Healthcare facilities are often complex and overwhelming for visitors, and wayfinding in healthcare facilities can be challenging. As there is an increasing number of global citizens who travel to seek medical care in another country, it is critical to make wayfinding easy for visitors who are not familiar with the language in a foreign country. Among many wayfinding aids, symbols are helpful f...

This study investigates the role of phonological and morphological information in children's developing orthographies in two languages with different linguistic typologies: Hebrew, a Semitic language with a highly synthetic morphology, and Dutch, a Germanic language with a sparse morphology. 192 Israeli and 192 Belgian monolingual schoolchildren in grades 1-6 (aged 6;0-12;0) were administered r...

abstract the study aimed at investigating the efficacy of written corrective feedback (cf) in improving iranian efl learners’ grammatical accuracy. it compared the effects of focused and unfocused written cf on the learners’ grammatical accuracy. 75 efl students formed a one control and two experimental groups. the focused feedback group was provided with error correction in tenses. the unfocus...

Traditionally, literacy, and speech production have been investigated separately. Studies of development demonstrate that children are able to meet the challenge of language learning across modalities, and that adults may experience difficulties in one or both modalities. Yet, it is rare to find a conceptual connection between these two processes. I argue that speaking and reading actually shar...

Computer-mediated communication is driving fundamental changes in the nature of written language. We investigate these changes by statistical analysis of a dataset comprising 107 million Twitter messages (authored by 2.7 million unique user accounts). Using a latent vector autoregressive model to aggregate across thousands of words, we identify high-level patterns in diffusion of linguistic cha...

Some scholars have hypothesized that writing style, the special language of writing, is acquired, or subconsciously absorbed, through reading (Krashen, 1984, 2004; Smith, 1988, 2004). The language of writing, it is argued, is too complex to be consciously learned, and there are compelling case histories of those who developed high levels of competence in the written language through reading alo...

This study directly tested the hypothesis that intrinsic motivation is conducive to creativity and extrinsic motivation is detrimental. Chosen because they identified themselves as actively involved in creative writing, 72 young adults participated in individual laboratory sessions where they were asked to write 2 brief poems. Before writing the second poem, subjects in an intrinsic orientation...

Evaluation is a required component of interventions. Written data are the predominant source. However, video recording is used in many applications to evaluate a range of encounters and practices. We report assessment of the role of videotaped interviews in programme evaluation. Interviews using a consistent script of open-ended questions were recorded during evaluation of an international chil...