We used ERPs to investigate the pre-activation of form and meaning in language comprehension. Participants read high-cloze sentence contexts (e.g., ‘‘The student is going to the library to borrow a. . .”), followed by a word that was predictable (book), form-related (hook) or semantically related (page) to the predictable word, or unrelated (sofa). At a 500 ms SOA (Experiment 1), semantically r...

Semantic unification, the process by which small blocks of semantic information are combined into a coherent utterance, has been studied with various types of tasks. However, whether the brain activations reported in these studies are attributed to semantic unification per se or to other task-induced concomitant processes still remains unclear. The neural basis for semantic unification in sente...

This study investigates the effects of teaching semantic radicals in inferring the meanings of unfamiliar characters among nonnative Chinese speakers. A total of 54 undergraduates majoring in Chinese Language from a university in Hanoi, Vietnam, who had 1 year of learning experience in Chinese were assigned to two experimental groups that received instructional intervention, called "old-for-new...

Language processing is predictive in nature, but it unknown whether language users generate multiple predictions about upcoming content simultaneously or spreading activation from one pre-activated word facilitates other words downstream. Simultaneously, developmental accounts of highlight potential tension among vs. accounts. We used self-paced reading to investigate if younger and older reade...

We investigate whether a medical writer can simplify text by only changing the grammatical structure. Based on a user study, we find that while the sentences look simpler after simplification, they are not easier to understand. For grammatical simplification, better tools are needed to provide more concrete guidance and feedback. Introduction Providing text to patients and health information co...

When performing online language comprehension, comprehenders probabilistically anticipate upcoming words. Psycholinguistic studies thus often depend on accurately estimating stimulus predictability, either to control it or to study it, and this estimation is conventionally accomplished via the cloze task. But we do not know how effectively — or even, strictly speaking, whether — cloze probabili...

the present study was conducted to investigate the effect of modified cloze procedure on writing proficiency of iranian intermediate efl learners. to fulfill the purpose of the study, 110 participants studying at semnan university majoring in english literature were tested on celt proficiency test. 65 participants who were found to be homogenous were selected and assigned randomly to two groups...

the present study was conducted to investigate the effect of modified cloze procedure on writing proficiencyof iranian intermediate efl learners. to fulfill the purpose of the study, 110 participantsstudying at semnan university majoring in english literature were tested on celt proficiency test.65 participants who were found to be homogenous were selected and assigned randomly to twogroups of ...