Updating and extending the work of O'Leary-Kelly, Martocchio, and Frink (1994), with this meta-analysis on goal setting and group performance we show that specific difficult goals yield considerably higher group performance compared with nonspecific goals (d = 0.80 plus or minus 0.35, k = 23 effect sizes). Moderately difficult and easy goals were…

Problem Statement: Previous studies showed that children with special health care needs are at increased risk for future linguistic problems and deficits in narrative abilities. Despite this evidence of increased risk, there has been limited research on the impact of young children's health problems on specific aspects of linguistic development.…

The present study adds to the computer-mediated communication (CMC) literature by exploring oral learner-to-learner interaction using Skype, a free and widely used Internet software program. In particular, this task-based study has a two-fold goal. Firstly, it explores possible differences between two modes of oral CMC (audio and video) and…

Studies investigating the specificity hypothesis have not always demonstrated that reliance on a specific source of feedback increases with practice. The goal of the present study was to address this inconsistency by having participants practice a throwing task with or without vision at incremental levels (10, 50, 100, or 200 acquisition trials).…

Using a population-based sample of 263 individuals ranging from 6 to 89 years of age, we investigated the gains and losses in the abilities to (a) use exogenous cues to shift attention covertly and (b) ignore conflicting information across the life span. The participants' ability to shift visual attention was tested by a typical Posner-type…

The purpose of this study is to analyse the effect of metalinguistic instruction on students' metalinguistic knowledge on the one hand, and on students' performance in metalinguistic and oral production tasks on the other hand. Two groups of primary school students learning English as a foreign language were chosen. One of them (Rule group) was…

The optional use of morphology attested in second language learners has been attributed either to a representational deficit or to a "surface" problem with respect to the realization of inflectional affixes. In this article we contribute to this issue by providing empirical data from the early interlanguage of Greek learners of Turkish. Three…

This chapter presents the results of a study on interlanguage variation. The production of four L2 learners of Italian, tested four times at yearly intervals while engaged in four oral tasks, is compared to that of two native speakers, and analysed with quantitative CAF measures. Thus, time, task type, nativeness, as well as group vs. individual…

School impact media studies indicate that a well-staffed and funded school library media program with a certified school library media specialist (SLMS) positively correlates with increased student achievement. SLMS must have a shared understanding of their roles and responsibilities to positively impact student success. In an effort to determine…

In 8 experiments, the authors examined the use of representations of self-to-object or object-to-object spatial relations during locomotion. Participants learned geometrically regular or irregular layouts of objects while standing at the edge or in the middle and then pointed to objects while blindfolded in 3 conditions: before turning (baseline),…

Two experiments were conducted to assess the effects of various constraints on the processing of jokes. Participants read humorous jokes and nonhumorous alternatives of the jokes, which were presented in 3 conditions that manipulated discourse context (comedy, political, and control). In Experiment 1, participants rated the funniness of texts and…

Immediate repetition priming for faces was examined across a range of prime durations in a threshold identification task. Similar to word repetition priming results, short duration face primes produced positive priming whereas long duration face primes eliminated or reversed this effect. A habituation model of such priming effects predicted that…

The current study assessed deictic relational responding in people with schizophrenia. A perspective-taking task and a mental states attribution task were employed with a sample of 15 patients diagnosed with schizophrenia and 15 age-matched controls. Results revealed poorer performance of participants with schizophrenia in responding in accordance…

EFL Learners often have problems using the past tense accurately. In an attempt to solve their problem, this study was carried out to examine the effects of using two different types of output tasks on noticing and learning the English past tense. Sixty female school-age EFL learners were divided into groups of 18, 19, and 23 participants. A…

The present study was an attempt to investigate the effects of premodified input, interactionally modified input and modified output on 80 EFL learners' comprehension of new words. The subjects were randomly assigned into four groups of pre modified input, interactionally modified input, modified output and unmodified (control) groups. Each group…