Previous studies suggested that social anxiety is associated with interpretation bias, theory of mind deficit, and eye gaze avoidance when identifying facial emotions. We tested the hypothesis that socially anxious individuals would be more affected by mask use during facial emotion recognition. 88 healthy undergraduates with various levels of…

Increasing evidence suggests that success in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields is not only dependent upon one's actual STEM-relevant abilities but also upon one's STEM-relevant attitudes--in particular, math and spatial attitudes. Here, we examine whether simply mentioning the math or spatial relevance of a task affects…

In this study, we compared children's and adults' ability to accurately identify target words in written minimal pairs (WMPs) with graphemically similar letters while accounting for factors such as gender, similarity of the middle letter in WMPs, mono- versus dimorphemic WMPs, number of syllable, homography, and imageability. Fifty children and…

This research investigated whether observing beat gesture and hearing contrastive accenting with novel words enhances their learning in early childhood and whether these effects differ by sex in light of sex differences in the pace of language development. Fifty-three 3- to 5-year-old boys and girls learned pairs of novel words with contrasting…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to investigate how speech naturalness relates to masculinity-femininity and gender identification (accuracy and reaction time) for cisgender male and female speakers as well as transmasculine and transfeminine speakers. Method: Stimuli included spontaneous speech samples from 20 speakers who are transgender…

Two eye-tracking experiments tested (a) whether L2 learners benefit from the consistency of input modality (auditory instead of written processing instruction [PI] training) and (b) whether they benefit from training using the same voice as the test voice. Results confirmed a robust effect of PI training on picture-selection accuracy, yet the…

The paper-and-pencil Mental Rotation Test (Vandenberg & Kuse, 1978) consistently produces large sex differences favoring men (Voyer, Voyer, & Bryden, 1995). In this task, participants select 2 of 4 answer choices that are rotations of a probe stimulus. Incorrect choices (i.e., foils) are either mirror reflections of the probe or…

This study examined accuracy on syllable-final (coda) consonants in newly-learned English-like nonwords to determine whether school-aged bilingual children may be more vulnerable to making errors on English-only codas than their monolingual, English-speaking peers, even at a stage in development when phonological accuracy in productions of…

We had 3 aims in the present study: (a) to examine the dimensionality of various evaluative approaches to scoring writing samples (e.g., quality, productivity, and curriculum-based measurement [CBM] writing scoring), (b) to investigate unique language and cognitive predictors of the identified dimensions, and (c) to examine gender gap in the…

We had 3 aims in the present study: (a) to examine the dimensionality of various evaluative approaches to scoring writing samples (e.g., quality, productivity, and curriculum-based measurement [CBM] writing scoring), (b) to investigate unique language and cognitive predictors of the identified dimensions, and (c) to examine gender gap in the…