Research has shown that novel words can be learned through the mechanism of statistical or cross-situational word learning (CSWL). So far, CSWL studies using adult populations have focused on the presentation of spoken words. However, words can also be learned through their written form. This study compared auditory and orthographic presentations…

Children's drawings of common object categories become dramatically more recognizable across childhood. What are the major factors that drive developmental changes in children's drawings? To what degree are children's drawings a product of their changing internal category representations versus limited by their visuomotor abilities or their…

Children's ability to learn words with multiple meanings may be hindered by their adherence to a one-to-one form-to-meaning mapping bias. Previous research on children's learning of a novel meaning for a familiar word (sometimes called a "pseudohomophone") has yielded mixed results, suggesting a range of factors that may impact when…

The same-different task is a classic paradigm that requires participants to judge whether two successively presented stimuli are the same or different. While this task is simple, with results that have been replicated many times, response times (RTs) and accuracy for both same and different decisions remain difficult to model. The biggest obstacle…

The aim of this study is to design, develop, implement and evaluate an accessible mass open learning platform for visually impaired individuals. The study group consists of experts in the field who want to contribute to the study voluntarily with the snowball sampling method and have not used the platform before, with or without visual impairment.…

Category learning is fundamental to cognition, but little is known about how it proceeds in real-world environments when learners do not have instructions to search for category-relevant information, do not make overt category decisions, and do not experience direct feedback. Prior research demonstrates that listeners can acquire task-irrelevant…

Purpose: The purpose of the current study was to examine sensory and auditory memory limitations on intensity resolution in individuals with Parkinson's disease as compared to healthy older and younger adults. Method: Nineteen individuals with Parkinson's disease, 10 healthy age- and hearing-matched adults, and 10 healthy young adults were…

Purpose: The study examined age-related differences in the use of semantic context and in the effect of semantic competition in spoken sentence processing. We used offline (response latency) and online (eye gaze) measures, using the "visual world" eye-tracking paradigm. Method: Thirty younger and 30 older adults heard sentences related…

Where the veracity of a statement is in question, listeners tend to interpret disfluency as signaling dishonesty. Previous research in deception suggests that this results from a speaker model, linking lying to cognitive effort and effort to disfluency. However, the disfluency-lying bias occurs very quickly: Might listeners instead simply…

During spatial reorientation, the use of local geometric cues (e.g., corner angles) and global geometric cues (e.g., principal axis) is differentially influenced by enclosure size. Local geometric cues exert more influence in large enclosures compared to small enclosures, whereas the use of global geometric cues is not influenced by changes in…

Purpose: Individuals with hearing loss engage in auditory training to improve their speech recognition. They typically practice listening to utterances spoken by unfamiliar talkers but never to utterances spoken by their most frequent communication partner (FCP)--speech they most likely desire to recognize--under the assumption that familiarity…

The present research examines the mechanisms underlying the comprehension of focus alternatives. In particular, we investigate whether listeners determine alternatives based on general semantic priming mechanisms or whether they only consider contrastive alternatives, elements that can replace the expression in focus. In a probe recognition…

False working memories readily emerge using a visual item-recognition variant of the converging associates task. Two experiments, manipulating study and test modality, extended prior working memory results by demonstrating a reliable false recognition effect (more false alarms to associatively related lures than to unrelated lures) within seconds…

Three experiments investigated the acquisition of English epistemic modal verbs (e.g., "may", "have to"). Semantically, these verbs encode possibility or necessity with respect to available evidence. Pragmatically, the use of weak epistemic modals often gives rise to scalar conversational inferences (e.g., "The toy may be…

Monitoring educational development in the early years of schooling is vital if practitioners, and policy makers, are to support students' learning, but the assessment of student achievement in developing countries can be a logistical headache. Maurice Walker reports on an innovative approach to assessment using tablets that is addressing that.