This text comments on the Keynote article 'Microvariation in multilingual situations: The importance of property-by-property acquisition' by Marit Westergaard, who argues for Full Transfer Potential within the Linguistic Proximity Model in third language (L3) acquisition. The commentary points at some theoretical and methodological issues related…

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to investigate the role of external feedback in auditory perceptual learning of school-age children as compared with that of adults. Method: Forty-eight children (7-9 years of age) and 64 adults (20-35 years of age) conducted a training session using an auditory frequency discrimination (difference limen for…

Purpose: Most educational assessments tend to be constructed in a close-ended format, which is easier to score consistently and more affordable. However, recent work has leveraged computation text methods from the information sciences to make open-ended measurement more effective and reliable for older students. This study asks whether such text…

During the first 5 years of life, the versatility, breadth, and fidelity with which children imitate change dramatically. Currently, there is no model to explain what underlies such significant changes. To that end, the present study examined whether task-independent but domain-specific--elemental--imitation mechanism explains performance across…

Understanding factors affecting the acceptance of E-Learning Systems Enabled with Cultural Contextual Features by lnstructors in Jamaican Tertiary Institutions is an important topic that's relevant to not only educational institutions, but developers of software for on line learning. The use of the unified theory of acceptance and use of…

This study examines, within the domain of science, the characteristics of words that predict word knowledge and word learning. The authors identified a set of word characteristics--length, part of speech, polysemy, frequency, morphological frequency, domain specificity, and concreteness--that, based on earlier research, were prime candidates to…

The purpose of the present study was to investigate incidental sequence learning across the lifespan. We tested 50 children (aged 7-16), 50 young adults (aged 20-30), and 50 older adults (aged >65) with a sequence learning paradigm that involved both a task and a response sequence. After several blocks of practice, all age groups slowed down…

The importance of early self-regulatory skill has seen increased focus in the applied research literature given the implications of these skills for early school success. A three-factor latent structure of self-regulation consisting of compliance, cool executive control, and hot executive control was tested against alternative models and retained…

The purpose of this study was to describe and examine a model for assessing student learning through reflection in service-learning courses. This model utilized a course-embedded process to frame, facilitate, support, and assess students' depth of learning and critical thinking. Student reflection products in two service-learning courses (a…

Neuronal modifications that accompany normal aging occur in brain neuropils and might share commonalties across phyla including the most successful group, the Insecta. This study addresses the kinds of neuronal modifications associated with loss of memory that occur in the hemimetabolous insect "Periplaneta americana." Among insects that display…

Two experiments were conducted to examine children's generality of imitative learning by measuring its transfer to other nonimitative performance conditions. Subjects in the first experiment were 14 children (mean age 8.5 years) from the Los Angeles County-University of Southern California Medical Center's Children's Psychiatric Out-Patient…

Tests the hypothesis that there is a relationship between children's comprehension of a syntactic form and the effectiveness of modeling in promoting imitation of that form. Subjects were 71 four- and five-year-old children. (Author/MP)

The controversy over the optimal age for learning a second language is discussed, examining, from the perspective of Piagetian theory: (1) the argument which suggests that children have an advantage in language learning; and (2) the arguments which states that adults have an advantage in language learning. The first part provides an overview of…

Second-, fourth-, and sixth-grade children were tested on a multiple-classification task to investigate the relationship between age and observational learning. (Editor)

Results lend support to the notion that children at different ages are differentially responsive to various conceptual-strategy models. (Author)