It has been suggested that the right hemisphere (RH) has a privileged role in the processing of figurative language, including metaphors, idioms, and verbal humor. Previous experiments using hemifield visual presentation combined with human electrophysiology support the idea that the RH plays a special role in joke comprehension. The current study examines metaphoric language. Event-related pot...

Fill-in-the-blank questions, or cloze items, are commonly used in language learning applications. The benefits of personalized items, tailored to the user’s interest and proficiency, have motivated research on automatic generation of cloze items. This paper is concerned with generating cloze items for prepositions, whose usage often poses problems for non-native speakers of English. The quality...

1 We report experience in applying techniques for natural language processing to algorithmically generating test items for both reading and listening cloze items. We propose a word sense disambiguationbased method for locating sentences in which designated words carry specific senses, and apply a collocation-based method for selecting distractors that are necessary for multiple-choice cloze ite...

This study aims to examine when and how readers make use of top-down information to predict or integrate upcoming words by utilizing the characteristics of Chinese classifier-noun agreement, as measured by event-related potentials (ERPs). Constraint strength of classifiers (strong and weak) and cloze probability of the pairing noun (high, low, implausible) was manipulated. Weakly constrained cl...

Most of the previous work on cloze prediction focused on grammar testing such as preposition generation. In this paper we explore a different problem on knowledge testing by designing a system to automatically generate blanks for cloze test. We present a cross-document Information Extraction (IE) driven approach, and compare its performance on two different tasks with and without background doc...

Linguists have suggested that one mechanism for the creative extension of meaning in language involves mapping, or constructing correspondences between conceptual domains. For example, the sentence, "The clever boys used a cardboard box as a boat," sets up a novel mapping between the concepts cardboard box and boat, while "His main method of transportation is a boat," relies on a more conventio...

When performing online language comprehension, comprehenders probabilistically anticipate upcoming words. Psycholinguistic studies thus often depend on accurately estimating stimulus predictability, either to control it or to study it, and this estimation is conventionally accomplished via the cloze task. But we do not know how effectively — or even, strictly speaking, whether — cloze probabili...

the present study was conducted to investigate the effect of modified cloze procedure on writing proficiency of iranian intermediate efl learners. to fulfill the purpose of the study, 110 participants studying at semnan university majoring in english literature were tested on celt proficiency test. 65 participants who were found to be homogenous were selected and assigned randomly to two groups...