The dream of intelligent assistants to enhance programmer productivity has now become a concrete reality, with rapid advances in artificial intelligence. Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in various domains based on the vast amount of data used to train them. However, tasks which require structured reasoning or…

How can we measure the resource mobilization (RM) efforts of social movements on Twitter? In this article, we create the first ever measure of social movements' RM efforts on a social media platform. To this aim, we create a four-conditional lexicon that can parse through tweets and identify those concerned with RM. We also create a simple RM…

This study explores the capability of academic staff assisted by the Turnitin Artificial Intelligence (AI) detection tool to identify the use of AI-generated content in university assessments. 22 different experimental submissions were produced using Open AI's ChatGPT tool, with prompting techniques used to reduce the likelihood of AI detectors…

In recent years, converging evidence has suggested that prediction plays a role in language comprehension, as it appears to do in information processing in a range of cognitive domains. Much of the evidence for this comes from the N400, a neural index of the processing of meaningful stimuli which has been argued to index the extent to which a word…

Purpose: A relevant aspect of listening is the effort required during speech processing, which can be assessed by pupillometry. Here, we assessed the pupil dilation response of normal-hearing (NH) and hard of hearing (HH) individuals during listening to clear sentences and masked or degraded sentences. We combined this assessment with functional…

The rise of Artificial Intelligence technology has raised concerns about the potential compromise of privacy due to the handling of personal data. Private AI prevents cybercrimes and falsehoods and protects human freedom and trust. While Federated Learning offers a solution by model training across decentralized devices or servers, thereby…

While a large body of work in sentence comprehension has explored how different types of linguistic information are used to guide syntactic parsing, less is known about the effect of discourse structure. This study investigates this question, focusing on the main and subordinate discourse contrast manifested in the distinction between restrictive…

Reading morphologically complex words requires analysis of their morphemic subunits (e.g., play + er); however, the positional constraints of morphemic processing are still little understood. The current study involved three unprimed lexical decision experiments to directly compare the positional encoding of stems and affixes during reading and to…

Recent investigations on how people derive meaning from language have focused on task-dependent shifts between two cognitive systems. The symbolic (amodal) system represents meaning as the statistical relationships between words. The embodied (modal) system represents meaning through neurocognitive simulation of perceptual or sensorimotor systems…

This study evaluates the ability of large language models (LLMs) to deliver criterion-based grading and examines the impact of prompt engineering with detailed criteria on grading. Using well-established human benchmarks and quantitative analyses, we found that even free LLMs achieve criterion-based grading with a detailed understanding of the…

This study reports on the feasibility of using the Test of Complex Syntax- Electronic (TECS-E), as a self-directed app, to measure sentence comprehension in children aged 4 to 5 ½ years old; how testing apps might be adapted for effective independent use; and agreement levels between face-to-face supported computerized and independent computerized…

Pronoun interpretation is often described as relying on a comprehender's mental model of discourse. For example, in some psycholinguistic accounts, interpreting pronouns involves a process of "retrieval," whereby a pronoun is resolved by accessing information from its linguistic antecedent. However, linguistic antecedents are neither…

The human experience is shaped by information from different perceptual channels, but it is still debated whether and how differential experience influences language use. To address this, we compared congenitally blind, blindfolded, and sighted people's descriptions of the same motion events experienced auditorily by all participants (i.e., via…

In this article, we explore the extraction of recursive nested structure in the processing of binary sequences. Our aim was to determine whether humans learn the higher-order regularities of a highly simplified input where only sequential-order information marks the hierarchical structure. To this end, we implemented a sequence generated by the…

Humans have the remarkable ability to solve different tasks by simply reading textual instructions that define the tasks and looking at a few examples. Natural Language Processing (NLP) models built with the conventional machine learning paradigm, however, often struggle to generalize across tasks (e.g., a question-answering system cannot solve…