This article examines and reviews two types of reduced redundancy tests, namely cloze tests C-tests, which involve completing a text from certain units (whole words or their parts) have been removed. Assessment instruments this kind are typically used to measure overall language proficiency, for example the purpose making placement decisions. The paper also discusses development these measures ...

It has been suggested that the activation of speech-motor areas during speech comprehension may, in part, reflect the involvement of the speech production system in synthesizing upcoming material at an articulatorily specified level. In this study, we explored that suggestion through the use of articulatory imaging. We investigated whether, and how, predictions that emerge during speech compreh...

Representation and learning of commonsense knowledge is one of the foundational problems in the quest to enable deep language understanding. This issue is particularly challenging for understanding casual and correlational relationships between events. While this topic has received a lot of interest in the NLP community, research has been hindered by the lack of a proper evaluation framework. T...

The present study investigates how skilled and less skilled readers answered a gap-Ž lling (or rational deletion cloze) test in order to examine whether such tests can measure text-level processing ability. Twelve Japanese EFL students (six skilled and six less skilled readers) completed a gap-Ž lling test while thinking aloud about their test-taking processes. Their verbal protocols were categ...

We present two new large-scale datasets aimed at evaluating systems designed to comprehend a natural language query and extract its answer from a large corpus of text. The QUASAR-S dataset consists of 37000 cloze-style (fill-in-the-gap) queries constructed from definitions of software entity tags on the popular website Stack Overflow. The posts and comments on the website serve as the backgroun...

Visual Question Answering (VQA) aims to answer the natural language question about a given image by understanding multimodal content. However, quality of most existing visual-language pre-training (VLP) methods is still limited, mainly due to: (1) Incompatibility. Upstream tasks are generally incompatible with downstream answering tasks, which makes knowledge from model not well transferable an...

We used ERPs to investigate the pre-activation of form and meaning in language comprehension. Participants read high-cloze sentence contexts (e.g., ‘‘The student is going to the library to borrow a. . .”), followed by a word that was predictable (book), form-related (hook) or semantically related (page) to the predictable word, or unrelated (sofa). At a 500 ms SOA (Experiment 1), semantically r...