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The meaning of words in natural language depends crucially on context. However, most neuroimaging studies of word meaning use isolated words and isolated sentences with little context. Because the brain may process natural language differently from how it processes simplified stimuli, there is a pressing need to determine whether prior results on word meaning generalize to natural language. fMRI was used to record human brain activity while four subjects (two female) read words in four conditions that vary in context: narratives, isolated sentences, blocks of semantically similar words, and isolated words. We then compared the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of evoked brain responses, and we used a voxelwise encoding modeling approach to compare the representation of semantic information across the four conditions. We find four consistent effects of varying context. First, stimuli with more context evoke brain responses with higher SNR across bilateral visual, temporal, parietal, and prefrontal cortices compared with stimuli with little context. Second, increasing context increases the representation of semantic information across bilateral temporal, parietal, and prefrontal cortices at the group level. In individual subjects, only natural language stimuli consistently evoke widespread representation of semantic information. Third, context affects voxel semantic tuning. Finally, models estimated using stimuli with little context do not generalize well to natural language. These results show that context has large effects on the quality of neuroimaging data and on the representation of meaning in the brain. Thus, neuroimaging studies that use stimuli with little context may not generalize well to the natural regime.SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT Context is an important part of understanding the meaning of natural language, but most neuroimaging studies of meaning use isolated words and isolated sentences with little context. Here, we examined whether the results of neuroimaging studies that use out-of-context stimuli generalize to natural language. We find that increasing context improves the quality of neuro-imaging data and changes where and how semantic information is represented in the brain. These results suggest that findings from studies using out-of-context stimuli may not generalize to natural language used in daily life.

Writing in L2 is considered a very challenging task by both teachers and students. Language teachers play a critical role in facilitating students' L2 writing development. Therefore, it is important to explore their beliefs about writing instruction as their beliefs exert influence on classroom practices. This study draws on the Repertory Grid Technique (RGT) to explore three teacher's beliefs about EFL writing instruction in senior high school in Taiwan. RGT, a qualitative inquiry evolving from Personal Construct Theory, involved three phases of data collection; firstly, the participant described activities in her writing class, which were later grouped and labeled. The activities were the elements, and the labels for activity groups were the constructs, which together formed a matrix for the participant to rate later. The rated matrix then underwent Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA). The participant's beliefs were extracted as a result of EFA and follow-up in-depth interviews; sources of their beliefs were identified from analysis of the interviews. The results yielded eight beliefs related to teacher involvement, reading-writing connection, structural knowledge, student efforts, students' background knowledge, error awareness, status of EFL writing, and writing as thinking. Five sources of beliefs were identified, including previous learning experience, personal writing experience, personal teaching experience, training from a master's program, and in-service training programs. Knowledge of teachers' beliefs gives the participants an opportunity to reflect on their own teaching; it also provides information for teacher training programs and in-service training programs on enhancing quality and efficacy of teachers' EFL writing instruction.

This study aimed to investigate how digital games affected college students’ creativity development. A sample of 60 college students participated in the digital game design and play instruction, grounded in the playful constructivism theory. The data incorporated the students’ pre- and post-creativity scores in game design, the first and final versions of game design, and the students’ responses to the open-ended questionnaire. The findings revealed that the students’ creativity was developed after digital game design and play instruction, facilitated by three key creative learning processes, including collaborative digital game design, digital game-playing for providing peer feedback, and redesign of the games after receiving peer feedback. These collaborative processes encouraged the students’ role-reversal between designers and players, enabling the students to provide and receive peer feedback for the exchange of creative ideas. Through reflecting on received peer feedback, the students refined their initial ideas and tailored their reflections to redesign the games for the target learners, thereby cultivating their creativity in educational digital game design. This study suggests collaborative digital game design and play instruction is an effective strategy to facilitate college students’ creativity development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Investigations of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis often ask whetherthere is a difference in the non-linguistic behavior of speak-ers of two languages, generally without modeling the underly-ing process. Such an approach leaves underexplored the rela-tive contributions of language and universal aspects of cogni-tion, and how those contributions differ across languages. Weexplore the naming and non-linguistic pile-sorting of spatialscenes across speakers of five languages via a computationalmodel grounded in an influential proposal: that language willaffect cognition when non-linguistic information is uncertain.We report two findings. First, native language plays a smallbut significant role in predicting spatial similarity judgmentsacross languages, consistent with earlier findings. Second, thesize of the native-language role varies systematically, such thatfiner-grained semantic systems appear to shape similarity judg-ments more than coarser-grained systems do. These findingscapture the tradeoff between language-specific and universalforces in cognition, and how that tradeoff varies across lan-guages.

