OBJECTIVE To explore the way the doctor-patient communication process may be improved by adopting the patients' conversational style in the development of written materials for surgical patients. METHODS Written information prepared by doctors, specialists in abdominal surgery, was tested for comprehension on patients undergoing cholecystectomy, using the standard Cloze test procedure. At the...

According to embodied theories, the symbols used by language are meaningful because they are grounded in perception, action, and emotion. In contrast, according to abstract symbol theories, meaning arises from the syntactic combination of abstract, amodal symbols. If language is grounded in internal bodily states, then one would predict that emotion affects language. Consistent with this, advoc...

Object-oriented systems are frequently built around idioms, design patterns, and other abstractions that can be captured only indirectly in source code. The loss of design information in code often impedes later development activities. Explicit programming attacks this information loss by enabling developers to introduce projectspecific design vocabulary into existing general-purpose languages....

Individuals with dyslexia show deficits in phonological abilities, rapid automatized naming, short-term/working memory, processing speed, and some aspects of sensory visual processing. There is currently one report the literature that individuals also impairments linguistic prediction. The current study sought to investigate prediction language dyslexia. Forty-one adults 43 typically-developing...

Recent success of deep learning models for the task of extractive Question Answering (QA) is hinged on the availability of large annotated corpora. However, large domain specific annotated corpora are limited and expensive to construct. In this work, we envision a system where the end user specifies a set of base documents and only a few labelled examples. Our system exploits the document struc...

This event-related potential study examined the impact of imitating an unfamiliar accent on the processing of spoken words embedded in sentential contexts produced in that accent. The cloze probability effect in two groups of southern French speakers after they had to either listen to or imitate sentences spoken by a Belgian French speaker was tested. Speakers who did not imitate the unfamiliar...

Computer “reading” of natural languages is a growing research topic with numerous applications, ranging from areas of artificial intelligence to linguistics. A successful “reading” of natural languages can be interpreted in two ways: 1) extracting facts out of a passage and 2) capturing “meaning” of a text. We focus on the latter interpretation, defining “meaning” as is done in humans, namely, ...

Commonsense question answering (CQA) aims to test if models can answer questions regarding commonsense knowledge that everyone knows. Prior works incorporate external bases have shown promising results, but are expensive construct and often limited a fixed set of relations. In this paper, we instead focus on better utilizing the implicit stored in pre-trained language models. While researchers ...

This study aimed at investigating differential item functioning (DIF) on the Special English Test of the Iranian National University Entrance Exam (INUEE). The effect of gender and subject area was taken into account. The study utilized one-parameter IRT model with a sample of 36000 students who sat for the INUEE Special English Test in 2004 and/or 2005. The findings confirmed the presence of D...

Cloze was officially introduced in a journal on Journalism as a technique for estimating text readability and as "a new psychological tool for measuring the effectiveness of communication" (Taylor, 1953: 415). Different varieties of cloze have since been developed and experimented upon as measures of such diverse traits as reading comprehension and language proficiency. The findings of numerous...