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...

When listening to speech under adverse conditions, expectancies resulting from semantic context can have a strong impact on comprehension. Here we ask how minimal variations in semantic context (cloze probability) affect the unfolding comprehension of acoustically degraded speech. Three main results are observed in the brain electric response. First, auditory evoked responses to a degraded sent...

In second language learning, cloze tests (also known as fill-in-the-blank tests) are frequently used for assessing the learning progress of students. While preparation effort for these tests is low, scoring needs to be done manually, as there usually is a huge number of correct solutions. In this paper, we examine whether the ambiguity of cloze items can be lowered to a point where automatic sc...

Introduction. Most of the existing neurophysiological literature on metaphors comprehension focuses on the processing conventional metaphors (Coulson & Van Petten 2002) or generic novel metaphors (Tartter et al. 2002, Lai et al. 2009). Except for a few studies including poetic metaphors in Hebrew (Arzouan et al. 2007, Faust & Mashal 2007), no extensive neurophysiological investigation on the pr...

this paper aims to investigate the presence of quantifier phrase and classifier phrase in the dp of sarhadi dialect of the baluchi language. to reach this goal, pseudo partitive constructions and their characteristics in different languages are introduced and then it is shown that determiner phrases containing a classifier in baluchi are examples of juxtaposed pseudo partitive constructions in ...