• Korean Journal of Cognitive Science
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• v.13 no.2
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• pp.15-23
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• 2002

This paper reports an experiment on Broca's aphasics' comprehension of a class of English constructions involving empty categories. Based on Grodzinsky's (1986) account of chance-level performance of agrammatic understanding of movement constructions and their thematic role assignments. I show that Grodzinsky's notion of invisible empty categories can be further extended to include pronomical anaphors (PRO's) in Chomsky's (1981) sense and that the asymmetry in their poor comprehension of subject- and object-control constructions can be explained by the heuristic mechanism of the default thematic role assignment rule. eventually supporting Grodzinsky's claim that empty categories are not visible In agrammatic's syntactic representation.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.15 no.4
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• pp.1-22
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• 2009

This case study aimed to explore proficient EFL readers' perceptions and experiences about reading tasks and how those perceptions and experiences influence their reading processing behaviors, and to examine how the cultural background of a text affects their reading strategies and comprehension. Three college students who were non-English majors participated in this study. Three data sources were employed: questionnaires, interviews, and think-alouds. The results showed that: (1) the participants emphasized comprehension as the goal of reading and considered themselves good EFL readers; (2) their reading purposes were closely associated with personal pursuits; (3) they preferred to read materials that deal with areas of interest but did not try to take a risk in terms of level of difficulty and/or length; (4) they implemented a multistrategic approach to reading in that the majority of their strategy use was in conjunction with their concern about meaning construction; (5) they were able to develop useful understandings of unknown vocabulary; and (6) their clear awareness of the cultural background presupposed in the text helped them invoke prior knowledge and reduce unknown vocabulary hindrances which contributed to comprehension. Pedagogical implications for EFL reading instruction are provided.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.16 no.3
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• pp.1-18
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• 2010

This study examined the effects of previewing and providing background knowledge on low level EFL readers' comprehension of expository texts and their responses to these treatments. 130 college freshmen were randomly placed into one of three treatment groups and read two expository texts reflecting unfamiliar cultural information. Prior to reading, one group was given previewing instruction, which included vocabulary preteaching and summaries, and a second group was provided with culture-specific background knowledge through watching videos and slides. The third group read each text without any prereading instruction. Immediately after reading a passage, subjects answered a 10-item multiple-choice test. Results showed significant positive effects of the previewing treatment and weak positive effects of the providing background knowledge treatment. Students' responses on the questionnaires revealed that the majority felt that the experimental treatments contributed to comprehension enhancement, made reading more enjoyable, and expedited their reading process. Students in the control group, however, indicated that they needed explicit prereading instruction in order to understand the texts. Pedagogical implications of the findings for EFL reading instruction are provided.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.8 no.4
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• pp.185-191
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• 2001

This study was designed to determine what components of spoken language have been relatively neglected in the teaching of listening comprehension in Korea and to suggest a model of listening process. Two types of tests were undertaken using spoken and written forms of English with secondary school teachers of English and college students. Findings: Hearing power has been generally neglected in the teaching of listening comprehension. Hearing power which can be thought as an active process is defined as an ability to transfer the sequence of discrete phonetic segments without word boundary into the sequence of words in phonemic representations by using both nonlinguistic factors and linguistic factors including perception rules based on phonetics and phonology. Vocabularies, hearing-speaking power, syntactic structures and idiomatic expressions are to be taught for spoken English. A model of listening process was suggested and discussed.

• Journal of the Korea Safety Management & Science
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• v.7 no.3
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• pp.109-120
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• 2005

A company is liable for its products and has the responsibility to make good on any loss or damage incurred by the user of its product. The purpose of the Product Liability Act(PLA) is to protect consumers against damage caused by defective products, and contribute to the safety of the citizen's life and the sound development of the national economy by regulating the liability of manufacturers, etc. for damages caused by the defectiveness of their products. In this study, the cognition levels of consumers and producers for PLA were surveyed. The cognition levels of four factors of acknowledgement, comprehension, necessity and impact for PLA were assessed. The results were as follows : i) Acknowledgement and comprehension levels of consumer were assessed low but they assessed necessity and impact of PLA high; ii) Producers assessed necessity and impact of PLA higher than their acknowledgement and comprehension levels; iii) Overall cognition levels of producers were higher than those of consumers.

