the purpose of this study was to investigate two different techniques for testing reading comprehension questions. differences are measured by two different types of questions including inferential and referential questions. to answer the referential questions, the reader is required to move beyond the level of sentence comprehension and understand the relationship among the sentences. while, i...

We report a study of referential choice in discourse production, understood as the choice between various types of referential devices, such as pronouns and full noun phrases. Our goal is to predict referential choice, and to explore to what extent such prediction is possible. Our approach to referential choice includes a cognitively informed theoretical component, corpus analysis, machine lear...

The present study was an attempt to examine how questioning was treated by EFL instructors and learners at a private language center in Yasouj, Iran. This study also intended to explore the types of questions posed by the EFL instructors and learners in different course levels and to scrutinize the extent to which the instructors’ classroom behaviors were geared towards enhancing the learners’ ...

Referential thinking is the tendency to view innocuous stimuli as having a specific meaning for the self and is associated with personality traits and disorders. In three studies, this research examined the relations among referential thinking, self-processing, and paranoia. In study 1, follow-up questions on the Referential Thinking Scale (Lenzenweger, Bennett, & Lilenfeld, 1997) revealed that...

Understanding the referent of other's utterance by referring the contextual information helps in smooth communication. Although this pragmatic referential process can be observed even in infants, its underlying mechanism and relative abilities remain unclear. This study aimed to comprehend the background of the referential process by investigating whether the phonological loop affected the refe...

Abstract Young children often struggle with referential communications because they fail to compare all valid referents. In two studies, we investigated this comparison process. Study 1, 4–7 year-olds ( N = 114) were asked categorize pairs of objects according their similarities or differences, and then identified a unique quality one the by responding question. Children found it easier judge d...