When listening to speech under adverse conditions, expectancies resulting from semantic context can have a strong impact on comprehension. Here we ask how minimal variations in semantic context (cloze probability) affect the unfolding comprehension of acoustically degraded speech. Three main results are observed in the brain electric response. First, auditory evoked responses to a degraded sent...

Advances in text simplification depend on reliable judgments of sentence difficulty. The ability of untrained native English speakers to judge sentence difficulty in the presence of variation in semantic similarity is examined using cloze tests and a forced-choice comparison task. Judgments from participants in web-based experiments demonstrate ability to assess sentence difficulty of professio...

Ten participants learned a miniature language (Anigram), which they later employed to verbally describe a pictured event. Using magnetoencephalography, the cortical dynamics of sentence production in Anigram was compared with that in the native tongue from the preparation phase up to the production of the final word. At the preparation phase, a cartoon image with two animals prompted the partic...

In the Story Cloze Test, a system is presented with a 4-sentence prompt to a story, and must determine which one of two potential endings is the ‘right’ ending to the story. Previous work has shown that ignoring the training set and training a model on the validation set can achieve high accuracy on this task due to stylistic differences between the story endings in the training set and validat...

Gamma-band neuronal synchronization during sentence-level language comprehension has previously been linked with semantic unification. Here, we attempt to further narrow down the functional significance of gamma during language comprehension, by distinguishing between two aspects of semantic unification: successful integration of word meaning into the sentence context, and prediction of upcomin...

Poor writing is common in children with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). However, the writing performance of children with ADHD has been rarely formally explored in Taiwan, so the purpose of this study was to investigate writing features of children with ADHD in Taiwan. There were 25 children with ADHD and 25 normal children involved in a standardization writing assessment - Wri...

Verbatim sentence recall is widely used to test the language competence of native and non-native speakers since it involves comprehension and production of connected speech. However, we assume that, to maintain surface information, sentence recall relies particularly on attentional resources, which differentially affects native and non-native speakers. Since even in near-natives language proces...

In the 1st part of the experiment, older and younger adults read a series of high-cloze sentence frames, each missing its final word (e.g., "She ladled the soup into her____."). Subjects were instructed to predict the ending for each. For critical sentences, the predicted final word (bowl) was not shown. Instead, an unexpected but acceptable ending (lap) was provided as the target. On a subsequ...