This thesis offers new input in the field of generating epithets to aid the comprehension of Swedish texts. For whatever reason, a reader might find certain words in a text difficult to understand. For example, they may never have come across the term moussaka before; however, by the simple expedient of assigning an explanatory epithet – in this case, “the dish” moussaka – they can hopefully continue reading uninterrupted. To do this, obscure phrases are identified and extracted based on word class, shallow token features and the Pareto Principle. An algorithm then extracts appropriate epithets for each word using the Wikipedia categorisation system. Although the algorithm developed for the study achieved underwhelming results when extracting obscure phrases, it did prove excellent at assigning appropriate epithets to nouns and proper nouns. With further research, this process can hopefully be utilised as a tool for improving the readability of any text.

<p>Complex Word Processing in Teenage Poor Readers- Does Morphological Knowledge Help or Hinder?</p> <p>Abstract</p> <p>This longitudinal study addressed development of morphological awareness in fourteen-to-seventeen-year-olds reading disabled (RD) high school students enrolled in the Wilson Reading Program (Wilson, 1989). Our lexical decision experiment and reading fluency assessment took place in the first (session 1) and last months (session 2) of the school year that included training with morphologically complex English words. The lexical decision stimuli were composed of derived (<em>critical</em>), compound (<em>bathtub</em>) and pseudo-complex (<em>postpone</em>) words from the training program (trained words), matched complex words not in the training program (untrained words), and nonwords. Accuracy and response times were compared between sessions, and with a comparison group of age-matched typical readers. The RD group did not demonstrate large post-training gains in reading fluency, but, there were significant improvements in accuracy and speed in visual lexical decision. These improvements did not extend to auditory lexical decision, suggesting that the observed improvements in visual word recognition were a result of the training, and not a practice effect due to multiple testing sessions. Additionally, there was post-training improvement in both trained and untrained words implying that the RD students were able to generalize their acquired knowledge of grapheme-phoneme mappings and morphological processing to novel words. Both the RD and comparison group demonstrated the same hierarchy of accuracy and response time patterns for complex words suggest a processing advantage for visually presented derived and compound words that is not skill dependent.</p> / Master of Science (MSc)