Computational simplification tools can make complex information sources easier to read for engineering designers. To guide and evaluate such approaches, it is necessary to understand how designers process information and how that information can be enhanced and measured. Here, we establish an approach for enhancing and measuring the comprehensibility of technical information for engineering designers. It is grounded in theories of document search and comprehension and provides theoretically supported principles for enhancing information and methods for measuring comprehension experimentally. It is tailored for engineering design in that it (i) does not summarize or remove potentially important information, (ii) is suitable for long, complex sources of information, (iii) can be applied in experiments that simulate real-life information sharing scenarios, and (iv) enables the measurement of domain-specific comprehension. The feasibility of the approach was tested by using patent documents as a test case since they represent a valuable but underutilized source of technical information. A 2 (patent documents) × 2 (conditions: control vs. modified) experiment was conducted with 28 professional engineering designers. Two patent documents were modified with six information design principles. Comprehension scores were higher for the modified patent than for the control, but the change was not statistically significant (p = 0.073). We attribute this either to redundancy effects causing a smaller than expected overall improvement in performance, or differences in prior knowledge for each patent. Overall, this approach offers a novel method for investigating and measuring information comprehensibility in engineering design; however, its effectiveness in enhancing information comprehensibility remains unvalidated.

The cognate facilitation effect, a classic example of cross-language interaction in the bilingual lexicon, has mostly been studied in adults. We examined the extent to which such effects occurred in simultaneous bilingual children’s word processing, to what extent these were modulated by language dominance, and to what extent this differed between comprehension and production tasks. Simultaneous bilingual Dutch-Greek children, ranging from Dutch-dominant to Greek-dominant, performed auditory lexical decision and picture-naming tasks in an online experiment. Cognate facilitation effects emerged in both tasks but manifested themselves differently. In lexical decision, there was an interaction effect with language dominance in accuracy, while in picture naming there was a main effect in reaction times. These findings suggest that, similar to what has been found for adults, simultaneous bilingual children have an integrated lexicon, in which both languages are interactively connected. Effects may differ as a combined result of factors such as comprehension versus production and individual differences in language dominance. Importantly, despite such differences, our results show that cognate effects emerge across tasks and across a range of individual children’s language dominance, indicating that shared representations within the bilingual lexicon are accessed during both word comprehension and production.

Metaphors are key to how children conceptualise the world around them and how they engage socially and educationally. This study investigated metaphor comprehension in typically developing Arabic-speaking children aged 3;01-6;07. Eighty-seven children were administered a newly developed task containing 20 narrated stories and were asked to point at pictures that best illustrated the metaphoric expression. The results were examined through a mixed ANCOVA, testing the effects of chronological age, metaphor type (primary, perceptual) and metaphor conventionality (conventional, novel) on metaphor comprehension. Children could understand some metaphors just after their third birthday, and their comprehension increased with age. Children’s performance was somewhat better on primary than perceptual, and much better on conventional than novel metaphors. These findings are discussed in light of conceptual metaphor theory (Lakoff & Johnson, 2008) and structure mapping theory (Gentner & Markman, 1997), confirming differences in the acquisition of different metaphor types.

This study reports on the feasibility of using the Test of Complex Syntax- Electronic (TECS-E), as a self-directed app, to measure sentence comprehension in children aged 4 to 5 ½ years old; how testing apps might be adapted for effective independent use; and agreement levels between face-to-face supported computerized and independent computerized testing with this cohort. A pilot phase was completed with 4 to 4;06-year-old children, to determine the appropriate functional app features required to facilitate independent test completion. Following the integration of identified features, children completed the app independently or with adult support (4–4;05 (n = 22) 4;06–4;11 months (n = 55) and 5 to 5;05 (n = 113)) and test re-test reliability was examined. Independent test completion posed problems for children under 5 years but for those over 5, TECS-E is a reliable method to assess children’s understanding of complex sentences, when used independently.

To test effects of German on anticipation in Vietnamese, we recorded eye-movements during comprehension and manipulated i) verb constraints (different vs. similar in German and Vietnamese) and ii) classifier constraints (absent in German). In each of two experiments, participants listened to Vietnamese sentences like “Mai mặc một chiếc áo.” (‘Mai wears a [classifier] shirt.’), while viewing four objects. Between experiments, we contrasted bilingual background: L1 Vietnamese–L2 German late bilinguals (Experiment 1) and heritage speakers of Vietnamese in Germany (Experiment 2). Both groups anticipated verb-compatible and classifier-compatible objects upon hearing the verb/classifier. However, when the (verb) constraints differed (e.g., Vietnamese: mặc ‘wear (a shirt/#earrings)’ – German: tragen ‘wear (a shirt/earrings)’), the heritage speakers were distracted by the object (earrings) compatible with the German (but not the Vietnamese) verb constraints. These results demonstrate that competing information in the two languages can interfere with anticipation in heritage speakers.

This paper presents a language, Alda, that supports all of logic rules, sets, functions, updates, and objects as seamlessly integrated built-ins. The key idea is to support predicates in rules as set-valued variables that can be used and updated in any scope, and support queries using rules as either explicit or implicit automatic calls to an inference function. We have defined a formal semantics of the language, implemented a prototype compiler that builds on an object-oriented language that supports concurrent and distributed programming and on an efficient logic rule system, and successfully used the language and implementation on benchmarks and problems from a wide variety of application domains. We describe the compilation method and results of experimental evaluation.

Bilinguals experience processing costs when comprehending code-switches, yet the magnitude of the cost fluctuates depending on numerous factors. We tested whether switch costs vary based on the frequency of different types of code-switches, as estimated from natural corpora of bilingual speech and text. Spanish–English bilinguals in the U.S. read single-language and code-switched sentences in a self-paced task. Sentence regions containing code-switches were read more slowly than single-language control regions, consistent with the idea that integrating a code-switch poses a processing challenge. Crucially, more frequent code-switches elicited significantly smaller costs both within and across most classes of switch types (e.g., within verb phrases and when comparing switches at verb-phrase and noun-phrase sites). The results suggest that, in addition to learning distributions of syntactic and semantic patterns, bilinguals develop finely tuned expectations about code-switching behavior – representing one reason why code-switching in naturalistic contexts may not be particularly costly.

Computational models of reading have tended to focus on the cognitive requirements of mapping among written, spoken, and meaning representations of individual words in adult readers. Consequently, the alignment of these computational models with behavioural studies of reading development has to date been limited. Models of reading have provided us with insights into the architecture of the reading system, and these have recently been extended to investigate literacy development, and the early language skills that influence children’s reading. These models show us: how learning to read builds on early language skills, why various reading interventions might be more or less effective for different children, and how reading develops across different languages and writing systems. Though there is growing alignment between descriptive models of reading behaviour and computational models, there remains a gap, and I lay out the groundwork for how translation may become increasingly effective through future modelling work.

Language switching is often associated with language competition and switching costs. However, the underlying mechanisms might differ depending on context (free versus cued naming) and modality (production or comprehension). In this study, we assessed how response-stimulus intervals (RSI) influence language-switching costs. Longer RSIs might provide more time for interference from the previous trial to decay and result in smaller switching costs. Mandarin–English bilinguals completed two dual-language production tasks (Experiment 1: cued and voluntary picture naming) and one comprehension task (Experiment 2: animacy judgement) with a short RSI and a long RSI condition. While switching costs were present in all tasks, they were only influenced by RSI length in the cued-production task, with smaller switching costs in the long RSI condition. In contrast, RSI did not influence voluntary-production or comprehension costs. This suggests that bilinguals might apply language control differently to switch languages depending on the type of switching and modality.