The effect of anomalous utterances on language production

Speakers sometimes encounter utterances that have anomalous linguistic features. Are such features registered during comprehension and transferred to speakers’ production systems? In two experiments, we explored these questions. In a syntactic-priming paradigm, speakers heard prime sentences with novel or intransitive verbs as part of prepositional-dative or double-object structures (e.g., The chef munded the cup to the burglar or The doctor existed the pirate the balloon). Speakers then described target pictures eliciting the same structures, using the same or different novel or intransitive verbs. Speakers overall described targets with the same structures as the primes (abstract syntactic priming), but more so when the primes and targets had the same novel or intransitive verbs (a lexical boost), an effect that was only observed when the novel words served as the verbs in both the prime and target sentences. Such a lexical boost could only manifest if speakers formed associations between the verbs and structures in the primes during comprehension, and if these associations were then transferred to their production systems. We thus showed that anomalous utterance features are not ignored but persist (at least) in speakers’ immediately subsequent production.     

The Relationship between Response-Time Effort and Accuracy in PISA Science Multiple Choice Items

The study examined the relationship between examinees’ test-taking effort and their accuracy rate on items from the PISA 2015 assessment. The 10% normative threshold method was applied on Science multiple-choice items in the Cyprus sample to detect rapid guessing behavior. Results showed that the extent of rapid guessing across simple and complex multiple-choice items was on average less than 6% per item. Rapid guessers were identified, and for most items their accuracy was lower than the accuracy for students engaging in solution-based behavior. A number of plausible explanations were graphically evaluated for items for which accuracy was higher for the rapid guessing subgroup. Overall, this empirical investigation presents original evidence on test-taking effort as measured by response time in PISA items and tests propositions of Wise’s (2017 Wise, S. L. (2017). Rapid‐guessing behavior: Its identification, interpretation, and implications. Educational Measurement: Issues and Practice, 36(4), 52–61. doi:10.1111/emip.12165[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) Test-Taking Theory.     

Contact Join-semilattices

Studia Logica - Contact algebra is one of the main tools in region-based theory of space. In ([7, 8, 22, 23]) it is generalized by dropping the operation Boolean complement. Furthermore we can...     

Relational Representation Theorems for Extended Contact Algebras

Studia Logica - In topological spaces, the relation of extended contact is a ternary relation that holds between regular closed subsets A, B and D if the intersection of A and B is included in D....