More innovative test methods may measure language learners’ test performance more accurately, contributing to much fairer decisions. This study examined Iranian language learners’ performance on cloze-elide test as an innovative, integrative test method. It specifically focused on investigating whether personality types correlated with their performance and whether personality types could predi...

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...

The aim of the study was to verify the accuracy of the formula for assessing the difficulty of texts written in Polish (Pisarek 1969). The study involved 1,309 persons aged between 15 and 84. 15 texts were used, each approximately 300 words long, representing different subjects and varied difficulty level. Text comprehension was checked with multiple choice tests, the cloze procedure and open-e...

The multiple choice cloze (MCC) question format is commonly used to assess students' comprehension. It is an especially useful format for ITS because it is fully automatable and can be used on any text. Unfortunately, very little is known about the factors that influence MCC question difficulty and student performance on such questions. In order to better understand student performance on MCC q...

We report an experiment to evaluate DQGen’s performance in generating three types of distractors for diagnostic multiple-choice cloze (fill-in-theblank) questions to assess children’s reading comprehension processes. Ungrammatical distractors test syntax, nonsensical distractors test semantics, and locally plausible distractors test inter-sentential processing. 27 knowledgeable humans rated can...

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...