Fill-in-the-blank questions are one of the main assessment devices in REAP.PT tutoring system. The problem of automatically generating the stems, i.e. the sentences that serve as basis to this type of question, has been studied mostly for English, and it remains a challenge for a language as morphologically rich as European Portuguese (EP), for which additional data scarcity problems arise. To ...

This article reports on case-study research which explored English as a second language (ESL) learners’ perceptions of the role played by the literary cloze activity in the development of their language and literary awareness. The subjects, four students from a variety of language, culturaland literarybackgrounds, attended a semester-long university ESL subject which adopted a language-based ap...

Cloze test is widely adopted in language exams to evaluate students’ language proficiency. In this paper, we propose the first large-scale human-designed cloze test dataset CLOTH 1, in which the questions were used in middle-school and high-school language exams. With the missing blanks carefully created by teachers and candidate choices purposely designed to be confusing, CLOTH requires a deep...

Reading comprehension ability consists of multiple cognitive processes, and cloze tests have long been claimed to measure this ability as a whole. However, since the introduction of cloze test, different varieties of it have been proposed by the testers. Thus, the present study was an attempt to examine the relatedness of Cloze-Elide test, Multiple-choice (MC) cloze test, and C-test as three di...

People can establish whether a sentence is hypothetically true even if what it describes can never be literally true given the laws of the natural world. Two event-related potential (ERP) experiments examined electrophysiological responses to sentences about unrealistic counterfactual worlds that require people to construct novel conceptual combinations and infer their consequences as the sente...

We describe the automated generation and use of 69,326 comprehension cloze questions and 5,668 vocabulary matching questions in the 2001-2002 version of Project LISTEN’s Reading Tutor used by 364 students in grades 1-9 at seven schools. To validate our methods, we used students’ performance on these multiple-choice questions to predict their scores on the Woodcock Reading Mastery Test. A model ...

Abstract Idioms are a kind of idiomatic expression in Chinese, most which consist four Chinese characters. Due to the properties non-compositionality and metaphorical meaning, idioms hard be understood by children non-native speakers. This study proposes novel task, denoted as Idiom Paraphrasing (CIP). CIP aims rephrase idiom-containing sentences non-idiomatic ones under premise preserving orig...

This preliminary study examines the relationships between each of six first language (L1) readability indexes and cloze passage mean performances Russian EFL students. The passages were created by randomly selecting 50 text from an American public library deleting every 12th word in to create a 30-item procedure. participants 5170 students 38 universities theRussian Federation. Each student was...

When listening to speech in everyday-life situations, our cognitive system must often cope with signal instabilities such as sudden breaks, mispronunciations, interfering noises or reverberations potentially causing disruptions at the acoustic/phonetic interface and preventing efficient lexical access and semantic integration. The physiological mechanisms allowing listeners to react instantaneo...

The cerebral hemispheres have been shown to be differentially sensitive to sentence-level information; in particular, it has been suggested that only the left hemisphere (LH) makes predictions about upcoming items, whereas the right (RH) processes words in a more integrative fashion. The current study used event-related potentials to jointly examine the effects of expectancy and sentential cons...