This article reports on a study in which third-grade students (8-9 years) were given a degree of agency in conducting chance experiments and representing the outcomes. Students chose their own samples of 12 coloured counters, ensuring all colours were represented. They predicted the outcomes of item selection, tested their predictions, explained…

Previous research on 4-6-year-olds' interpretations of adjunct control has observed non-adult-like behavior for sentences like "John called Mary before running to the store." Several studies have aimed to identify a grammatical source of children's errors. This study tests the predictions of grammatical and extragrammatical accounts by…

Language comprehension involves cognitive abilities that are specific to language as well as cognitive abilities that are more general and involved in a wide range of behaviors. One set of domain-general abilities that support language comprehension are executive functions (EFs), also known as cognitive control. A diverse body of research has…

The abstract concept of time is conceptualized as moving linearly across space, known as the mental timeline (MTL). The direction of our MTL is consistent with reading direction. English speakers, who read left to right, think of past on the left and future on the right; the reverse is true of Hebrew speakers, who read right to left. However, it…

Teaching the periodic table is a central part of chemistry. This might involve memorizing the symbols of the elements, learning about the properties of the families, or understanding its general organization. This year, The International Year of the Periodic Table, marks its 150th anniversary, and represents a good opportunity to highlight its…

Existing approaches in the literature on cognitive control in conflict tasks almost exclusively target the outcome of control (by comparing mean congruency effects) and not the processes that shape control. These approaches are limited in addressing a current theoretical issue--what contribution does learning make to adjustments in cognitive…

When and how do infants learn color words? It is generally supposed that color words are learned late and with a great deal of difficulty. By examining infant language surveys in British English and 11 other languages, this study shows that color word learning occurs earlier than has been previously suggested and that the order of acquisition of…

It has been demonstrated that the Simon effect may be increased or reversed due to proportion congruency manipulation, suggesting that learned spatial irrelevant stimulus-response (S-R) associations are used to guide responses. In this study, we tested the hypothesis that learning spatial irrelevant S-R associations by rewards may show a similar…

Target onsets in dynamically changing displays can be predicted when contingencies exist between different stimulus states over time. In the present study, we examined predictive monitoring when participants searched dynamically changing displays of numbers and colored squares for a color target, a number target, or both. Stimuli were presented in…

Executive function (EF) plays a foundational role in development. A brain-based model of EF development is probed for the experiences that strengthen EF in the dimensional change card sort task in which children sort cards by one rule and then are asked to switch to another. Three-year-olds perseverate on the first rule, failing the task, whereas…

Previous studies report that children use color words haphazardly before acquiring conventional, adult-like meanings. The most common explanation for this is that children do not abstract color as a domain of linguistic meaning until several months after they begin producing color words, resulting in a stage during which they produce but do not…

We examined the contribution of rapid automatized naming (RAN) components (articulation time, pause time, and pause time consistency) to reading fluency, reading comprehension, and spelling in a sample of 257 German children (139 boys, 118 girls; M[subscript age] = 5.60 years, SD = 0.31) followed from kindergarten to Grade 1. In kindergarten,…

Research Findings: The study investigated whether preschool code-related home literacy experiences had direct associations with regular and irregular word reading in the first year of primary school as well as exploring whether there were indirect associations between these experiences and later word reading via children's language skills or…

The changing nature of education has forced educators to rethink the role of classrooms in student learning. Prior research has shown that the environmental and structural design of education centers impact student learning. With a dozen variables to deal with, classroom designers are faced with the daunting task of selecting one plan from the…

Contrastive focus, conveyed by prosodic cues, marks important information. Studies have shown that 6-year-olds learning English and Japanese can use contrastive focus during online sentence comprehension: focus used in a "contrastive context" facilitates the identification of a target referent (speeding up processing), whereas focus used…