According to the constructive episodic simulation hypothesis, remembering past experiences and imagining future experiences both rely heavily on episodic memory. However, recent research indicates that nonepisodic processes such as descriptive ability also influence memory and imagination. We recently found that an episodic specificity induction--brief training in recollecting details of past e...

Accumulating evidence suggests that amnesic patients have difficulty imagining the future in addition to having deficits remembering the past (see Verfaellie et al., 2012). In a recent article in this journal, Zeman et al. (in press) reported that amnesics are also impaired at describing the present: A group of amnesics with mixed etiologies and variable neurocognitive profiles produced fewer n...

This study used eye tracking to investigate the allocation of attention to multimodal stimuli during an incidental learning situation, as well as its impact on subsequent explicit learning. Participants were exposed to foreign language (FL) auditory words on their own, in conjunction with written native language (NL) translations, or with both written NL translations and pictures. Incidental ac...

In an event related potential (ERP) experiment using written language materials only, we investigated a potential modulation of the N400 by the modality switch effect. The modality switch effect occurs when a first sentence, describing a fact grounded in one modality, is followed by a second sentence describing a second fact grounded in a different modality. For example, "A cellar is dark" (vis...

The main purpose of the present quasi-experimental study was twofold; its first purpose was to investigate the effects of using of two approaches namely; genre and process on EFL learners’ accuracy, fluency, and complexity in written task production. Secondly, it attempted to investigate the effects of mentioned approaches on EFL learners’ attitude toward writing skill. to this end, 60 learners...

In our modern technological world, Computer-Assisted Language learning (CALL) is a new realm towards learning a language in general, and learning L2 vocabulary in particular. It is assumed that the use of multimedia annotations promotes language learners’ vocabulary acquisition. Therefore, this study set out to investigate the effects of different multimedia annotations (still picture annotatio...

In this paper, we present our system description in task of Cross-lingual Textual Entailment. The goal of this task is to detect entailment relations between two sentences written in different languages. To accomplish this goal, we first translate sentences written in foreign languages into English. Then, we use EDITS, an open source package, to recognize entailment relations. Since EDITS only ...

The main purpose of the present quasi-experimental study was to investigate the effects of linear process versus genre-based approach on EFL learners’ written production. To this end, 40 learners of English at intermediate level were randomly selected as the participants of the study and assigned into two groups of experimental (process and genre) which received different types of instruction f...