Accuracy on assessments is commonly studied in education research but response time (RT) is relatively less investigated even though decades of research in cognitive sciences indicate that time can be an important dimension for understanding student learning. To better understand RT and the potentially important relations between accuracy and RT…

The speed-accuracy trade-off (SAT) suggests that time constraints reduce response accuracy. Its relevance in observational settings--where response time (RT) may not be constrained but respondent speed may still vary--is unclear. Using 29 data sets containing data from cognitive tasks, we use a flexible method for identification of the SAT (which…

Disengaged responding poses a severe threat to the validity of educational large-scale assessments, because item responses from unmotivated test-takers do not reflect their actual ability. Existing identification approaches rely primarily on item response times, which bears the risk of misclassifying fast engaged or slow disengaged responses.…

Purpose: Adults recognize words that are acquired during childhood more quickly than words acquired during adulthood. This is known as the Age of Acquisition (AoA) effect. The AoA effect, according to the integrated account, manifests in tasks necessitating greater semantic processing and in tasks with arbitrary input-output mapping. Compound…

The Assessment of Language in Adults using Self-reported Skills (ALASS) is an online tool aimed at providing a rapid indication of language-related skills at two levels: basic performance and social use. In Study 1, we have developed and validated a new tool with two objective measures: a lexical decision test and a grammaticality judgement test,…

Word frequency is an important predictor of lexical-decision task performance. The current study further examined the role of this variable by exploring the influence of frequency trajectory. Frequency trajectory is measured by how often a word occurs in childhood relative to adulthood. Past research on the role of this variable in word…

Background: Individuals with dyslexia demonstrate syntactic difficulties on tasks of language comprehension, yet little is known about spoken language production in this population. Aims: To investigate whether spoken sentence production in college students with dyslexia is less proficient than in typical readers, and to determine whether group…

Cognitive factors have been recognised as important in the interpreting process, but whether they could serve as valid components of interpreting aptitude still awaits further investigation. This study explores the predictive value of cognitive fluency in the simultaneous interpreting (SI) performance of trainee interpreters. Cognitive fluency…

Ajzen and Dasgupta (2015) recently invited complementing Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) measures with measures borrowed from implicit cognition research. In this study, we examined for the first time such combination, and we did so to predict academic persistence. Specifically, 169 first-year college students answered a TPB questionnaire and…

In choice reaction time (RT) tasks, performance is often influenced by the presence of nominally irrelevant stimuli, referred to as distractors. Recent research provided evidence that distractor processing can be adjusted to the utility of the distractors: Distractors predictive of the upcoming target/response were more attended to and also…

English language programmes provide established pathways for international students seeking university admission in countries such as Australia and the United Kingdom. In order to refer international applicants to appropriate levels and durations of English language support prior to matriculation into their main course of study, pathway providers…

Many studies have examined how people recall the locations of objects in spatial layouts. However, little is known about how people monitor the accuracy of judgments based on those memories. The goal of the present experiments was to examine the effect of reference frame characteristics on metacognitive accuracy for spatial judgments. Reference…

Researchers have extensively documented how various statistical properties of words (e.g., word frequency) influence lexical processing. However, the impact of lexical variables on nonword decision-making performance is less clear. This gap is surprising, because a better specification of the mechanisms driving nonword responses may provide…

The relationship between metacognition in real life situations and study skills and habits was examined using a sample of college students. Results showed no significant relationship between these two variables nor was there a significant relationship between study skills and reaction time as measured on the metacognitive test. However, there was…

Three experiments examined the relation between working memory capacity (WMC) and 2 different forms of cognitive conflict: stimulus-stimulus (S-S) and stimulus-response (S-R) interference. Our goal was to test whether WMC's relation to conflict-task performance is mediated by stimulus-identification processes (captured by S-S conflict),…