To test a central assumption of the increased perceptual capacity account in individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), the effects of perceptual load and target-stimulus degradation on auditory detection sensitivity were contrasted. Fourteen adolescents with ASD and 16 neurotypical controls performed a visual letter search task under three…

In science education, representations are necessary inter alia for the understanding of relationships between structures and systems. However, several studies have identified difficulties of students when working with representations. In the present study, we investigated students' responses (regarding their preference, test performance, mental…

When bilinguals speak, both fluent language systems become activated in parallel and exert an influence on speech production. As a consequence of maintaining separation between the two linguistic systems, bilinguals are purported to develop enhanced executive control functioning. Like bilinguals, individuals who speak two dialects must also…

Text length is considered as one of the factors that cause listening task difficulty along with others such as speech rate, clarity of voice, accents, text genre and topic. Despite all these factors, teachers sometimes consider text length as the single reason for a listening activity's difficulty. Not many studies have focused on the length as a…

43 typically-developed adults and 35 adults with ASD performed a cartoon faux pas test. Adults with ASD apparently over-detected faux pas despite good comprehension abilities, and were generally slower at responding. Signal detection analysis demonstrated that the ASD participants had significantly greater difficulty detecting whether a cartoon…

The present study investigates the comprehension of syntactic and affective prosody in adults with autism spectrum disorder without accompanying cognitive deficits (ASD w/o cognitive deficits) as well as age-, education- and gender-matched unimpaired adults, while processing orally presented sentences. Two experiments were conducted: (a) an…

Identifying specific language impairment (SLI) in bilingual children represents a clinical challenge because of similarities in language behavior between child second language learners and monolinguals with SLI and because of the lack of standardized language tests on bilingual children. This study investigated the relevance of a LITMUS (Language…

Second Language learners' oral task performance has been one of interesting and research generating areas of investigations in the field of second language acquisition specially, task-based language teaching and learning. The main purpose of the present study is to investigate the effect of focus on form and task complexity on L2 learners' oral…

Studies of supervised Categorization have demonstrated limited Categorization performance in participants with autism spectrum disorders (ASD), however little research has been conducted regarding unsupervised Categorization in this population. This study explored unsupervised Categorization using two stimulus sets that differed in their…

We ask whether an adult learner's knowledge of their native language impedes statistical learning in a new language beyond just word segmentation (as previously shown). In particular, we examine the impact of native-language word-form phonotactics on learners' ability to segment words into their component morphemes and learn phonologically…

The belief that studying mathematics improves reasoning skills, known as the Theory of Formal Discipline (TFD), has been held since the time of Plato. Research evidence supports this idea, at least in the context of students who had chosen to study post-compulsory mathematics. Here we examined the development of reasoning skills in 16- to…

This study investigates the relationship in L2 writing between raters' judgments of communicative adequacy and linguistic complexity by means of six-point Likert scales, and general measures of linguistic performance. The participants were 39 learners of Italian and 32 of Dutch, who wrote two short argumentative essays. The same writing tasks…

Informed by the cognition hypothesis (Robinson, 2011), recent studies indicate that more cognitively complex tasks can result in better incorporation of feedback during interaction and, as a consequence, more learning. It is not known, however, how task complexity and feedback work together in computerized environments. The present study addressed…

This article investigates the second language (L2) acquisition of two expressions of the semantic feature [definite] in Russian, a language without articles, by English and Korean native speakers. Within the Feature Reassembly approach (Lardiere, 2009), Slabakova (2009) has argued that reassembling features that are represented overtly in the…

Dyslexia has been widely held to be associated with deficient temporal processing. It is, however, not established that the slower visual processing of dyslexic readers is not a secondary effect of task difficulty. To illustrate this we re-analyze data from Liddle et al. (2009) who studied temporal order judgment in dyslexia and plotted the…