Coh-Metrix: Analysis of text on cohesion and language

Advances in computational linguistics and discourse processing have made it possible to automate many language- and text-processing mechanisms. We have developed a computer tool called Coh-Metrix, which analyzes texts on over 200 measures of cohesion, language, and readability. Its modules use lexicons, part-of-speech classifiers, syntactic parsers, templates, corpora, latent semantic analysis, and other components that are widely used in computational linguistics. After the user enters an English text, Coh-Metrix returns measures requested by the user. In addition, a facility allows the user to store the results of these analyses in data files (such as Text, Excel, and SPSS). Standard text readability formulas scale texts on difficulty by relying on word length and sentence length, whereas Coh-Metrix is sensitive to cohesion relations, world knowledge, and language and discourse characteristics.     

Coh-metrix: analysis of text on cohesion and language.

Advances in computational linguistics and discourse processing have made it possible to automate many language- and text-processing mechanisms. We have developed a computer tool called Coh-Metrix, which analyzes texts on over 200 measures of cohesion, language, and readability. Its modules use lexicons, part-of-speech classifiers, syntactic parsers, templates, corpora, latent semantic analysis, and other components that are widely used in computational linguistics. After the user enters an English text, CohMetrix returns measures requested by the user. In addition, a facility allows the user to store the results of these analyses in data files (such as Text, Excel, and SPSS). Standard text readability formulas scale texts on difficulty by relying on word length and sentence length, whereas Coh-Metrix is sensitive to cohesion relations, world knowledge, and language and discourse characteristics.     

输入方式对学语前聋生语篇理解的影响：文本和测题类型的调节效应

为了考察信息输入方式、文本类型和测题类型对聋生语篇理解的影响,研究通过录像呈现,以口语、手语、书面语三种输入方式向学语前极重度七、八、九年级聋生呈现叙述性和描述性两种文本类型的语篇信息,并要求其完成理解测试。结果显示：输入方式对聋生语篇理解的效率存在影响,书面语成绩最高且速度最快,依次为手语、口语,文本类型和测题类型对该影响有调节作用。结果表明输入方式是聋生语篇理解的主要影响因素,文本和测题类型是调节因素。     

基于论证型式应用的论证挖掘

本文旨在为构建一种以论证型式为基础的方法,用以帮助非形式逻辑的学生分析自然语言对话的文本,并识别出其中所出现的常见论证类型。他们在这一过程中时常会错误地辨识论证类型,而本文将表明所发展的这种方法对于学习非形式逻辑的学生们是非常有帮助的。另外,对于那些可用于构建一种有用的论证识别方法的理论资源,本文对其最新发展动态进行了考察,并且也概览了当前人工智能领域中所发展的自动论证挖掘工具。     

Irrelevant speech and indoor lighting: effects on cognitive performance and self‐reported affect

This study examined the disruption of cognitive performance by ecologically valid, office and school like settings with warm‐ or cool‐white lighting and silence or meaningful, irrelevant, conversational speech, and whether any such susceptibility was attributable to the changes in affective states. The study aims to address the lack of data on combined impact of noise and light on humans in previous research and to complement findings of irrelevant sound effect in list memory studies. No interactions between noise and light were shown, but there were main effects of noise and light on long‐term memory recall and of noise on self‐reported affect. Cool‐white compared to warm‐white lighting impaired the long‐term memory recall of a novel text. Learning from this text was, in addition, disrupted by meaningful, irrelevant, conversational speech: an impact that was not mediated by affect. The obtained noise effect suggests that the meaning in irrelevant sound was processed, to some extent, semantically by the subjects, which disrupted their performance in a cognitive task that also involved processing of meaning. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Productive syntax abilities in Huntington's and Parkinson's diseases

This study examined syntactic changes in the spoken discourse of patients with Huntington's (HD) or Parkinson's disease (PD) and explored possible relationships between their syntactic changes and concomitant cognitive and motoric symptoms. Patient and control groups participated in a conversational discourse activity and completed a battery of standardized speech and cognitive tests. The HD group used shorter and fewer grammatically complete utterances than their healthy, age-matched peers, whereas there were no significant syntactic differences between PD patients and their healthy, age-matched peers or between PD and HD patients. Productive syntax abilities in HD and PD were meaningfully related to both neuropsychological and motor speech changes. These findings indicate that patients with subcortical disease, at least those with HD, may present with language production deficits and that these deficits are most likely the product of not only motor speech limitations (i.e., dysarthria) but also underlying cognitive impairments.     

