Research in literature reports the importance of L2 vocabulary and syntactic knowledge on the learners' reading comprehension. In this regard, the current study investigated the role of vocabulary knowledge that is disunited into depth and breadth dimensions and syntactic knowledge in the reading comprehension scores of an advanced cohort of…

Two main mechanisms, articulatory rehearsal and attentional refreshing, are argued to be involved in the maintenance of verbal information in working memory (WM). Whereas converging research has suggested that rehearsal promotes the phonological representations of memoranda in working memory, little is known about the representations that…

Attentional theories of associative learning and categorization propose that learning about the predictiveness of a stimulus influences the amount of attention that is paid to that stimulus. Three experiments tested this idea by looking at the extent to which stimuli that had previously been experienced as predictive or nonpredictive in a…

This study examines the lexical representation and recall of abstract words by beginning L2 learners of Spanish in the light of the predictions of the dual coding theory (Paivio 1971; Paivio and Desrochers 1980). Ninety-seven learners (forty-four males and fifty-three females) were randomly placed in the picture or non-picture group and taught…

What do learners do when they control whether to engage in massed or spaced practice? According to theories by Son (2004) and by Metcalfe and Kornell (2005), the tendency for learners to choose spaced practice over massed practice should decline as item difficulty becomes greater. Support originally was obtained when pairs containing unfamiliar…

Theorists have argued that the relatedness of words depends upon the degree to which they are associatively connected. Hierarchies of association have been established using two experimental methods: (1) the procedural method, and (2) the repetitions method. Since the results of the two methods have proven to be somewhat inconsistent, a study was…