Presents results of a study involving 54 8- to 12-year-old children with specific language impairment who are compared with a control group on a referential communication task. The children were asked to describe a picture from an array of eight similar items so that the listener could identify it. (18 references) (GLR)

Compared the performance of participants with Williams Syndrome on two past tense elicitation tasks with that of four typically-developing control groups. Results were consistent with the hypothesis that the Williams Syndrome language system is delayed, because it developed under different constraints. (Author/VWL)

Background: Semantic and inferencing abilities have not been fully examined in children with communication difficulties. Aims: To investigate the inferential and semantic abilities of children with communication difficulties using newly designed tasks. Methods & Procedures: Children with different types of communication disorder were compared with…

In this paper we discuss an experiment that was carried out with a prototype, designed in conformity with the concept of parallelism and the Parallel Instruction theory (the PI theory). We designed this prototype with five different interfaces, and ran an empirical study in which 18 participants completed an abstract task. The five basic designs…

Performance in 2 versions of a computer-animated task was compared. Participants either indicated the time of arrival of a target that rolled off a horizontal surface and fell--hidden from view--onto a landing point (production task) or judged flight time on a rating scale (judgment task). As predicted, performance was significantly better in the…

Four experiments explored the task span procedure: Subjects received lists of 1-10 task names to remember and then lists of 1-10 stimuli on which to perform the tasks. Task span is the number of tasks performed in order perfectly. Experiment 1 compared the task span with the traditional memory span in 6 practiced subjects and found little…

The process-dissociation equations (L. Jacoby, 1991) have been applied to results from inclusion and exclusion tasks to derive quantitative estimates of the influence of controlled and automatic processes on memory. This research has provoked controversies (e.g., T. Curran & D. Hintzman, 1995) regarding the validity of specific assumptions…

Although the literature on language pedagogy encourages the use of pair work in the second language classroom, students sometimes seem reluctant to work in pairs, particularly on grammar-focused tasks. This study investigated the merits of pair work by comparing pair and individual work on an editing task and by analysing the nature of pair…

Research showing how upward social comparison breeds competitive behavior has so far conflated local comparisons in "task" performance (e.g. a test score) with comparisons on a more general "scale" (i.e. an underlying skill). Using a ranking methodology (Garcia, Tor, & Gonzalez, 2006) to separate task and scale comparisons, Studies 1-2 reveal that…

The authors estimate weighted mean values for nine information processing parameters for older adults using the Card, Moran, and Newell (1983) Model Human Processor model. The authors validate a subset of these parameters by modeling two mobile phone tasks using two different phones and comparing model predictions to a sample of younger (N = 20;…

Perspective-taking, or the ability to demonstrate awareness of informational states in oneself and in others, has been of recent interest in behavioral psychology. This is, in part, a result of a modern behavioral approach to human language and cognition known as Relational Frame Theory, which views perspective-taking as generalized operant…

This study focused on the relationship between school performance and performance on a dichotic listening (DL) task in dyslexic children. Dyslexia is associated with impaired phonological processing, related to functions in the left temporal lobe. DL is a frequently used task to assess functions of the left temporal lobe. Due to the predominance…

This paper reports on a study on the relationship between cognitive task complexity and linguistic performance in L2 writing. In the study, two models proposed to explain the influence of cognitive task complexity on linguistic performance in L2 are tested and compared: Skehan and Foster's Limited Attentional Capacity Model (Skehan, 1998; Skehan…

Purpose: Children with language impairment (LI) often perform below the level of typically developing peers on measures of both processing speed and working memory. This study examined the relationship between these 2 types of measures and attempted to determine whether such measures can account for the LI itself. Method: Fourteen-year-old…

During adolescence the body undergoes many physical changes. These changes necessitate an updating of internal models of action. Here, we tested the hypothesis that internal models undergo refinement between adolescence and adulthood. We investigated the chronometry of executed and imagined hand actions, which relies on internal models, in 40…