Examining the Role of Linguistic Flexibility in the Text Production Process

abstract: A commonly held belief among educators, researchers, and students is that high-quality texts are easier to read than low-quality texts, as they contain more engaging narrative and story-like elements. Interestingly, these assumptions have typically failed to be supported by the writing literature. Research suggests that higher quality writing is typically associated with decreased levels of text narrativity and readability. Although narrative elements may sometimes be associated with high-quality writing, the majority of research suggests that higher quality writing is associated with decreased levels of text narrativity, and measures of readability in general. One potential explanation for this conflicting evidence lies in the situational influence of text elements on writing quality. In other words, it is possible that the frequency of specific linguistic or rhetorical text elements alone is not consistently indicative of essay quality. Rather, these effects may be largely driven by individual differences in students' ability to leverage the benefits of these elements in appropriate contexts. This dissertation presents the hypothesis that writing proficiency is associated with an individual's flexible use of text properties, rather than simply the consistent use of a particular set of properties. Across three experiments, this dissertation relies on a combination of natural language processing and dynamic methodologies to examine the role of linguistic flexibility in the text production process. Overall, the studies included in this dissertation provide important insights into the role of flexibility in writing skill and develop a strong foundation on which to conduct future research and educational interventions.Dissertation/ThesisDoctoral Dissertation Psychology 201

Referential Anaphoric Expressions in Three Tie Locations and their Relationship to Reading Achievement of Eighth Grade Students

The purpose of this study was to examine eighth grade subjects\u27 abilities to resolve three types of referential anaphoric expressions across three different tie locations in expository discourse and to determine if the ability to resolve referential anaphoric expressions is significantly related to reading comprehension as measured by either a product-oriented or process-oriented test of reading achievement. One of the chief means of creating cohesion within a text is through the use of anaphoric expressions which refer a reader back to concepts developed previously. Research at the elementary level has led a number of investigators to conclude that elementary children do not adequately comprehend anaphoric expressions. Other researchers have found that difficulty with pronominal referents extends into the junior-high-school range. An anaphoric resolution test was developed by the investigator in which each of three types of referential anaphoric expressions were crossed with each of three tie locations, according to classifications established by Halliday and Hasan (1976). A two-way analysis of variance was used to provide insight into the influence that these factors have on the ability of eighth grade subjects to resolve referential anaphora. Scores from this instrument were then correlated with the Gates-MacGinitie Reading Test, Level E, a product-oriented measure of reading achievement, and the New York State Preliminary Competency Test in Reading, a process-oriented measure of reading achievement It was found that the type of referential anaphoric expression did not make a significant difference in their resolution and that there was no significant interaction between the type of referential anaphoric expression and the tie location of the presupposed items. The tie location, however, did make a significant difference in the subjects\u27 abilities to resolve referential anaphora. Further analysis demonstrated that there were significant differences between the immediate and both mediated and remote tie locations, but no significant difference between mediated and remote tie locations. Correlation coefficients between the anaphoric resolution test and either measure of reading achievement were significant beyond the .01 level of confidence. It was concluded that with average eighth grade subjects the ability to resolve referential anaphoric expressions in expository discourse is dependent to a significant degree upon the tie locations of the presupposed items when the presuppositions are nouns or noun phrases mentioned explicitly in the discourse. It was significantly easier for subjects to resolve these anaphoric expressions when their presuppositions were in the immediate tie locations than when they were in either the mediated or remote tie locations. Mean percentages of correct responses were also computed which confirmed results of other studies and led to the conclusion that students in the junior-high-school range also do not adequately comprehend anaphoric expressions. Further research is needed to: (1) establish the causative factor in the relationship between anaphoric resolution ability and reading comprehension, (2) determine if instruction in the resolution of anaphoric expressions would increase students\u27 abilities to resolve them, (3) determine if there is a relationship between the ability to resolve anaphoric expressions and measures of intelligence, and (4) determine if other factors involved in anaphoric resolution ability are also significant. Teachers need to be aware of the difficulty that students have resolving anaphoric expressions and attempt to help them in this area. Authors and publishers of children\u27s reading material, especially basal reader programs and content area textbooks, should be aware of the fact that popular readability formulas do not take anaphoric resolution ability into account. Teachers, as well as authors and publishers, should be constantly alert to new research findings on anaphora

The language of instruction: Compensating for challenge in lectures.

