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…

Willingness to communicate (WTC) research has recently witnessed a paradigm shift with the more recent studies looking at the shifting and dynamic nature of the variable. A growing body of literature has interpreted such dynamicity from a complex dynamic systems (CDS) perspective. The theory of CDS has four basic properties, one of which, and the…

This study investigates learner engagement in pedagogic task performance by triangulating multiple sources of data to gain insight into the cognitive and affective processes that take place on a range of tasks and how they engage learners of different target languages. The study provides a detailed analysis of 4 learners' second language (L2)…

Gestures are associated with powerful forms of understanding; however, their causative role in mathematics reasoning is less clear. We inhibit college students' gestures by restraining their hands, and examine the impact on language, recall, intuition, and mathematical justifications of geometric conjectures. We test four mutually exclusive…

When people are asked to perform actions, they remember those actions better than if they are asked to talk about the same actions. But when people talk, they often gesture with their hands, thus adding an action component to talking. The question we asked in this study was whether producing gesture along with speech makes the information encoded…

Working memory is believed to play a central role in almost all domains of higher cognition, yet the specific mechanisms involved in working memory are still fiercely debated. We describe a neuroimaging experiment with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and a companion behavioral experiment, and in both we seek to adjudicate between…

The influence of selected cognitive factors on age-related changes in speech recognition was examined by measuring the effects of recall task, speech rate, and availability of contextual cues on the recognition performance of 10 young listeners (ages 18-40) and 10 older listeners (ages 65-76). Hearing loss affected performance. (Author/CR)

A listener's inferences about why speakers say what they do can influence what the listener remembers. Psychologists studying memory for discourse have neglected to give attention to the source of the information to be remembered. In a study to determine what effects adding information has on remembering initial discourse, subjects listening to…

This study examines recall of narrative prose for evidence of underlying structures such as the grammar used in the story's sentence structure. Subjects listened to repeated presentations of a tape recording of two pages from a history book, with verbals collected after each presentation. The subjects used in this experiment were 13 undergraduate…

This experiment was designed to determine how oral report activities, following exposure to an informative message, can influence children's retention of topical and factual information from the message. The message was a prose passage about modes of transportation. Second grade students (N=51) were subjects. A third of the children presented oral…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 12 titles deal with the following topics: advance organizers; a comparison of the effectiveness and efficiency of behavioral objectives and sample tests; anaphoric nominal substitution and its relationship to reading…

Proponents of the cognitive approach to language teaching list linguistic competence as the primary instructional objective and attribute considerable importance to listening comprehension. For the student, linguistic competence would be knowledge of grammatical components of the language and its vocabulary. Understanding oral messages is an…