Do the cognitive benefits of "interleaving"--the method of alternating between two or more skills or concepts during training--extend to foreign language learning? In four experiments, we investigated the efficacy of interleaved versus conventional blocked practice for teaching adult learners to conjugate Spanish verbs in the…

This article reports one eye-tracking and one sentence-completion experiment, examining the antecedent preferences for plural anaphora "they" and demonstrative "these." Our results show that the antecedent-grouping preference depends on type of referring expressions: specifically, the preference for "they" is to refer…

Two experiments investigated whether 4- and 5-year-old children choose to learn from informants who use more complex syntax (passive voice) over informants using more simple syntax (active voice). In Experiment 1 (N = 30), children viewed one informant who consistently used the passive voice and another who used active voice. When learning novel…

We investigated whether children at the ages of two and three years understand that a speaker's use of the definite article specifies a referent that is in common ground between speaker and listener. An experimenter and a child engaged in joint actions in which the experimenter chose one of three similar objects of the same category to perform an…

A body of research shows that grammatical gender, although an arbitrary category, is viewed as the system with its own meaning. However, the question remains to what extent does grammatical gender influence shaping our notions about objects when both verbal and visual information are available. Two experiments were conducted. The results obtained…

The use and understanding of ordinal terms (e.g., "first" and "second") is a developmental milestone that has been relatively unexplored in the preschool age range. In the present study, 4- and 5-year-olds watched as a reward was placed in one of three train cars labeled by the experimenter with an ordinal (e.g.,…

When learning their first language, children develop strategies for assigning semantic roles to sentence structures, depending on morphosyntactic cues such as case and word order. Traditionally, comprehension experiments have presented transitive clauses in isolation, and cross-linguistically children have been found to misinterpret object-first…

In the current study we investigate whether 2- and 3-year-old German children use intonation productively to mark the informational status of referents. Using a story-telling task, we compared children's and adults' intonational realization via pitch accent (H*, L* and de-accentuation) of New, Given, and Contrastive referents. Both children and…

If people believe that some property is true of all members of a class such as sofas, then they should also believe that the same property is true of all members of a conjunctively defined subset of that class such as uncomfortable handmade sofas. A series of experiments demonstrated a failure to observe this constraint, leading to what is termed…

Conjunction errors occur when participants incorrectly identify as "old" novel test stimuli created by recombining parts of two study stimuli (parent items). Prior studies have reported that the conjunction error rate is higher when parent items are studied together than when they are studied apart (a parent proximity effect). In several…