Poor writing is common in children with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). However, the writing performance of children with ADHD has been rarely formally explored in Taiwan, so the purpose of this study was to investigate writing features of children with ADHD in Taiwan. There were 25 children with ADHD and 25 normal children involved in a standardization writing assessment - Wri...

Software readability and comprehension are important factors in software maintenance. There is a large body of research on software measurement, but the actual factors that make software easier to read or easier to comprehend are not well understood. In the present study, we investigate the role of method chains and code comments in software readability and comprehension. Our analysis comprises...

We describe a method to semi-automatically generate incorrect choices, or distractors, for cloze (fill-in-the-blank) questions. We generated distractors aimed at revealing what type of misunderstanding a student was having. English as a Second Language learners answered a series of cloze questions that presented distractors generated by our method. We analyzed their answers in order to see how ...

We use vector space models (VSMs) as explicit models of word relations that influence the N400, and use this connection to predict N400 amplitude in an ERP study by Federmeier and Kutas (1999). We find that the VSM-based model is able to capture key elements of the authors’ manipulations and results, accounting for aspects of the results that are unexplained by cloze probability. This demonstra...

one of the most problematic areas in foreign language learning is collocation. it is often seen as arbitrary and an overwhelming obstacle to the achievement of nativelike fluency. current second language (l2) instruction research has encouraged the use of collaborative output tasks in l2 classrooms. this study examined the effects of two types of output tasks (editing and cloze) on the learning...

Participants read sentences presented one word at a time, half of which ended with a semantically incongruent ending. 1.5T functional magnetic resonance imaging data were collected from 11 participants, showing that the left posterior inferior temporal region, which has previously been termed the Language Formulation Area (LFA), responded to cloze probability. It is suggested, based on anatomic...

Aim To determine whether single-word speechreading is sensitive to prior phrase context. Background We used a well-established Event Related Potential (ERP) paradigm to elicit the N400, a negative wave around 400 ms. The N400 reflects activation by lexical semantic features and is modulated by contextual integration. Methods Seventeen adult native English speakers participated. They were shown ...

Idioms and common multi-word expressions are often argued to be stored as chunks of words or fixed configurations in the mind, and to therefore be accessed faster and interpreted more easily than fully compositional word combinations. Experimental research has furthermore shown that a specific “recognition point” can be identified in such expressions, at which enough information is present to a...

This paper describes and evaluates DQGen, which automatically generates multiple choice cloze questions to test a child’s comprehension while reading a given text. Unlike previous methods, it generates different types of distracters designed to diagnose different types of comprehension failure, and tests comprehension not only of an individual sentence but of the context that precedes it. We ev...

Two large-scale cloze-style context-question-answer datasets have been introduced recently: i) the CNN and Daily Mail news data and ii) the Children’s Book Test. Thanks to the size of these datasets, the associated task is well suited for deep-learning techniques that seem to outperform all alternative approaches. We present a new, simple model that is tailor made for such question-answering pr...