The emerging generative artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots, such as Chat Generative Pre-Trained Transformer (ChatGPT), have recently taken different disciplines by surprise. Very few scholarly papers show the collaborative effort by researchers on the impact of generative AI in higher education (HE) and its implication on HE disciplines and…

Generative AIs such as Google Bard are known to be equipped with techniques and grammatical principles of human language based on a large corpus of text and code that allow them to generate natural-sounding language, and also identify and correct grammatical errors in human-written texts. Still, they are not perfect language generators, and this…

In everyday life, humans rely on working memory (WM) processes to make sense of relationships between linguistic elements that are not linearly adjacent. For example, to understand the sentence "The dog that the cat chased is cute," we encode the referent "the dog" into WM, maintain and retrieve it after reading the verb…

Previous research has found mixed results for a link between executive function and perspective-taking. One proposed reason for this is that perspective-taking during comprehension tasks may not be internally reliable. This dissertation presents two large individual differences experiments with multiple perspective-taking during comprehension and…

Rastle et al. (2004) reported that true (e.g., walker) and pseudo (e.g., corner) multi-morphemic words prime their stem words more than form controls do (e.g., brothel priming BROTH) in a masked priming lexical decision task. This data pattern has led a number of models to propose that both of the former word types are "decomposed" into…

Children's increasing expertise in composition relies partly on word choice. Little is known about how children consider words as they write, their meta-lexical awareness, or about their choice of words for writing. In this study, we investigate children's meta-lexical awareness, as one aspect of their metalinguistic awareness, which guides their…

[This paper is part of the Focused Collection on Qualitative Methods in PER: A Critical Examination.] Qualitative research methods have provided key insights in physics education research (PER) by drawing on non-numerical data such as text or video data. While different methods towards qualitative research exist, they share two essential steps:…

In this study, we asked how the emotional status, i.e., valence and arousal, and concreteness of idioms contribute to their processing. Additionally, we asked whether the contribution of emotional factors and concreteness is modulated by other linguistic constraints, specifically idiom familiarity and decomposability, that has been shown to impact…

Background: Artificial intelligence, particularly natural language processing (NLP), enables automating the formative assessment of written task solutions to provide adaptive feedback automatically. A laboratory study found that, compared with static feedback (an expert solution), adaptive feedback automated through artificial neural networks…

In this study we asked whether nonwords created by transposing two phonemes (/biks[open-mid back rounded vowel]t/) are perceived as being more similar to their base words (/bisk[open-mid back rounded vowel]t/) than nonwords created by substituting two phonemes (/bipf[open-mid back rounded vowel]t/). Using the short-term phonological priming and a…

Multi-angle question answering models have recently been proposed that promise to perform related tasks like question generation. However, performance on related tasks has not been thoroughly studied. We investigate a leading model called Macaw on the task of multiple choice question generation and evaluate its performance on three angles that…

Purpose: Emotional stimuli have been shown to influence language processing (both language comprehension and production) in people with aphasia (PWA); however, this finding is not universally reported. Effects of emotional stimuli on language performance in PWA could have clinical and theoretical implications, yet the sparsity of studies and…

Biomimicry has been proposed as an important tool to reach key skills for the new century. It has taken its place as an essential resource for critical and creative thinking in design disciplines. However, as emphasized in many studies, bio-informed research requires interdisciplinary collaboration and systematic knowledge transfer. This article…

Purpose: Persons with unilateral brain damage in the right hemisphere (RH) or left hemisphere (LH) show limitations in processing linguistic prosody, with yet inconclusive results on their ability to process prosodically marked structural boundaries for syntactic ambiguity resolution. We aimed at systematically investigating production and…

Idiomatic expressions (IEs) play an essential role in natural language. In this paper, we study the task of idiomatic sentence paraphrasing (ISP), which aims to paraphrase a sentence with an IE by replacing the IE with its literal paraphrase. The lack of large scale corpora with idiomatic-literal parallel sentences is a primary challenge for this…