This study suggests that familiarity and novelty preferences in infant experimental tasks can in some instances be interpreted together as a single indicator of language advance. We provide evidence to support this idea based on our use of the auditory headturn preference paradigm to record responses to words likely to be either familiar or unfamiliar to infants. Fifty-nine 10-month-old infants...

This paper presents an experimental study on the effect of topic familiarity on the assessment behaviour of online searchers. In particular we investigate the effect of topic familiarity on the resources and relevance criteria used by searchers. Our results indicate that searching on an unfamiliar topic leads to use of more generic and fewer specialised resources and that searchers employ diffe...

The  present  study  aimed  at  investigating  DIF  sources  on  an  EFL  reading  comprehension test.  Accordingly,  2  DIF  detection  methods,  logistic  regression  (LR)  and  item  response theory  (IRT),  were  used  to  flag  emergent  DIF  of  203  (110  females  &  93  males)  Iranian EFL examinees’ performance on a reading comprehension test. Seven hypothetical DIF sources were examin...

A typical web search engine returns a mix of introductory and advanced documents (around 50%) in response to a random selection of queries. Depending on a web searcher’s familiarity with a query’s target topic, it may be more appropriate to show her introductory or advanced documents. We conceptualize the notion of introductory and advanced documents in a way that obviates additional user-inter...