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...

Digital libraries commonly elide hierarchical metadata that might be used more effectively. This proposal presents the ResultMap concept, a tool that leverages that metadata for digital library search facilities; an initial study of its effectiveness; the concept of applying ResultMaps to faceted metadata, allowing visual detection of implicit correlations between facets; and proposals for furt...

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...

It is popularly believed that false paternity rates are 10-30%, and that thousands of unsuspecting men are supporting children who are not theirs. These reported rates offalse paternity have become urban legend, demonizing women as over-sexualized partners who shouldn't be trusted. This in turn has influenced laws regarding paternity, which have evolved to allow men to disestablish paternity ye...

We report an experiment to evaluate DQGen’s performance in generating three types of distractors for diagnostic multiple-choice cloze (fill-in-theblank) questions to assess children’s reading comprehension processes. Ungrammatical distractors test syntax, nonsensical distractors test semantics, and locally plausible distractors test inter-sentential processing. 27 knowledgeable humans rated can...