小学生外显的说明性文本段落主旨推断学习研究

研究72位不同语文能力的小学五年级男女学生,通过外显的计算机学习软件,运用6种推断策略：主题、细节、综合、主旨方程式、自我提问和文本结构,从没有主题句的说明性文本推断段落主旨的成效。研究发现学生最常用的策略是细节和综合,不同语文能力和性别的学生的学习成效都十分显著。     

Multimedia Learning in a Second Language: A Cognitive Load Perspective

What can be done to help college students who are not native speakers of English learn from computer‐based lessons that are presented in English? To help students access the meaning of spoken words in a slow‐paced 16‐minute narration about wildlife in Antarctica, a representational video was added that showed the scenes and animals being described in the narration (Experiment 1). Adding video resulted in improved performance of non‐native English speakers on a comprehension test (d = 0.63), perhaps because the video improved access to word meaning without creating extraneous cognitive load. To help students perceive the spoken words in a fast‐paced 9‐minute narrated video about chemical reactions, concurrent on‐screen captions were added (Experiment 2). Adding on‐screen captions did not improve performance by non‐native English speakers on comprehension tests, perhaps because learners did not have available capacity to take advantage of the captions. Implications for cognitive load theory are discussed. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Children's Narratives Following Traumatic Brain Injury: Linguistic Structure, Cohesion, and Thematic Recall

Narrative discourse and intellectual functioning were examined 3 years following traumatic brain injury (TBI) in children 1 to 8 years of age at the time of injury. The language-impaired TBI group (n= 9) had language deficits during the subacute stage of recovery; their performance was contrasted with that of a TBI comparison group equated on neurologic and demographic variables that did not show subacute language impairment (n= 8) and a sibling comparison group (n= 9). The language-impaired TBI group had lower Verbal and Full-Scale IQ scores and produced fewer words and utterances than the sibling group on a story retelling task; their stories were characterized by fewer complete referential and lexical ties and more referential errors, indicating difficulty conjoining meaning across sentences. The language-impaired TBI group recalled approximately one-third of the propositions needed to maintain the story theme and made more errors sequencing the propositions than either the TBI or the sibling comparison groups. Group differences were not obtained on the Performance IQ scores or on measures of rate or fluency of speech production, mazes, use of conjunctives, or naming errors. The discourse deficiencies of children with TBI and acute language impairment were most pronounced at the level of cognitive organization of the text reflecting text macrostructure and were least apparent at the level of lexical and sentential organization reflecting text microstructure. Results are discussed in terms of the vulnerability of developing language abilities to disruption by brain injury.     

Reader and text variables as determinants of discourse memory in adulthood

Young students, old students, and old nonstudents read and recalled short texts that were in either narrative or expository form. In addition, a set of six verbal ability measures thought to be related to discourse memory was obtained for all of the participants. Older subjects recalled less from the texts than younger subjects, and neither type of text nor student status modified the magnitude of the age differences. The set of verbal ability measures was adequately described by two principal components, one consisting of simple, speed-related skills, and the other consisting of more complex skills. Each set of variables predicted a proportion of discourse memory variance, and accounted for some of the variance that would otherwise be attributed to age. The results suggest that age differences in some basic cognitive skills related to reading effectiveness might underlie age differences in memory for discourse.     

The development and analysis of tutorial dialogues in AutoTutor Lite

The goal of intelligent tutoring systems (ITS) that interact in natural language is to emulate the benefits that a well-trained human tutor provides to students, by interpreting student answers and appropriately responding in order to encourage elaboration. BRCA Gist is an ITS developed using AutoTutor Lite, a Web-based version of AutoTutor. Fuzzy-trace theory theoretically motivated the development of BRCA Gist, which engages people in tutorial dialogues to teach them about genetic breast cancer risk. We describe an empirical method to create tutorial dialogues and fine-tune the calibration of BRCA Gist’s semantic processing engine without a team of computer scientists. We created five interactive dialogues centered on pedagogic questions such as “What should someone do if she receives a positive result for genetic risk of breast cancer?” This method involved an iterative refinement process of repeated testing with different texts and successively making adjustments to the tutor’s expectations and settings in order to improve performance. The goal of this method was to enable BRCA Gist to interpret and respond to answers in a manner that best facilitated learning. We developed a method to analyze the efficacy of the tutor’s dialogues. We found that BRCA Gist’s assessment of participants’ answers was highly correlated with the quality of the answers found by trained human judges using a reliable rubric. The dialogue quality between users and BRCA Gist predicted performance on a breast cancer risk knowledge test completed after exposure to the tutor. The appropriateness of BRCA Gist’s feedback also predicted the quality of answers and breast cancer risk knowledge test scores.     

Maternal Input to Twin and Singleton Children Implications for Language Acquisition

Differences in the conversational characteristics of mothers of two-year-old twins and mothers of two-year-old singletons with older siblings were investigated. Three maternal conversational characteristics were examined: discourse features, illocutionary force features, and style parameters. The twins' and singletons' language skills were also compared and the relationship between the maternal conversational characteristics and language development scores was explored. The mothers of twins were found to differ significantly from the mothers of singleton children in their conversational behavior. The twin children were found to score significantly lower than the singleton children on measures of language expression and comprehension. Significant correlations were found between the maternal input features and the children's language scores. It is proposed that twins receive less responsive and less conversation-eliciting maternal speech. The possibility is offered that this style of speech may play a role in their slower rate of language development.     

