This text critically examines traditional methodologies for teaching grammar in the context of Portuguese as a Foreign Language (PFL). It proposes an alternative, eclectic approach, which can be used in any foreign language. Drawing on evidence from research and pedagogical practices, it highlights areas for improvement in current approaches, such…

Although retrieval practice is a more effective learning strategy than restudy, students oftentimes prefer the latter. Previous studies have investigated this suboptimal decision at strategy level. The present study, however, focused on the learning task level: How perceived mental effort and perceived learning during task performance influence…

Iconicity, or the resemblance between form and meaning, is often ascribed to a special status and contrasted with default assumptions of arbitrariness in spoken language. But does iconicity in spoken language have a special status when it comes to learnability? A simple way to gauge learnability is to see how well something is retrieved from…

We investigated the effects of readymade versus self-generated graphic organizers (GOs) on learning, comparing the performances of undergraduates (N = 81) tasked with learning a multimedia document. This document was either presented on its own ("control group"), with a readymade GO, or with a blank GO that students had to fill in either…

From limited evidence, children track the regularities of their language impressively fast and they infer generalized rules that apply to novel instances. This study investigated what drives the inductive leap from memorizing specific items and statistical regularities to extracting abstract rules. We propose an innovative entropy model that…

The learning-style theory of Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) (Qian, Lipkin, Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 5:77, 2011) states that ASD individuals differ from neurotypics in the way they learn and store information about the environment and its structure. ASD would rather adopt a "lookup-table" strategy (LUT: memorizing each…

The present study aimed at developing young children's knowledge of the structure and function of orthographic components of Chinese characters and words. Grade 2, eight-year-old Chinese children (N = 541) were taught a twelve-week training programme in two quasi experimental conditions: analytic and synthetic approach (ASA), and integrated…

The phrasing of task instructions can facilitate or hinder the learning process. In this study, three groups of participants (N = 526) performed a foreign vocabulary memorization task, with modified instructions for each group. The instructions were either learning oriented, encouraging participants to improve their abilities; outcome oriented,…

Past studies have suggested that study time allocation partially mediates age relations on memory performance in a verbal task. To identify whether this applied to a different material modality, participants ages 20-87 completed a spatial task in addition to a traditional verbal task. In both the verbal and the spatial task, increased age was…

The present study investigated the effects of approach versus avoidance motivation on declarative learning. Human participants navigated a virtual reality version of the Morris water task, a classic spatial memory paradigm, adapted to permit the experimental manipulation of motivation during learning. During this task, participants were instructed…

Artificial grammar learning constitutes a well-established model for the acquisition of grammatical knowledge in a natural setting. Previous neuroimaging studies demonstrated that Broca's area (left BA 44/45) is similarly activated by natural syntactic processing and artificial grammar learning. The current study was conducted to investigate the…

Recent work on adult metacognition indicates that although metacognitive monitoring often guides control operations, sometimes it follows control operations and is based on the feedback from them. Consistent with this view, in self-paced learning, judgments of learning (JOLs) made at the end of each study trial "decreased" with the amount of time…