Recently tasks, as the basic units of syllabi, and the cognitive complexity, as the criterion for sequencing them, have caught many second language researchers’ attention. This study sought to explore the effect of utilizing the cognitively simple and complex tasks on high- and low-proficient EFL Iranian writers’ linguistic performance, i.e., fluency, accuracy, lexical complexity, and structura...

The purpose of the present study was to develop a structural model of reading based on the Lexical Quality Hypothesis (Perfetti & Hart, 2002). Data from a 4-year longitudinal study of Dutch primary school children with and without hearing loss were used to conduct an exploratory analysis of how lexical components (i.e., decoding skills, lexical decision, and lexical use) relate to one another a...

this is a longitudinal case study of two farsi-speaking children learning english: ‘bernard’ and ‘melissa’, who were 7;4 and 8;4 at the start of data collection. the research deals with the initial state and further development in the child second language (l2) acquisition of syntax regarding the presence or absence of copula as a functional category, as well as the role and degree of l1 influe...

Lexical chains provide a representation of the lexical cohesion structure of a text. In this paper, we propose two lexical chain based cohesion models to incorporate lexical cohesion into document-level statistical machine translation: 1) a count cohesion model that rewards a hypothesis whenever a chain word occurs in the hypothesis, 2) and a probability cohesion model that further takes chain ...

We revisit the one sense per discourse hypothesis of Gale et al. in the context of machine translation. Since a given sense can be lexicalized differently in translation, do we observe one translation per discourse? Analysis of manual translations reveals that the hypothesis still holds when using translations in parallel text as sense annotation, thus confirming that translational differences ...

The Lexical Quality Hypothesis (Perfetti & Hart, 2002) suggests that the difficulties exhibited by poor readers cascade from deficient (impoverished, fuzzy) representations of phonological, semantic, and orthographic dimensions in lexical memory. If so, readers, even as adults, should vary in their ability to acquire new lexical representations. In our study, we examine the role of cross-modal ...

Exploiting Linguistic Knowledge in Lexical and Compositional Semantic Models Tong Wang Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Department of Computer Science University of Toronto 2016 A fundamental principle in distributional semantic models is to use similarity in linguistic environment as a proxy for similarity in meaning. Known as the distributional hypothesis, the principle has been successfully app...