“The Frog Ate the Bug and Made his Mouth Sad”: Narrative Competence in Children with Autism

This study compares the narrative abilities of 13 children with autism, 13 children with developmental delays, and 13 typically developing children matched on language ability. Although groups did not differ in their use of causal language or internal state terms, children with autism and children with developmental delays were less likely than typical children to identify the causes of characters' internal states. Rather, they tended simply to label emotions and explain actions. Children with autism and children with developmental delays also relied on a more restricted range of evaluative devices, which both convey point of view and maintain listener involvement. In addition, the narrative abilities of children with autism were linked to performance on measures of theory of mind and an index of conversational competence, whereas this was not the case among children with developmental delays. Findings are discussed in relation to the social, cognitive, and emotional underpinnings and consequences of narrative activity.     

Relationship between orthographic‐motor integration and computer use for the production of creative and well‐structured written text

Background: Orthographic‐motor integration refers to the way in which orthographic knowledge is integrated with fine‐motor demands of handwriting. A strong relationship has shown to exist between orthographic‐motor integration and students' ability to produce creative and well‐structured written text (De La Paz & Graham, 1995). This relationship is thought to be due to the cognitive load resulting from lack of automaticity in orthographic‐motor integration so that writers do not have sufficient resources to accomplish the more demanding aspects of writing. Interventions to improve children's orthographic‐motor integration result in improved written text (Jones & Christensen, 1999). Aim: This study first extended findings related to handwritten text to the relationship between typing and the length and quality of computer‐based written text. Second, it examined the efficacy of an intervention to develop proficiency in typing skills on the length and quality of students' written language. Sample: Participants in the first study were 276 Grade 8 and 9 students. In the second study 35 students in Grades 8 and 9 who exhibited very low levels of proficiency in typing were the participants. Methods: In Study 1, orthographic‐motor integration related to typing as well as handwriting was assessed for all students. They were asked to complete a piece of handwritten and computer‐based text. Students in the intervention study completed the same measures as Study 1, at pre‐ and post‐test. During the intervention half the students completed a daily typed journal and half completed a program designed to facilitate their typing skills. Results: There was a significant relationship between orthographic‐motor integration — handwriting and the length and quality of handwritten text, and a stronger relationship between orthographic‐motor integration — typing and length and quality of computer‐based text. Both intervention groups in the second study showed significant differences in writing skills from pre‐ to post‐test. However, the typing skills group showed significantly better scores on typing and quality of typewritten text than the journal group at post‐test. The impact of the intervention was specific to typewritten text. There was no difference in length or quality of handwritten text. Conclusion: It is suggested that developing proficiency in orthographic‐motor integration related to typing allows writers to employ their cognitive resources more flexibly when working on a computer, so that they can devote attention to higher‐order processes involved in ideation, syntactic and semantic monitoring and pragmatic awareness.     

La rationalité de l'incohérence en conversation schizophrène (Analyse pragmatique conversationnelle et sémantique formelle)

We base on well known researches in pragmatics, linguistics and psychology of communication who define the schizophrenics troubles of thought according to their intrication with some properties of language, discourse and conversation. But we observe that those researches fail to represent the cognitive rationality of incoherence. We prepare a new method of analysis which takes the dynamical properties of verbal interaction sequences into account that constitute the natural context of the trouble's expression. This method connects a discourse representation theory (DRT) to aspects of pragmatics and conversational analysis. In the way we make such a model suitable to discontinuity in verbal interaction, we show it is possible 1) to describe the specific processes of thought of the schizophrenic speaker and “normal” and 2) to decipher the dialogical mechanism, probably in part archaic, which maintains the exchange despite disturbances.     

Enhancing the Learning and Retention of Biblical Languages for Adult Students

Abstract. Finding ways to reduce students’ anxiety and maximize the value of learning Greek and Hebrew is a continual challenge for biblical language teachers. Some language teachers use technology tools such as web sites or CDs with audio lessons to improve the experience. Though these tools are helpful, this paper explores the value gained from understanding first how students learn and then how technology tools best support that learning. Developments in cognitive psychology and neuroscience offer many insights concerning adult learning and retention. After a presentation of key insights, several ideas are suggested for enhancing the learning and retention experience of biblical language students.     

Does reticence mean just talking less? Qualitative differences in the language of talkative and reticent preschoolers

In our recent efforts to understand individual variation in the language acquisition process, the existence and nature of the communicative behaviors that differentiate reticent from talkative children have been virtually ignored. This study provides a preliminary investigation of this issue by analyzing the spontaneous language produced by four children who varied in degree of talkativeness in free-play dyadic interactions with a total of 28 different adults. Both structural complexity and discourse features analyses of the children's language revealed significant, difference between the talkative and reticent children. A further question considered the influence of the children's degree of talkativeness on their adult conversational partners. While the structural complexity of the adults' language was not influenced by child talkativeness, several discourse parameters did reveal significant adjustments. Implications for the concept of reticence and for language acquisition theory are explored.