When presented with several time-compressed sentences, young adults' performance improves with practice. Such adaptation has not been studied in older adults. To study age-related changes in perceptual learning, the authors tested young and older adults' ability to adapt to degraded speech. First, the authors showed that older adults, when equated…

The ability to critically evaluate whether information presented actually supports a given claim is essential for cognitive and social development. This paper presents a study focusing on developmental and contextual aspects of this ability (called antilogos). We tested antilogos for different variables: age group (Grades 8 and 10), direction of…

In this article, I examine my attempts as an instructor in a university-based school leadership program to cross the generational divide with my students by using democracy as the central concept for understanding what is meant by a quality American education for all children. I guide the course according to the democratic learning principles that…

The experiments reported here were concerned with the development of delayed self-recognition. Children were videotaped playing a game and were marked covertly with a sticker on their forehead while doing so. The findings, of both a cross-sectional sample and a prospective longitudinal one, revealed that 3- but not 2.5-year-old children reached to…

The effects of gaze direction on memory for faces were studied in children from three different age groups (6-7, 8-9, and 10-11 years old) using a computerized version of a task devised by Hood, Macrae, Cole-Davies and Dias (2003). Participants were presented with a sequence of faces in an encoding phase, and were then required to judge which…

Toddlers' (MA = 22 and 27 months) ability to extend newly taught verbs to new situational and sentential contexts was investigated. Children were interactively taught two novel verbs, presented in only the transitive frame (e.g. "You're lorping the ball"), in a playroom setting. They then viewed the verb actions presented on side-by-side monitors…

Two experiments examined whether young and older adults differ in comprehending sentences that contain temporary syntactic closure ambiguities. Experiment 1 examined age-related differences using the Auditory Moving Window (AMW) task, in which sentences were presented in a segment-by-segment self-paced fashion. Experiment 2 examined age-related…

Situated within the framework of the conceptual metaphor theory (Lakoff & Johnson, 1999), this study investigated young children's understanding of metaphorical extensions of spatial motion. Metaphor was defined as a conceptual-linguistic mapping between a source and a target domain. The study focused on metaphors that are structured by the source…

Two studies investigating young readers' use of conjunctions are reported. In Study One, 145 eight- to ten-year-olds completed one of two narrative cloze tasks in which different types of conjunction were deleted. Performance for additive conjunctions was not affected by age in this study, but older children were more likely to select the target…

Trainers need to consider changes in working practices, which, it is argued, influence managers' perceptions of their careers. A total of 540 managers were interviewed, and a questionnaire was used to measure the relative importance of individual career anchors. It was found that younger managers were more orientated towards their own skills and…

Editor-in-chief James Morrison sat down with Deneen Frazier Bowen at the 2005 National Educational Computing Conference to discuss her unique presentation "The Natives are Restless," a series of dramatic sketches dealing with the utilization of technology in educational settings. Bowen's sketches examined students' difficulties in relating school…

Absent reference comprehension is a critical achievement of early development, yet little is known about its emergence. In the current study, 12- and 16-month-old infants' recognition of properties of mentioned absent things was used as an index of absent reference comprehension. Infants were presented with displays matching the color and prior…

This study investigated the effectiveness of metacognitive strategies in teaching reading comprehension to five Chinese children with physical and multiple disabilities. Results suggested that metacognitive instructional strategies might be effective. Further research using various methods/designs on children of different ages and academic levels…

This study investigated the effects of age, hearing loss, and cochlear implantation on mothers' speech to infants and children. We recorded normal-hearing (NH) mothers speaking to their children as they typically would do at home and speaking to an adult experimenter. Nine infants (10-37 months) were hearing-impaired and had used a cochlear…

Over half the world's population speaks a tone language, yet infant speech perception research has typically focused on consonants and vowels. Very young infants can discriminate a wide range of native and nonnative consonants and vowels, and then in a process of "perceptual reorganization" over the 1st year, discrimination of most…