Development of noun phrase structure and use is analyzed as an important facet of syntactic acquisition from middle childhood to adolescence. Noun phrases occurring in narrative and expository texts produced in both speech and writing by 96 native speakers of English and Hebrew were identified and examined by a set of specially devised criteria including length in words, syntactic depth, abstra...

Moral text processing was used as an ecologically valid method for assessing implicit and explicit moral understanding and development. The authors tested undergraduates, seminarians, and graduate students in political science and philosophy for recall of moral narratives and moral expository texts. Multivariate analyses of covariance using educational experience as an independent variable, age...

We are compiling a corpus of Dutch texts annotated with discourse structure and lexical cohesion, containing initially 80 texts from expository and persuasive genres. We are using this resource for corpus-based studies of discourse relations, discourse markers, cohesion, and genre differences. We are also exploring the possibilities of automatic text segmentation and semi-automatic discourse an...

Moral text processing was used as an ecologically valid method for assessing implicit and explicit moral understanding and development. The authors tested undergraduates, seminarians, and graduate students in political science and philosophy for recall of moral narratives and moral expository texts. Multivariate analyses of covariance using educational experience as an independent variable, age...

Our study investigated the importance of reader aptitudes (prior knowledge and reading skill) in the processing of an expository text. We analyzed self-explanations produced by 42 high-school students while reading an expository text about thunderstorms. Specifically, we focused on students attempts to paraphrase information (i.e., restate sentences in their own words) and elaborate on the sent...

We propose a method for segmentation of ex-pository texts based on hierarchical agglomera-tive clustering. The method uses paragraphs as the basic segments for identifying hierarchical discourse structure in the text, applying lexical similarity between them as the proximity test. Linear segmentation can be induced from the identified structure through application of two simple rules. However t...