is explicitly modeled, prior work has relied predominantly on context-free grammars (CFGs), yet such formalisms are not…

The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) has given rise to sophisticated language models that excel in understanding and generating human-like text. With the capacity to process vast amounts of information, these models effectively tackle problems across diverse domains. In this paper, we present a comparative analysis of prominent AI…

Background and aims: Fascinations for or aversions to particular sounds are a familiar feature of autism, as is an ability to reproduce another person's utterances, precisely copying the other person's prosody as well as their words. Such observations seem to indicate not only that autistic people can pay close attention to what they hear, but…

Automatic essay scoring (AES) is an essential educational application in natural language processing. This automated process will alleviate the burden by increasing the reliability and consistency of the assessment. With the advances in text embedding libraries and neural network models, AES systems achieved good results in terms of accuracy.…

Idioms entail a competition between bottom-up and top-down activations of literal and figurative meanings. The present study explored the involvement of cognitive control in processing Hebrew ambiguous idioms. Fifty subjects have completed a self-paced reading task and a response inhibition, stop-signal task (SST). Subjects read 26 matched pairs…

This paper aims to investigate to what extent preschoolers' narrative speech can be affected by the combined use of five narrative elements: narrative framing, narrative basic structure, intertextual hero, plot subversion and image-text interaction. It presents an intervention aiming to teach these elements to an experimental group of…

Purpose: Although commonly defined as a speech disorder, stuttering interacts with the language production system in important ways. Our purpose is to summarize research findings on linguistic variables that influence stuttering assessment and treatment. Method and Results: Numerous topics are summarized. First, we review research that has…

Background: Verbal fluency tasks are routinely used in clinical assessment and research studies of aphasia. People with aphasia produce fewer items in verbal fluency tasks. It remains unclear if their output is limited solely by their lexical difficulties and/or has a basis in their executive control abilities. Recent research has illustrated that…

Background: The detection and description of language impairments in neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's Disease (AD) play an important role in research, clinical diagnosis and intervention. Various methodological protocols have been implemented for the assessment of morphosyntactic abilities in AD; narrative discourse elicitation tasks…

Automating the classification of instructional strategies from a large-scale online tutorial dialogue corpus is indispensable to the design of dialogue-based intelligent tutoring systems. Despite many existing studies employing supervised machine learning (ML) models to automate the classification process, they concluded that building a…

Purpose: Persons with aphasia (PWA) experience differences in attention after stroke, potentially impacting cognitive/language performance. This secondary analysis investigated physiologically measured vigilant attention during linguistic and nonlinguistic processing in PWA and control participants. Method: To evaluate performance and attention in…

Background: The use of telepractice in aphasia research and therapy is increasing in frequency. Teleassessment in aphasia has been demonstrated to be reliable. However, neuropsychological and clinical language comprehension assessments are not always readily translatable to an online environment and people with severe language comprehension or…

Large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, are becoming increasingly prominent. Their use is becoming more and more popular to assist with simple tasks, such as summarizing documents, translating languages, rephrasing sentences, or answering questions. Reports like McKinsey's (Chui, & Yee, 2023) estimate that by implementing LLMs,…

This study replicates Felser and Roberts (2007), which used a cross-modal picture priming task to examine indirect-object dependency processing in classroom L2 learners. The replication focuses on early L2 learners with extensive naturalistic L2 exposure (n = 22)--an understudied group in the literature--and investigates whether these learners, in…

In Krashen's theory of second-language acquisition he claims that there is distinction between language acquisition and language learning, a distinction which other second-language acquisition researchers have called "perhaps the most important conceptualization" in the field and which has made possible the most productive models of SLA.…