Social life rests in large part on the capacity to understand the intentions behind the behavior of others. What are the origins of this capacity? How is one to construe its development in ontogenesis? By assuming that action understanding can be explained only in terms of the ability to read the minds of others--that is, to represent mental…

This study examined children's tendency to confuse events that varied in source similarity, which was manipulated using different media of event presentation. In Experiment 1, children in two age groups (3- and 4-year-olds and 5- and 6-year-olds) experienced a live presentation of an event, and another event was either heard from a story (low…

The purpose of this dissertation is to investigate the processing mechanisms of non-native English speakers at both the sentence level and the morphological level, addressing the issue of whether adult second language (L2) learners qualitatively differ from native speakers in processing linguistic input. Using psycholinguistic on-line techniques…

Teaching narrative text selections is an important part of the middle grades English curriculum. As middle grades educators search for ways to best support their students' reading, it is important to consider carefully the effects of various approaches to teaching literature. This study focused on the two most popular approaches to teaching…

This study adds momentum to the ongoing discussion clarifying the merits of visualization and analysis in mathematical thinking. Our goal was to gain understanding of three calculus students' mental processes and images used to create meaning for derivative graphs. We contrast the thinking processes of these three students as they attempted to…

Aim: We used diffusion tensor imaging to investigate the association between white-matter integrity and reading ability in a cohort of 28 children. Nineteen preterm children (14 males, five females; mean age 11y 11mo [SD 1y 10mo], mean gestational age 30.5wks (SD 3.2), mean birthweight was 1455g [SD 625]); and nine term children (five males, four…

Students often hold misconceptions that conflict with scientific explanations. Research has shown that refutation texts are effective for facilitating conceptual change in these cases (Guzzetti, Snyder, Glass, & Gamas, 1993). The process through which refutation texts have their effect is not clear. The authors replicated and extended previous…

Focal brain lesions are assumed to produce language deficits by two basic mechanisms: local cortical dysfunction at the lesion site, and remote cortical dysfunction due to disruption of the transfer and integration of information between connected brain regions. However, functional imaging studies investigating language outcome after aphasic…

One of the most intriguing findings on language comprehension is that violations of syntactic predictions can affect event-related potentials as early as 120 ms, in the same time-window as early sensory processing. This effect, the so-called early left-anterior negativity (ELAN), has been argued to reflect word category access and initial…

Two experiments investigated children's communicative perspective-taking ability. In Experiment 1, 4- to 5-year-old children were tested on two referential communication tasks, as well as on measures of inhibitory control, working memory, and cognitive flexibility. Results document children's emergent use of the perspective of their speaking…

Do young children have a basic intuition of posterior probability? Do they update their decisions and judgments in the light of new evidence? We hypothesized that they can do so extensionally, by considering and counting the various ways in which an event may or may not occur. The results reported in this paper showed that from the age of five,…

The author reviews research on working memory and short-term memory abilities of deaf individuals, delineating strengths and weaknesses. Among the areas of weakness that are reviewed are sequential recall, processing speed, attention, and memory load. Areas of strengths include free recall, visuospatial recall, imagery, and dual encoding.…

Latino English learners (ELs) come to elementary classrooms with many English-Spanish cognates in their listening, speaking, reading, and writing vocabularies. Cognates are words that are orthographically, semantically, and syntactically similar in two languages because of a shared etymology. Some cognates are identical in both English and…

In an event-related potentials (ERPs) study, we examined the comprehension of different types of Chinese (Mandarin) relative clauses (object vs. subject-extracted) to test the universality and language specificity of sentence comprehension processes. Because Chinese lacks morphosyntactic cues to sentence constituent relations, it allows a test of…

We investigated the extent to which inhibition, updating, shifting, and mental-attentional capacity ("M"-capacity) contribute to children's ability to solve multiplication word problems. A total of 155 children in Grades 3-6 (8- to 13-year-olds) completed a set of multiplication word problems at two levels of difficulty: one-step and multiple-step…