The primary purpose of this study was to compare language and narrative skills of both talented and regular young children in Taiwan. The participants were asked to tell a story based on images in children's picture books. Twelve children, who participated in a screening session designed to identify young talented children for the Enrichment Program for Cultivating Problem Solving Abilities and Multiple Intelligences for Talented Preschoolers (PSMIGP program), were divided into a verbally talented group (VT) and a regular group (RE). The stories told by the participants were tape-recorded, transcribed, and coded using the Child Language Data Exchange System (CHILDES). The results indicated that the verbally talented children demonstrated their linguistic talents at as young as four years of age. In telling a story, they used more clauses and more words that were different to complete the task. In addition, they used more modifiers (i.e. adjectives and adverbs) and employed more conjunctions that were more complex. However, there were no differences between the two groups in mean length of utterance (MLU) and type-token ratios (TTRs). This paper presents a discussion on the implications of this study and offers suggestions for future research.

Gifted children are precocious in verbal abilities. While the neural efficiency hypothesis of intelligence has supporting evidence across cultures, electrophysiological responses associated with intelligence varied in children with different intellectual levels on various tasks. To test the hypothesis by components of the event-related field (ERF) on gifted children, we used a semantic-and-syntactic error detection task to study sentence processing in language comprehension. Three types of determiner-particle final sentences were presented visually to subjects in this magnetoencephalography (MEG) experiment: the congruent (a correct particle with a detection task), incongruent (an incorrect particle with a detection task), and filler (a correct particle followed by a word recall task) conditions. To detect different waveforms within and between the gifted group (GT) (N = 19) and non-gifted group (NG) (N = 15), the permutation t tests (iteration: 1000; p = .05; two tailed) were adopted to compare the ERF of the two groups. For the within group comparison, the NG group showed stronger amplitudes only around 600 ms, while the GT group had early components closed to 400 ms and the late time-window around 600ms. For the incongruent-subtract-filler comparison, a significant ERF difference was found between the two groups at a late time window around 650 ms in the right occipital channel. The topography revealed stronger current in the occipito-temporal region for the GT group during this time-window. In contrast, no statistically significant difference was found by comparing incongruent-subtractcongruent (IC) and congruent-subtract-filler (CF) conditions. Interestingly, this study showed that responses of gifted children had stronger magnetic current at a late time point compared to children with average IQ in the semantic-syntactic judgment task. These results indicate the complex task might engage deeper processing in a brain network and that gifted individuals show greater brain activation than their average peers. Task complexity or difficulty needs to be taken into consideration when the neural efficiency hypothesis of intelligence is proposed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The primary purpose of this study was to compare language and narrative skills of both talented and regular young children in Taiwan. The participants were asked to tell a story based on images in children’s picture books. Twelve children, who participated in a screening session designed to identify young talented children for the Enrichment Program for Cultivating Problem Solving Abilities and Multiple Intelligences for Talented Preschoolers (PSMIGP program), were divided into a verbally talented group (VT) and a regular group (RE). The stories told by the participants were tape-recorded, transcribed, and coded using the Child Language Data Exchange System (CHILDES). The results indicated that the verbally talented children demonstrated their linguistic talents at as young as four years of age. In telling a story, they used more clauses and more words that were different to complete the task. In addition, they used more modifiers (i.e. adjectives and adverbs) and employed more conjunctions that were more complex. However, there were no differences between the two groups in mean length of utterance (MLU) and type-token ratios (TTRs). This paper presents a discussion on the implications of this study and offers suggestions for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]