The article is devoted to studying the principles of the language economy of modern English word-forming. The most productive ways of word-formation are highlighted, illustrating the tendency of the language to compress nominative units. In the system of English word-formation, the most effective ways to save speech are affixal word formation,…

The ability to objectively quantify the complexity of a text can be a useful indicator of how likely learners of a given level will comprehend it. Before creating more complex models of assessing text difficulty, the basic building block of a text consists of words and, inherently, its overall difficulty is greatly influenced by the complexity of…

Automated scoring of student language is a complex task that requires systems to emulate complex and multi-faceted human evaluation criteria. Summary scoring brings an additional layer of complexity to automated scoring because it involves two texts of differing lengths that must be compared. In this study, we present our approach to automate…

Though efforts have been made for centuries, how concepts are represented in the brain is still elusive. The embodiment view claims that the sensory, motor and other brain areas through which people acquire concept information during life experiences represent this information during concept retrieval. Some compelling neurobiological evidence…

The morphological structure of complex words impacts how they are processed during visual word recognition. This impact varies over the course of reading acquisition and for different languages and writing systems. Many theories of morphological processing rely on a decomposition mechanism, in which words are decomposed into explicit…

Knowledge tracing (KT), the task of tracking the knowledge state of a student over time, has been assessed actively by artificial intelligence researchers. Recent reports have described that Deep-IRT, which combines item response theory (IRT) with a deep learning method, provides superior performance. It can express the abilities of each student…

Decades of psycholinguistics research have shown that human sentence processing is highly incremental and predictive. This has provided evidence for expectation-based theories of sentence processing, which posit that the processing difficulty of linguistic material is modulated by its probability in context. However, these theories do not make…

Linguistic meaning is generated by the mind and can be expressed in multiple languages. One may assume that equivalent texts/utterances in two languages by means of translation generate equivalent meanings in their readers/hearers. This follows if we assume that meaning calculated from the linguistic input is solely objective in nature. However,…

In this commentary, I discuss why, despite the existence of gradience in phonetics and phonology, there is still a need for abstract representations. Most proponents of exemplar models assume multiple levels of abstraction, allowing for an integration of the gradient and the categorical. Ben Ambridge's dismissal of generative models such as…

The exponential growth of scientific publications increases the effort required to identify relevant articles. Moreover, the scale of studies is a frequent barrier to research as the majority of studies are low or medium-scaled and do not generalize well while lacking statistical power. As such, we introduce an automated method that supports the…

Natural language processing (NLP) has captivated the attention of educational researchers over the past three decades. In this study, a total of 2,480 studies were retrieved through a comprehensive literature search. We used neural topic modeling and pre-trained language modeling to explore the research topics pertaining to the application of NLP…

With the aim to provide teachers with more specific, frequent, and actionable feedback about their teaching, we explore how Large Language Models (LLMs) can be used to estimate "Instructional Support" domain scores of the CLassroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS), a widely used observation protocol. We design a machine learning…

Background: Competency models provide useful frameworks for organizing learning and assessment programs, but their construction is both time intensive and subject to perceptual biases. Some aspects of model development may be particularly well-suited to automation, specifically natural language processing (NLP), which could also help make them…

Westergaard (2021) presents an updated account of the Linguistic Proximity Model and the micro-cue approach to the parser as an acquisition device. The property-by-property view of transfer inherent in this approach contrasts with other influential models that assume that third language (L3) acquisition involves the creation of a full copy of only…

A new technique to teach language grammar is proposed. It consists of the blending of two previously existing techniques--VanPatten's (1996) Processing Instruction (PI) and Adair-Hauck and Donato's (2002) Presentation, Attention, Co-construct, and Extension (PACE) Model. The result is the S-PACE Model, which incorporates the whole-language…