s Scott Crossley Crowdsourcing text complexity models The current study builds on work by De Clercq et al. (2014) and Crossley et al. (2017) by using crowdsourcing techniques to collect human ratings of text comprehension, processing, and familiarity across a large corpus comprising a diverse variety of topic domains (science, technology, and history). Pairwise comparisons among the ratings wer...

We administered six functional intelligibility tests, i.e., spoken and written versions of (i) an isolated word recognition test, (ii) a cloze test at the sentence level and (iii) a picture-to-text matching task at the paragraph level. The scores on these functional tests were compared with each other and with intersubjective measures obtained for the same materials through opinion testing, i.e...

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...

Whether left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG) activation during sentence comprehension reflects semantic integration or domain-general cognitive control remains unclear. To address this issue, 26 participants were presented with sentences word by word during fMRI scanning and were asked to perform two semantic tasks, one explicit (semantic congruency judgment) and one implicit (font size judgment)...

Word production proceeds through the processing stages of lemma selection, phonological word-form selection, and phoneme selection. We assessed whether each of these processing stages is subject to a central processing bottleneck, causing it to delay a concurrently performed task. Subjects named line-drawn pictures as they performed a three-tone auditory discrimination task. In Experiment 1, su...

The statistical analysis technique of correlation has extensively been used in second/ foreign language testing research for a variety of purposes. Most commonly, the technique has been used to validate newly constructed language tests (particularly cloze tests) against previous supposedly valid measures. Tests such validated are meant to substitute the older ones, and based on these newly vali...

Providing the first few letters of a missing word in a sentence gives information about this word. This paper attempts to measure the information transmitted in that case. In order to do so, we analyzed response accuracy for open cloze questions, that is fill-in-the-blank questions without multiple choice answers. In this study, native and non-native speakers of English answered a series of ope...

Cloze tests, also known as gap-fill exercises, are a popular tool for acquiring and evaluating language proficiency. A major challenge in the way of automating scoring of cloze tests is the yet unsolved problem of gap filler ambiguity. To address this challenge, we present the concept of bundled gap filling, along with (1) an efficient computational model for automatically generating unambiguou...

Van Petten and Luka's (2012, International Journal of Psychophysiology, 83(2), 176-190) literature survey of late positive ERP components elicited by more or less predictable words during sentence processing led them to propose two topographically and functionally distinct positivities: a parietal one associated with semantically incongruent words related to semantic reanalysis and a frontal on...