• Asia pacific journal of information systems
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• v.9 no.1
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• pp.193-209
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• 1999

Developing Information Systems is a process of decomposing the entire systems into sub systems and identifying a hierarchical structure among the sub systems. Diagrammatic representation of hierarchy is an essential part of systems development since the identified hierarchical structures are usually presented in diagrams. The main goal of this research is to identify the most effective ways of representing system structures using diagrams. In order to achieve the main goal, this study performed three phases of research. In the first step, a theoretical model was constructed to conceptually explain users' comprehension on diagrams. Then visual factors of diagrammatic representations were identified based on the diagrams used in systems development. Finally, three consecutive experiments were conducted to identify the impacts of visual factors on the level of users' comprehension. The results indicate that familiarity and affordance of diagrams affect the degree of comprehension about the diagrams, which is in turn influenced by the complexity of tasks and the types of hierarchies. This paper concludes with the limitations of the study results and implications in the development of information systems.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.24
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• pp.157-169
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• 2011

Compared to studies on prosodic effects on the comprehension of syntactic ambiguity in English, there are relatively few that investigated prosodic effects in East-Asian languages. This study examined the role of prosodic information in processing syntactically ambiguous sentences in Japanese. For syntactically ambiguous sentences containing relative clauses, this paper investigated whether prosodic information is immediately available during the process of these ambiguous sentences. Results from an auditory comprehension experiment with an on-line, cross-modal naming task seemingly suggest that contrary to the findings from the off-line study that examined the same constructions, prosodic information may not be immediately available to Japanese listeners. A possible account for failure to obtain effects of prosodic information is provided.

• International Journal of Computer Science & Network Security
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• v.22 no.8
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• pp.145-152
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• 2022

The current study investigates the effects of an interactive learning environment on EFL students' vocabulary acquisition and reading comprehension skills. The study utilized a quasi-experimental design. The sample consisted of 41 students enrolled in the English program at Umm Al-Qura University studying Reading in EFL course in Summer 2018/2019. The sample was randomly divided into two groups: A control group consisting of 21 students and an experimental group of 20 students. The results revealed statistically significant differences at (α≤ 0.01) between the mean scores of the experimental group and the control group in the posttest of the vocabulary test and the reading comprehension test favoring the experimental group. Finally, the study concluded with a call for more studies on modern technologies in teaching EFL skills in the Saudi context.

• Educational Technology International
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.1-26
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• 2013

This study is to identify whether three types of online instruction (text-based, video-based, and video-based instruction without text) and age category have a different influence on students' comprehension and motivation. Online students were randomly assigned to one of six groups, and they attended two-week online lectures via Course Management System. The comprehension test and the short form of IMMS were implemented when 114 participants accomplished two-week online lectures. The results revealed that using instructional video in online instruction is more effective instructional medium than text only in order to promote learner's motivation. Besides, older adults aged 41-60 are significantly different from younger adults (21-40 years old) in terms of students' comprehension. Furthermore, three types of online instructions are likely to be influenced by age category.

• Smart Media Journal
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• v.11 no.10
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• pp.89-96
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• 2022

An open domain machine reading comprehension is a model that adds a function to search paragraphs as there are no paragraphs related to a given question. Document searches have an issue of lower performance with a lot of documents despite abundant research with word frequency based TF-IDF. Paragraph selections also have an issue of not extracting paragraph contexts, including sentence characteristics accurately despite a lot of research with word-based embedding. Document reading comprehension has an issue of slow learning due to the growing number of parameters despite a lot of research on BERT. Trying to solve these three issues, this study used BM25 which considered even sentence length and InferSent to get sentence contexts, and proposed an open domain machine reading comprehension with ALBERT to reduce the number of parameters. An experiment was conducted with SQuAD1.1 datasets. BM25 recorded a higher performance of document research than TF-IDF by 3.2%. InferSent showed a higher performance in paragraph selection than Transformer by 0.9%. Finally, as the number of paragraphs increased in document comprehension, ALBERT was 0.4% higher in EM and 0.2% higher in F1.