Words and pictures with earlier learned labels are processed faster than words and pictures with later learned labels. This age-of-acquisition (AoA) effect has been extensively investigated in many different types of tasks. This article provides a review of these studies including picture naming, word naming, speeded word naming, word…

In a mental rotation task, children 5 and 6 years of age and adults had to decide as quickly as possible if a photograph of a hand showed a left or a right limb. The visually presented hands were left and right hands in palm or in back view, presented in four different angles of rotation. Participants had to give their responses with their own…

It is acknowledged that contrast plays an important role in understanding discourse and information structure. While it is commonly assumed that contrast can be marked by intonation only, our understanding of the intonational realization of contrast is limited. For German there is mainly introspective evidence that the rising theme accent (or…

Pavlovian stimuli can markedly elevate instrumental responding, an effect known as Pavlovian-instrumental transfer (PIT). As the role of the ventral tegmental area (VTA) in PIT is yet unknown, we examined the effects of transient VTA inactivation by direct microinjections of a mixture of the GABA[subscript A] and GABA[subscript B] receptor…

Rats were trained by shocking them in a closed compartment. When subsequently tested in the same closed compartment with no shock, normal rats showed an increased tendency to freeze. They also showed an increased tendency to actively avoid the compartment when given access to an adjacent neutral compartment for the first time. Amygdala…

The prefrontal cortex (PFC) has a well-established role in the inhibition of inappropriate responding, and evidence suggests that the infralimbic (IL) region of the rat medial PFC (MPFC) may be involved in some aspects of extinction of conditioned fear. MPFC lesions including, but not those sparing the IL cortex increase spontaneous recovery of…

We investigated whether postextinction administration of methylene blue (MB) could enhance retention of an extinguished conditioned response. MB is a redox compound that at low doses elevates cytochrome oxidase activity, thereby improving brain energy production. Saline or MB (4 mg/kg intraperitoneally) were administered to rats for 5 d following…

This study investigated attention control in tasks involving the processing of relational terms (more highly grammaticized linguistic stimuli: spatial prepositions) and non-relational terms (less highly grammaticized lexical stimuli: nouns) in a first (L1) and second language (L2). Participants were adult bilinguals with greater proficiency in…

The purpose of this article was to examine the effect of base rate occurrence of race, sex, and student achievement on the accuracy of a problem-solving model of assessment and teacher referral. All students in first and second grade (n = 182) at a participating school were exposed to four screening measures. Students who performed poorly on at…

Stimuli designed to selectively elicit motion or color processing were used in a developmental event-related potential study with adults and children aged 6, 7 and 8. A positivity at posterior site INZ (P-INZ) was greater to motion stimuli only in adults. The P1 and N1 were larger to color stimuli in both adults and children, but earlier to motion…

The present study investigated the language familiarity hypothesis formulated by Mackay [(1970). How does language familiarity influence stuttering under delayed auditory feedback? "Perceptual and Motor Skills", 30, 655-669] that bilinguals speak faster and stutter less under delayed auditory feedback (DAF) when speaking their more…

Online comprehension of naturally spoken and perceptually degraded words was assessed in 95 children ages 12 to 31 months. The time course of word recognition was measured by monitoring eye movements as children looked at pictures while listening to familiar target words presented in unaltered, time-compressed, and low-pass-filtered forms. Success…

Sixty-two adults with mental retardation of heterogeneous etiology performed four facial emotion discrimination tasks and two facial nonemotion tasks. Staff members familiar with the participants completed measures of social adjustment (the Socialization and Communication domains of the Vineland Adaptive Behavior Scales and the Social Performance…

While the majority of students in schools tend to respond to effective general academic instruction and proactive schoolwide discipline systems, some continue to exhibit intense and chronic problem behaviors, even in the best schools. For these students, schools are highly variable in their ability and capacity to provide accurate and durable…

Low-frequency words produce more hits and fewer false alarms than high-frequency words in a recognition task. The low-frequency hit rate advantage has sometimes been attributed to processes that operate during the recognition test (e.g., L. M. Reder et al., 2000). When tasks other than recognition, such as recall, cued recall, or associative…