Two experiments investigated how readers comprehend noun phrase (NP) arguments and adjuncts. Previous research suggested that argument phrases are processed more quickly than adjunct phrases (Clifton, Speer, & Abney, 1991; Kennison, 1999; Schütze & Gibson, 1999; Speer & Clifton, 1998). The present experiments investigated whether the type of verb in the sentence context could influence how NP a...

Networks have been used to successfully identify and comprehend patient subgroups based on their characteristics (e.g., comorbidities or genes) with the goal of designing targeted interventions, a cornerstone of precision medicine. However, current network layout algorithms often fail to reveal patterns in large and dense networks despite having significant clustering. We therefore developed an...

Mechanical systems have structural organizations-parts, and their relations-and functional organizations-temporal, dynamic, and causal processes-which can be explained using text or diagrams. Two experiments illustrate the role of arrows in diagrams of mechanical systems. In Experiment 1, people described diagrams with or without arrows, interpreting diagrams without arrows as conveying structu...

Feature modeling is a common way to present and manage variability of software and systems. As a prerequisite for effective variability management is comprehensible representation, the main aim of this paper is to investigate difficulties in understanding feature models. In particular, we focus on the comprehensibility of feature models as expressed in Common Variability Language (CVL), which w...