We investigate how to improve access to medical literature for health consumers. Our focus is on medical terminology. We present a method to predict automatically in a given text which medical terms are unlikely to be understood by a lay reader. Our method, which is linguistically motivated and fully unsupervised, relies on how common a specific term is in texts that we already know are familia...

The interaction between language and action systems has become an increasingly interesting topic of discussion in cognitive neuroscience. Several recent studies have shown that processing of action verbs elicits activation in the cerebral motor system in a somatotopic manner. The current study extends these findings to show that the brain responses for processing of verbs with specific motor me...

OpenStreetMap (OSM) thrives on allowing anyone in the world to contribute features to a free online geographic database, thereby allowing international mixes of contributors to create the map in any given place. Using South America as a test area, I explore the geography of OSM contributors by applying automated language identification to the free-form comments that contributors make when savin...

The neural mechanisms underlying the processing of conventional and novel conceptual metaphorical sentences were examined with event-related potentials (ERPs). Conventional metaphors were created based on the Contemporary Theory of Metaphor and were operationally defined as familiar and readily interpretable. Novel metaphors were unfamiliar and harder to interpret. Using a sensicality judgment ...

This study investigated the representations that readers construct for narratives describing a sequence of events. Participants read narratives describing 4 successive events in chronological order (Event 1, Event 2, Event 3, Event 4 [E1, E2, E3, E4] Experiment 1) or in nonchronological order with E1 being mentioned in a flashback (E2, E3, E1, E4; Experiments 2-4). The information about the dur...

Previous studies show that reading sentences about actions leads to specific motor activity associated with actually performing those actions. We investigate how sign language input may modulate motor activation, using British Sign Language (BSL) materials, some of which explicitly encode direction of motion, vs. written English, where motion is only implied. We find no evidence of action simul...

Recent research suggests that readers' subjective task understanding influences reading processes and outcomes. Therefore, the present study's aim was to investigate whether demands readers retrospectively report relate multiple document comprehension strategies outcome. A total of 310 university students completed three units from a standardized multiple-document test answered an open-ended qu...

<p class="abstrak"><em>The difficulty of students in understanding reading, especially finding detailed information still becomes the main problems teaching reading. One solutions to break problem is practicing visualization strategy Visualization recognized as one strategies that are effective and easy apply learning process. The used create their own images from text minds. image ...