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Children efficiently acquire language not just by listening, but by interacting with others in their social environment. Conversely, large language models are typically trained with next-word prediction on massive amounts of text. Motivated…
Repeated reading (RR) helps learners, who have little to no experience with reading fluently to gain confidence, speed and process words automatically. The benefits of repeated readings include helping all learners with fact recall, aiding…
Recent studies suggest that very small language models (SLMs) can generate surprisingly coherent text when trained on simplified, child-directed corpora such as TinyStories. These findings have been interpreted as evidence that readability…
Building on game design and education research, this paper introduces narrative-focused role-playing games as a way to promote visualization literacy in young children. Visualization literacy skills are vital in understanding the world…
Discourse varies with age, education, psychiatric state and historical epoch, but the ontogenetic and cultural dynamics of discourse structure remain to be quantitatively characterized. To this end we investigated word graphs obtained from…
Literacy, or the ability to read and write, is a crucial indicator of success in life and greater society. It is estimated that 85% of people in juvenile delinquent systems cannot adequately read or write, that more than half of those with…
Oral narrative skills are strong predictors of later literacy development. This study examines the features of oral narratives from children who were identified by experts as requiring intervention. Using simple machine learning methods, we…
With recent advances in large language models (LLMs), the concept of automatically generating children's educational materials has become increasingly realistic. Working toward the goal of age-appropriate simplicity in generated educational…
The ability to automatically determine the age audience of a novel provides many opportunities for the development of information retrieval tools. Firstly, developers of book recommendation systems and electronic libraries may be interested…
Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown a tremendous capacity for generating literary text. However, their effectiveness in generating children's stories has yet to be thoroughly examined. In this study, we evaluate the trustworthiness of…
Curiosity is an important factor that favors independent and individualized learning in children. Research suggests that it is also a competence that can be fostered by training specific metacognitive skills and information-searching…
Causality visualization can help people understand temporal chains of events, such as messages sent in a distributed system, cause and effect in a historical conflict, or the interplay between political actors over time. However, as the…
Judging the readability of text has many important applications, for instance when performing text simplification or when sourcing reading material for language learners. In this paper, we present a 518 participant study which investigates…
Capturing readers' engagement in fiction is a challenging but important aspect of narrative understanding. In this study, we collected 23 readers' reactions to 2 short stories through eye tracking, sentence-level annotations, and an overall…
Proper identification of grade levels of children's reading materials is an important step towards effective learning. Recent studies in readability assessment for the English domain applied modern approaches in natural language processing…
Children learn word meanings by tapping into the commonalities across different situations in which words are used and overcome the high level of uncertainty involved in early word learning experiences. We propose a modeling framework to…
The use of statistical methods to analyze large databases of text has been useful to unveil patterns of human behavior and establish historical links between cultures and languages. In this study, we identify literary movements by treating…
Understanding texts requires memory: the reader has to keep in mind enough words to create meaning. This calls for a relation between the memory of the reader and the structure of the text. To investigate this interaction, we first identify…
In the current study,we propose that, in the era of generative AI, there is now a new form of literacy called "prompt literacy," which refers to the ability to generate precise prompts as input for AI systems, interpret the outputs, and…
Hidden structural patterns in written texts have been subject of considerable research in the last decades. In particular, mapping a text into a time series of sentence lengths is a natural way to investigate text structure. Typically,…