Patterns of resemblance and Bachmann-Howard fixed points

Timothy Carlson’s patterns of resemblance employ the notion of $$\Sigma _1$$ Σ 1 -elementarity to describe large computable ordinals. It has been conjectured that a relativization of these patterns to dilators leads to an equivalence with $$\Pi ^1_1$$ Π 1 1 -comprehension (Question 27 of A. Montalbán’s “Open questions in reverse mathematics”, Bull. Symb. Log. 17(3)2011, 431-454). In the present paper we prove this conjecture. The crucial direction of the equivalence (towards $$\Pi ^1_1$$ Π 1 1 -comprehension) is reduced to a previous result of the author, which is concerned with relativizations of the Bachmann-Howard ordinal.

How do people interpret implausible sentences?

People sometimes interpret implausible sentences non-literally, for example treating The mother gave the candle the daughter as meaning the daughter receiving the candle. But how do they do so? We contrasted a nonliteral syntactic analysis account, according to which people compute a syntactic analysis appropriate for this nonliteral meaning, with a nonliteral semantic analysis account, according to which they arrive at this meaning via purely semantic analysis. The nonliteral syntactic but not semantic reanalysis account postulates that people consider not only a literal-but-implausible double-object (DO) analysis in comprehending The mother gave the candle the daughter, but also a nonliteral-but-plausible prepositional-object (PO) analysis (i.e., including to before the daughter). In three structural priming experiments, participants heard a plausible or implausible DO or PO prime sentence. They then answered a comprehension question first or described a picture of a dative event first. In line with the nonliteral syntactic analysis account, priming was reduced following implausible than plausible sentences and following nonliterally than literally-interpreted implausible sentences. We argue that comprehenders project a plausible analysis before they have encountered the whole sentence (e.g., a PO analysis at the candle for The mother gave the candle the daughter) and that this analysis is often maintained even if it turns to be incorrect.

A software toolkit for modeling human sentence parsing: An approach using continuous-time, discrete-state stochastic dynamical systems

We present a new software toolkit for implementing a broad class oftheories of sentence processing. In this framework, processing a word ina sentence is viewed as a continuous-time random walk through a set ofdiscrete states that encode information about the emerging structure of thesentence so far. The state space includes one or more special absorbingstates, which, when reached, indicate the decision to move on to the nextword of the sentence. This setup allows us to ask how how long it takesto reach an absorbing state and what the probability of reaching this stateis. We summarize a number of important statistics that can be directlyrelated to human reading times and comprehension question performance.To illustrate the use of the toolkit, we model two types of garden paths,local coherence effects, and the ambiguity advantage using three qualitativelydifferent theories of sentence processing. While the modeler must still makedefensible theoretical and implementation choices, this framework representsan improvement over the descriptive, paper-pencil modeling that is thenorm in psycholinguistics by facilitating quantitative evaluations of modelperformance and laying the groundwork for Bayesian fitting of free parametersin a model. An open-source Python package is provided.

The Realization of Brown’s Theory of Assessing Reading on Reading Section of English National Examination

This study is concerned with the realization of Brown’s theory of assessing reading on the English national examination. This study focused on the English national examination for junior high schools in the academic year 2018/2019. It aimed to know what types of assessing reading were used and what the most dominant types were used on the English national examination based on the realization of Brown’s theory. The qualitative approach was employed. The method of analysis used was descriptive research. Based on the data analysis, there was only one type of the four types of reading assessment which was implemented on the English national examination. It was interactive reading. The tasks which were used in interactive reading are impromptu reading plus comprehension question as many as 49 questions which are included in 17 texts and ordering tasks as many as 1 question which was included into 1 text. All of them were spread into 17 texts. The most dominant type of assessing reading was interactive reading (50 questions) which consisted of 49 questions of impromptu reading plus comprehension questions and 1 question of ordering tasks.

Investigating Integration of Writing Skills in Grade VIII English PTBB Textbook

The present study aimed to explore the integration of writing skills competency in the Grade VIII English textbook prescribed by the Punjab textbook board. A content analysis was carried out in the backdrop of a checklist based on the competencies and students' learning outcomes provided in the latest English National Curriculum (2006), Pakistan. The writing competency was proposed to improve learners' writing skills. The study employed a qualitative research design, and findings were analyzed thematically. In accordance with the curriculum, students are expected to write keeping in mind transactional and interactional purposes as well as descriptive, expository and narrative texts of language. But the findings are otherwise and unfolded that the textbook understudy does not provide students with adequate opportunities to improve their writing skills. Rather, writing skill was only found in the form of comprehension question exercises in which students merely have to answer the questions.