Recent studies have used Coh-Metrix, an automated text analyzer, to assess differences in language characteristics across different genres and academic disciplines (Graesser, McNamara, & Kulikowich, 2011; McNamara, Graesser, McCarthy, & Cai, 2014). Coh-Metrix analyzes text on many constructs at different levels, including Word Concreteness (vs. abstractness), Narrativity (vs. informational), Deep Cohesion, Referential Cohesion, and Syntactic Simplicity. In previous research, texts in the natural sciences had lower Narrativity and Word Concreteness than texts in the language arts, but were higher in Syntactic Simplicity and Referential Cohesion. This pattern suggests a form of compensation in which difficulty on one dimension (e.g., Word Concreteness) is compensated for by increasing text ease on another dimension (e.g., Syntactic Simplicity). In the present study, we provide a further test of this compensation idea by analyzing oral language use across humanities and natural science lectures. We demonstrate that decreases in Word Concreteness across lectures are associated with increases in Narrativity, Deep Cohesion, and Syntactic Simplicity. In addition, within lectures, decreases in Word Concreteness are associated with increases in Syntactic Simplicity. Compensatory mechanisms are discussed in this article at different levels of language and discourse

ReaderBench, an Environment for Analyzing Text Complexity and Reading Strategies

Session: Educational Data MiningInternational audienceReaderBench is a multi-purpose, multi-lingual and flexible environment that enables the assessment of a wide range of learners' productions and their manipulation by the teacher. ReaderBench allows the assessment of three main textual features: cohesion-based assessment, reading strategies identification and textual complexity evaluation, which have been subject to empirical validations. ReaderBench covers a complete cycle, from the initial complexity assessment of reading materials, the assignment of texts to learners, the capture of metacognitions reflected in one's textual verbalizations and comprehension evaluation, therefore fostering learner's self-regulation process

Distinct Neurocognitive Strategies for Comprehensions of Human and Artificial Intelligence

Although humans have inevitably interacted with both human and artificial intelligence in real life situations, it is unknown whether the human brain engages homologous neurocognitive strategies to cope with both forms of intelligence. To investigate this, we scanned subjects, using functional MRI, while they inferred the reasoning processes conducted by human agents or by computers. We found that the inference of reasoning processes conducted by human agents but not by computers induced increased activity in the precuneus but decreased activity in the ventral medial prefrontal cortex and enhanced functional connectivity between the two brain areas. The findings provide evidence for distinct neurocognitive strategies of taking others' perspective and inhibiting the process referenced to the self that are specific to the comprehension of human intelligence

Cognitive constraints and island effects

Competence-based theories of island effects play a central role in generative grammar, yet the graded nature of many syntactic islands has never been properly accounted for. Categorical syntactic accounts of island effects have persisted in spite of a wealth of data suggesting that island effects are not categorical in nature and that nonstructural manipulations that leave island structures intact can radically alter judgments of island violations. We argue here, building on work by Paul Deane, Robert Kluender, and others, that processing factors have the potential to account for this otherwise unexplained variation in acceptability judgments. We report the results of self-paced reading experiments and controlled acceptability studies that explore the relationship between processing costs and judgments of acceptability. In each of the three self-paced reading studies, the data indicate that the processing cost of different types of island violations can be significantly reduced to a degree comparable to that of nonisland filler-gap constructions by manipulating a single nonstructural factor. Moreover, this reduction in processing cost is accompanied by significant improvements in acceptability. This evidence favors the hypothesis that island-violating constructions involve numerous processing pressures that aggregate to drive processing difficulty above a threshold, resulting in unacceptability. We examine the implications of these findings for the grammar of filler-gap dependencies

Predicting Comprehension from Students’ Summaries

International audienceComprehension among young students represents a key component of their formation throughout the learning process. Moreover, scaffolding students as they learn to coherently link information, while organically construct- ing a solid knowledge base, is crucial to students’ development, but requires regular assessment and progress tracking. To this end, our aim is to provide an automated solution for analyzing and predicting students’ comprehension levels by extracting a combination of reading strategies and textual complexity factors from students’ summaries. Building upon previous research and enhancing it by incorporating new heuristics and factors, Support Vector Machine classification models were used to validate our assumptions that automatically identified reading strategies, together with textual complexity indices applied on students’ summaries, represent reliable estimators of comprehension