While attentional models of SLA postulate attention as crucial for learning to take place (e.g., Robinson, 1995b; Schmidt, 1990, 2001; Tomlin & Villa, 1994), the role that awareness or lack thereof plays remains debatable. Indeed, the studies that have empirically addressed the construct of unawareness reveal conflicting results (e.g.,…

The present study investigated whether children's representations of morphosyntactic information are abstract enough to guide early verb learning. Using an infant-controlled habituation paradigm with a switch design, Japanese-speaking children aged 1 ; 8 were habituated to two different events in which an object was engaging in an action. Each…

The article describes action research into a telecollaborative exchange between the Pädagogische Hochschule in Freiburg, Germany and the Pedagogical University in Krakow, Poland, which took place between October 2014 and January 2015. Both groups followed CALL teacher training study programmes and consisted of 16 students. The study aimed at…

Through computational modeling, here we examine whether visual and task characteristics of writing systems alone can account for lateralization differences in visual word recognition between different languages without assuming influence from left hemisphere (LH) lateralized language processes. We apply a hemispheric processing model of face…

Learning a new word consists of two primary tasks that have often been conflated into a single process: "referent selection", in which a child must determine the correct referent of a novel label, and "referent retention", which is the ability to store this newly formed label-object mapping in memory for later use. In addition,…

The literature on learning with animations has focused so far on subject matters in which changes over time depicted in the animation are mapped onto changes over time in the reality of the concepts to be learned. The experiments presented in this article, however, suggest that also a nontemporal mapping of facts, as in paired-associate learning…

Some researchers have argued that children's earliest symbols are based on their sensorimotor experience and that arbitrary symbol-referent mapping poses a challenge for them. If so, exposure to iconic symbols (such as one-finger-for-one-object manual gestures) might help children in a difficult domain such as number. We assessed 44 preschoolers'…

A paradigmatic test of executive control, the n-back task, is known to recruit a widely distributed parietal, frontal, and striatal "executive network," and is thought to require an equally wide array of executive functions. The mapping of functions onto substrates in such a complex task presents a significant challenge to any theoretical…

Objective: To identify facilitative strategies that could be used in developing a tobacco cessation program for community dental practices. Methods: Nominal group technique (NGT) meetings and a card-sort task were used to obtain formative data. A cognitive mapping approach involving multidimensional scaling and hierarchical cluster analysis was…

The current experiments address several concerns, both empirical and theoretical in nature, that have surfaced within the verb learning literature. They begin to reconcile what, until now, has been a large and largely unexplained gap between infants' well-documented ability to acquire verbs in the natural course of their lives and their rather…

Previous research suggests that competition among the objects present during referent selection influences young children's ability to learn words in fast mapping tasks. The present study systematically explored this issue with 30-month-old children. Children first received referent selection trials with a target object and either two, three or…

Previous studies have suggested that children's learning of the relation between number words and approximate numerosities depends on their verbal counting ability, and that children exhibit no knowledge of mappings between number words and approximate numerical magnitudes for number words outside their productive verbal counting range. In the…

Two experiments explored the mapping between language and mental representations of visual scenes. In both experiments, participants viewed, for example, a scene depicting a woman, a wine glass and bottle on the floor, an empty table, and various other objects. In Experiment 1, participants concurrently heard either "The woman will put the glass…

Individuals with Williams syndrome (WS) show a specific deficit in visuo-spatial abilities. This finding, however, derives mainly from performance on small-scale laboratory-based tasks. This study investigated large-scale route learning in individuals with WS and two matched control groups (moderate learning difficulty group [MLD], typically…

Though auditory pitch is customarily mapped in Western cultures onto spatial verticality (high-low), both anthropological reports and cognitive studies suggest that pitch may be mapped onto a wide variety of other domains. We collected a total number of 35 pitch mappings and investigated in four experiments how these mappings are used and…