Not all wh-dependencies are created equal: processing of multiple wh-questions in Romanian children and adults

The aim of this study was to examine the acquisition and processing of multiple who- and which-questions in Romanian that display ordering constraints and involve exhaustivity. Toward that aim, typically developing Romanian children (mean age 8.3) and adults participated in a self-paced listening experiment that simultaneously investigated online processing and offline comprehension of multiple wh-questions. The study manipulated the type of wh-phrase (who/which) and the order in which these elements appear (subject–object [SO]/object–subject [OS]). The response to the comprehension question could address the issue of exhaustivity because we measured whether participants used an exhaustive or a non-exhaustive response. Our findings reveal that both children and adults slow down when processing who- as compared to which-phrases, but only adults show an online sensitivity to ordering constraints in who-questions. Accuracy is higher with multiple who- than which-questions. The latter pose more difficulties for comprehension, particularly in the OS order. We relate this to intervention effects similar to those proposed for single which-questions. The lack of intervention effects in terms of reaction times indicates that these effects occur at a later stage, after participants have heard the whole sentence and when they interpret its meaning.

EXPRESS: Online inference making and comprehension monitoring in children during reading: Evidence from eye movements

Inference generation and comprehension monitoring are essential elements of successful reading comprehension. While both improve with age and reading development, little is known about when and how children make inferences and monitor their comprehension during the reading process itself. Over two experiments, we monitored the eye movements of two groups of children (age 8-13 years) as they read short passages and answered questions that tapped local (Experiment 1) and global (Experiment 2) inferences. To tap comprehension monitoring the passages contained target words which were consistent or inconsistent with the context. Comprehension question location was also manipulated with the question appearing before or after the passage. Children made local inferences during reading, but the evidence was less clear for global inferences. Children were sensitive to inconsistencies that relied on the generation of an inference, consistent with successful comprehension monitoring, although this was seen only very late in the eye movement record. Although question location had a large effect on reading times, it had no effect on global comprehension in one experiment and reading the question first had a detrimental effect in the other. We conclude that children appear to prioritise efficiency over completeness when reading, generating inferences spontaneously only when they are necessary for establishing a coherent representation of the text.

Research on Chinese Question-Answering for Gaokao Based on Graph

Reading comprehension Question-Answering (QA) for College Entrance Examination (Gaokao in Chinese) is a challenging AI task because it requires effective representation to capture complicated semantic relations between the question and answers. In this paper, a novel method of Chinese Automatic Question-Answering based on a graph is proposed. The method first uses the Chinese FrameNet and discourse topic (paragraph topic sentence and author’s opinion sentence) to construct the affinity matrix between the question and candidate sentences and then employs the algorithm based on the graph to iteratively calculate the importance of each sentence. At last, the top 6 candidate answer sentences are selected based on the ranking scores. The recall on Beijing College Entrance Examination in the recent twelve years is 67.86%, which verifies the effectiveness of the method.

Students’ Problems in Answering Reading Comprehension Question of Descriptive Text in The “Mandiri” Textbook Published by Erlangga at SMPN 1 Kepahiang

This research aimed to find out the students’ problems in answering reading comprehension questions of descriptive text in the “Mandiri” textbook published and the causes of students’ problems in answering reading comprehension questions of descriptive text in the “Mandiri” textbook published by Erlangga at SMPN 1 Kepahiang. The design of this research was a descriptive quantitative research. This research was designed based on the problems identified and arranged to adjust the main purpose of the research, so that the researcher employed descriptive method. The researcher took 50 students as the sample of this research. The instruments of this study were reading test and interview guideline. The researcher used a reading test in multiple choice forms consisted of fourty numbers of questions included in Mandiri textbook published by Erlangga. Another instrument was an interview guideline. The interview guideline was arranged based on the result of the reading test to reconfirm the result of the reading test and to get an indepth data on the causes of students’ difficulties in reading comprehension. The findings of this research were; (1) the students’ problems in answering reading comprehension questions of descriptive text in the “Mandiri” textbook published by Erlangga at SMPN 1 Kepahiang were finding main idea, identifying specific information, inference, and vocabulary; (2) there were four causes of students’ problems in answering reading comprehension questions of descriptive text in the “Mandiri” textbook published by Erlangga at SMPN 1 Kepahiang; (a) finding main idea is rather complicated, the students need to read the text repeatly to find the main idea; (b) the students need to read from the beginning to finish this description so that they can get the information and answer the questions given; (c) to find inferences they must know the text well and clearly; (d) There are some words that they find difficult to understand and they have never met. They answered that there are some words which are not familiar to them.

The processing of object–subject ambiguities in early second-language acquirers

Studies of the second language (L2) processing of object–subject ambiguities (OSA), where the parser must revise an initially incorrect analysis of the input, have yielded two findings that the present paper addresses. First, L2 speakers are guided more strongly by plausibility information than L1 speakers in OSA processing. Second, L2 speakers generally do not perform reanalysis in real time, and their comparably poor performance on subsequent comprehension questions suggests ultimate failure to derive a grammatical parse. Because previous studies have targeted later L2 acquirers living outside of an L2 context, the present study tested whether the above two findings hold for childhood L2 acquirers with extensive naturalistic L2 exposure, hypothesizing that these factors would engender more nativelike processing. A self-paced reading task involving two kinds of OSA construction was conducted. Sensitivity to plausibility information differed across the first language and L2 groups per construction type. Within the L2 group, there is evidence that the early childhood acquirers initiated online reanalysis. Comprehension question accuracy did not differ across participant groups, suggesting that all participants succeeded in reanalysis to the same extent. The role of age of onset in L2 processing is discussed, as is the findings’ relevance to current models of L2 processing.