We investigate the effectiveness of using an accepted readability index, the Flesch Reading Ease (FRE) scale, to design prompts for an automatic oral proficiency assessment system. The prompts in question are uttered by the system, and must be repeated from memory by the test subjects, in the form of an elicited imitation exercise. The FRE scores for our prompts are shown to correlate well with...

Reading fiction is a major component of intellectual life, yet it has proven difficult to study experimentally. One aspect of literature that has recently come to light is perspective embedding ("she thought I left" embedding her perspective on "I left"), which seems to be a defining feature of fiction. Previous work (Whalen et al., 2012) has shown that increasing levels of embedment affects th...

Two studies investigated whether there is a direct relation between children’s reading comprehension, their knowledge about the goals and processes of reading, and their skill in applying such knowledge. An interview revealed that less skilled comprehenders differed from same-age skilled comprehenders in their knowledge about reading and reading strategies, but they did not differ signiŽcantly ...

Bargaining with reading habit is no need. Reading is not kind of something sold that you can take or not. It is a thing that will change your life to life better. It is the thing that will give you many things around the world and this universe, in the real world and here after. As what will be given by this global political economy of intellectual property rights the new enclosures, how can yo...

Interestingly, (2) is ambiguous. It shows a reading parallel to (1), where Mary interviewed everyone who was a possible candidate (2a). But it also shows a second, unexpected reading on which possible does not seem to modify candidate directly, but rather indirectly through an implicit relative clause (2b). On this second reading, Mary doesn’t interview potential candidates, but rather actual c...