The Language Perception, Assessment, and Learning Lab

LPAL

The Language Perception, Assessment and Learning Lab

Research conducted in the L-PAL lab investigates language from a variety of perspectives in order to better understand the processing, production and representation of language. Members of the lab work within the contexts of second language acquisition, discourse studies, natural language processing, adult literacy and more.

Volunteer

If you are interested in volunteering for LPAL as either a research participant or assistant, please send an email to [email protected].

A group of 11 people standing next to one another in a conference room. — Members of the LPAL lab

Research

Recent Lab Publications

Crossley, S. A., & Skalicky, S. (in press). Making sense of polysemy relations in first and second language speakers of English. International Journal of Bilingualism.

Skalicky, S., Crossley, S.A., McNamara, D.S., & Muldner, K. (in press). Identifying creativity during problem solving using linguistic features. Creativity Research Journal.

Berger, C. M., Crossley, S., & Kyle, K. (in press). Using native-speaker psycholinguistic response norms to predict lexical proficiency in second language learners. Applied Linguistics.

Kyle, K., Crossley, S. A., & Berger, C. (in press). The Tool for the automatic analysis of lexical sophistication version 2.0 Behavior Research Methods.

Berger, C. M., Crossley, S., & Kyle, K. (2017). Using novel word context measures to predict human ratings of lexical proficiency. Journal of Educational Technology & Society, 20(2), 201-212.

Crossley, S. A., Francus Rose, D., Danekes, C., Rose, C. W. & McNamara, D. S. (2017). That noun phrase may be beneficial and this may not be: Discourse cohesion and text processing. Reading and Writing, 30 (3), 569-589.

Crossley, S. A., Skalicky, S., Dascalu, M., McNamara, D., & Kyle, K. (2017). Predicting text comprehension, processing, and familiarity in adult readers: New approaches to readability formulas. Discourse Processes, 54(5-6), 340-359.

Skalicky, S., Crossley, S.A., McNamara, D.S., & Muldner, Kasia. (2017). Automatically identifying humorous and persuasive language produced during a creative problem-solving task. In Proceedings of the 30^th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence.

Current Grants and Other Projects

ALRC: Text Readability for Adults

Summary: This project aims to improve the predictability of traditional readability formulas using richer linguistic features supported by behavioral data. Under the direction of Scott Crossley, members of the lab (Cynthia Berger, Ali Heidari and Stephen Skalicky) will use online crowd-sourcing, natural language processing, eye-tracking techniques in order to obtain measures of text readability that improve upon traditional readability formulas such as Flesch-Kincaid.

Linguistic Analysis and a Hybrid Human-Automatic Coach for Improving Math Identity

Ocumpaugh, J., Baker, R., Crossley, S. A. (Co-PI), Kostyuk, V., & Mingle, L.

National Institute of Health

Karter, A. J., Schillinger, D. et al.

Facilities

The L-PAL lab is located in the Applied Linguistics/ESL Department and is housed in two spaces.

The first space contains four soundproof testing rooms that are used to conduct experiments with human subjects. Three of the rooms contain desktop computers designed to run a wide variety of linguistic experiments (e.g., reaction time measurements, listening comprehension tasks, lexical decision tasks). The fourth room houses a computer equipped with an eye-tracking device capable of capturing fine-grained eye movements, useful for answer questions related to the processing of written text. The second space contains computers and resources used by lab members to brainstorm, design and test their experiments.