Search results for "TASK"
showing 10 items of 1658 documents
Assessing learners’ writing skills in a SLA study: Validating the rating process across tasks, scales and languages
2014
There is still relatively little research on how well the CEFR and similar holistic scales work when they are used to rate L2 texts. Using both multifaceted Rasch analyses and qualitative data from rater comments and interviews, the ratings obtained by using a CEFR-based writing scale and the Finnish National Core Curriculum scale for L2 writing were examined to validate the rating process used in the study of the linguistic basis of the CEFR in L2 Finnish and English. More specifically, we explored the quality of the ratings and the rating scales across different tasks and across the two languages. As the task is an integral part of the data-gathering procedure, the relationship of task p…
Bridging Skill and Task-Oriented Reading
2015
Some individual difference factors are more strongly correlated with performance on postreading questions when the text is not available than when it is. The present study explores if similar interactions occur with bridging skill, which refers to a reader's propensity to establish connections between explicit text during reading. Undergraduates read science texts using two research tools. The Reading Strategy-Assessment Tool provided a measure of bridging skill. Texts and postreading questions were presented in Read&Answer, and the availability of the text while answering was manipulated. Contrary to prior research, bridging skill was comparably correlated with performance in both availabi…
Neighbourhood distribution interacts with orthographic priming in the lexical decision task
2004
Lexical decision tasks (LDTs) were used with a masked priming procedure to test whether neighbourhood distribution interacts with orthographic priming. Word targets had either ‘single’ neighbours when their two higher frequency orthographic neighbours were spread over letter positions (e.g., neighbours of LOBE: robe-loge) or ‘twin’ neighbours when they were concentrated on a single letter position (e.g., neighbours of FARD: lard-tard). All word targets were preceded by their highest frequency orthographic neighbour or by a control prime. An inhibitory priming effect was found for words with single neighbours, but not for words with twin neighbours, in both a yes/no LDT (Experiment 1a) and a…
I saw this somewhere else: the Spanish Ambiguous Words (SAW) database
2017
The present paper describes the Spanish Ambiguous Words (SAW) database, which comprises 210 words (133 polysemous and 77 homographs). Three-hundred and fifteen Spanish university students took part in the study on which SAW is based. First, subjective word meanings and senses were collected by means of a meaning retrieval task. Two judges then assigned participants’ responses to different categories of meaning according to lexicographical and statistical criteria. Results showed that, while there was a relatively high relationship between the number of senses included in the dictionary and those provided by participants (r = .62), regression analyses on lexical decision and naming times rev…
Transposed-letter and laterality effects in lexical decision.
2006
Two divided visual field lexical decision experiments were conducted to examine the role of the cerebral hemispheres in transposed-letter similarity effects. In Experiment 1, we created two types of nonwords: nonadjacent transposed-letter nonwords (TRADEGIA; the base word was TRAGEDIA, the Spanish for TRAGEDY) and two-letter different nonwords (orthographic controls: TRATEPIA). In Experiment 2, the controls were one-letter different nonwords (TRAGEPIA) instead of two-letter different nonwords (TRATEPIA). The effect of transposed-letter similarity was substantially greater in the right visual field (left hemisphere) than in the left visual field. Furthermore, nonwords created by transposing …
Developmental Increase in Working Memory Span: Resource Sharing or Temporal Decay?
2001
Working memory span tasks require participants to maintain items in short-term memory while performing some concurrent processing (e.g., reading, counting, and problem solving). It has been suggested that the difficulty of these tasks results either from the necessity of sharing a limited resource pool between processing and storage (Case’s cognitive space hypothesis) or from the fact that the memory traces suffer from a temporal decay while the concurrent task is being performed (Towse and Hitch’s memory decay hypothesis). We tested these two hypotheses by comparing children’s performance in tasks in which the processing component always had the same duration but varied in cognitive cost (…
Hands-on tasks in CLIL science classrooms as sites for subject-specific language use and learning
2015
This paper is concerned with content and language integrated learning (CLIL), i.e. classrooms where a foreign or second language (L2) is used as the means of instruction and where content and language learning objectives merge. More specifically, it explores the potential of hands-on tasks in CLIL chemistry and physics lessons to serve as sites for using and learning subject-specific language, conceptualised as both special concepts and terminology as well as subject-specific ways of constructing meaning. Using discourse analysis, attention was directed to hands-on tasks as well as pre-task and post-task phases. The findings indicate that despite the evident content orientation in the tasks…
Conducting a task while reconstructing its meaning
2022
This article investigates the way an institutional task of a meeting is oriented to by different meeting participants and developed in and through local interaction. Our data come from a city organization, where a large organizational change is planned and prepared through a series of face-to-face encounters and accompanying written texts. Using the notion of recontextualization and by connecting it to the conversation analytical method and to the notion of intersubjectivity, the study examines how the institutional task that is verbalized in written form prior to the meeting is conceptualized by meeting participants in their turns of talk. By doing so, the study will particularly shed ligh…
Pragmatic markers resulting from language contact. The case of sañani in Aymara
2020
This paper explores the pragmatic functions of a previously unattested pragmatic marker (Fraser, 1996, 2006) found in Aymara, i.e. sanani ‘let’s say’. The uses of sanani suggest that this marker is the result of the influence of Spanish on Aymara due to sustained language contact. Sanani seems to be the “replication” (Heine and Kuteva, 2005) of the Spanish pragmatic marker digamos ‘let’s say’. Like digamos (Grande Alija, 2010; Quartararo, 2017a), sanani functions as a pragmatic marker by signaling either an inferential process or the semantic relation between two discourse segments. The original data used for this analysis was gathered through the Family Problems Picture task (San Roque et …
The role of letters and syllables in typical and dysfluent reading in a transparent orthography
2012
The role of letters and syllables in typical and dysfluent 2nd grade reading in Finnish, a transparent orthography, was assessed by lexical decision and naming tasks. Typical readers did not show reliable word length effects in lexical decision, suggesting establishment of parallel letter processing. However, there were small effects of word syllable structure in both tasks suggesting the presence of some sublexical processing also. Dysfluent readers showed large word length effects in both tasks indicating decoding at the letterphoneme level. When lexical access was required in a lexical decision task, dyslexics additionally chunked the letters into syllables. Response duration measure rev…