The purpose of this study was to examine the role and nature of phonology in silent reading of Japanese sentences. An experiment was conducted using a Japanese sentence acceptability judgment task. One important finding was that participants more rapidly rejected homophonic sentences in which one two-kanji compound word was replaced by its…

Text reading prosody and reading comprehension are related, but both rely on decoding. The aim of the current study was, therefore, to disentangle the contribution of decoding from that of prosody skills. We examined the performance on text reading prosody and speech prosody in fifth-grade children with age-appropriate decoding but weak…

This study investigated the effect of a touch-typing course on the spelling and narrative-writing skills on the computer of elementary school students. Data of 207 students in Grades 4, 5, and 6 were analysed using a pretest-posttest design. Students in the experimental group (n = 154) followed a touch-typing course, and those in the control group…

Joint attention--the ability to coordinate attention with a social partner--is critical for social communication, learning and the regulation of interpersonal relationships. Infants and young children with autism demonstrate impairments in both initiating and responding to joint attention bids in naturalistic settings. However, little is known…

On the evidence of four lexical-decision tasks in German, we examine speakers' sensitivity to internal morphological composition and abstract morphological rules during the processing of derived words, real and novel. In a lexical-decision task with delayed priming, speakers were presented with two-step derived nouns such as "Heilung…

Stress influences how we remember emotional events and how these events shape future behaviors. However, the impact of stress on memory specificity for emotional events has yet to be examined. To this end, the present study utilized a mnemonic discrimination task that taxes hippocampal pattern separation, the process of distinguishing between…

Prior research has used many variants of "be creative" or brainstorm instructions to enhance creativity in a variety of tasks. However, differences in instruction wording may lead to differences in instruction interpretation, and varying the placement of instructions before or after a written problem description may lead to differences…

Analogical reasoning is essential for transfer by supporting recognition of relational similarity. However, not all analogies are created equal. The source and target can be similar (near), or quite different (far). Previous research suggests that close comparisons facilitate children's relational abstraction. On the other hand, evidence from…

This paper tests a new method of teaching vocabulary to young second language learners through the medium of drama, specifically the effect of drama teaching techniques on vocabulary acquisition among primary school learners of Welsh. Vocabulary Acquisition via Drama (VAD) is based on principles derived from both process drama and communicative…

A hallmark of grammatical knowledge is the ability to parse novel syntactic structures. Previous artificial language studies have examined learning hierarchical structures, but few have involved meaningful language and shown generalization to novel structures. This study addressed this issue using the semiartificial language paradigm. The…

In science education, representations are necessary inter alia for the understanding of relationships between structures and systems. However, several studies have identified difficulties of students when working with representations. In the present study, we investigated students' responses (regarding their preference, test performance, mental…

The idea that characteristics acquired by an organism during its lifetime can be inherited by offspring and result in evolution is a substantial impediment to student understanding of evolution. In the current study, we performed a preliminary examination of how acquiring physical changes in a question prompt may differentially cue intuitive and…

From birth on, infants show long-term recognition memory for persons. Furthermore, infants from six months onwards are able to store and retrieve demonstrated actions over long-term intervals in deferred imitation tasks. Thus, information about the model demonstrating the object-related actions is stored and recognition memory for the objects as…

Frith's original notion of 'weak central coherence' suggested that increased local processing in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) resulted from reduced global processing. More recent accounts have emphasised superior local perception and suggested intact global integration. However, tasks often place local and global processing in direct trade-off,…

Background: Impairment in initiating joint attention (IJA) is associated with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in children, although it is unclear when impairments arise. Due to the early development of IJA use and late diagnosis of ASD, groups at high-risk of ASD, such as infants with an older sibling with ASD (ASIBs) and infants with fragile X…