This paper describes a new automated disengagement tracking system (DTS) that detects learners' maladaptive behaviors, e.g. mind-wandering and impetuous responding, in an intelligent tutoring system (ITS), called AutoTutor. AutoTutor is a conversation-based intelligent tutoring system designed to help adult literacy learners improve their reading…

The present study investigated the potential benefits of extended exposure to captioned videos for second language pronunciation. We tested 90 L2 adult learners of English on speech processing skills (segmentation, speed of lexical access, and sentence processing) and phonological accuracy in perception (ABX discrimination) and production…

Three experiments examine whether a naturalistic reading task can induce long-lasting changes of syntactic patterns in memory. Judgment of grammatical acceptability is used as an indirect test of memory for sentences that are identical or only syntactically similar to those read earlier. In previous research (Luka & Barsalou, 2005) both sorts of…

Adults can incrementally combine information from speech with astonishing speed to anticipate future words. Concurrently, a growing body of work suggests that vocabulary ability is crucially related to lexical processing skills in children. However, little is known about this relationship with predictive sentence processing in children or adults.…

Structural priming paradigms have been influential in shaping theories of adult sentence processing and theories of syntactic development. However, until recently there have been few attempts to provide an integrated account that explains both adult and developmental data. The aim of the present paper was to begin the process of integration by…

Pronouns are extraordinarily common in daily language yet little is known about the neural mechanisms that support decisions about pronoun reference. We propose a large-scale neural network for resolving pronoun reference that consists of two components. First, a core language network in peri-Sylvian cortex supports syntactic and semantic…

In whole report, a sentence presented sequentially at the rate of about 10 words/s can be recalled accurately, whereas if the task is to report only two target words (e.g., red words), the second target suffers an attentional blink if it appears shortly after the first target. If these two tasks are carried out simultaneously, is there an…

Emotional prosody provides important cues for understanding the emotions of others in every day communication. Asperger's syndrome (AS) is a developmental disorder characterised by pronounced deficits in socio-emotional communication, including difficulties in the domain of prosody processing. We measured pupillary responses as an index of…

This study examined how 6-9 year-old English-speaking children and adults establish anaphoric dependencies during auditory sentence comprehension. Using eye-movement monitoring during listening and a corresponding sentence-picture judgment task, we investigated both the ultimate interpretation and the online processing of reflexives in comparison…

A study of near-native sentence processing was carried out using the self-paced reading method. Twenty-three near-native speakers of Spanish were identified on the basis of native-like proficiency, age of onset of acquisition after 15 years, and a minimum of three years ongoing residency in Spanish-speaking countries. The sentence comprehension…

Although the role of working memory in sentence comprehension has received substantial attention, the nature of this relationship remains unclear. The purpose of this study was to examine the interaction between general, nonverbal working memory (WM) and sentence parsing (SP) in normal English-speaking adults. Accuracy and reaction times were…

Despite the importance of phonemic awareness in beginning literacy, several studies have demonstrated that adults, including teacher trainees, have surprisingly poor phonemic skills. Three experiments investigated whether adults' responses in phonemic awareness and spelling segmentation tasks are based on units larger than single letters and…

The proposal by Clahsen and Felser (CF) has the potential of marking a turning point in second language (L2) acquisition research. Contrary to much L2 research to date, it suggests that some of the differences between native and (advanced) nonnative speakers may be at the level of grammatical processing, rather than grammatical representations.…