To determine the areas involved in reorganization of language to the right hemisphere after early left hemisphere injury, we compared fMRI activation patterns during four production and comprehension tasks in post-surgical epilepsy patients with either left (LH) or right hemisphere (RH) speech dominance (determined by Wada testing) and healthy…

In order to be adaptive, cognition requires knowledge about the statistical structure of the environment. We show that decision performance and the selection between cue-based and exemplar-based inference mechanisms can depend critically on how this knowledge is acquired. Two types of learning tasks are distinguished: "learning by comparison", by…

Some situations require one to quickly stop an initiated response. Recent evidence suggests that rapid stopping engages a mechanism that has diffuse effects on the motor system. For example, stopping the hand dampens the excitability of the task-irrelevant leg. However, it is unclear whether this "global suppression" could apply across wider motor…

In this article, we propose a theoretical connection between research on learning and research on teaching through recent research on students' learning trajectories (LTs). We define learning trajectory based instruction (LTBI) as teaching that uses students' LTs as the basis for instructional decisions. We use mathematics as the context for our…

Children (aged 6-10) and adults (total N = 136) completed a novel visual perspective-taking task that allowed quantitative comparisons across age groups. All age groups found it harder to judge the other person's perspective when it differed from their own. This egocentric interference did not decrease with age, even though, overall, performance…

In recent years, multiple studies have shown that the languages of a bilingual interact during processing. We investigated sign activation as deaf children read words. In a word-picture verification task, we manipulated the underlying sign equivalents. We presented children with word-picture pairs for which the sign translation equivalents varied…

Many differences in brain activity have been reported between persons who stutter (PWS) and typically fluent controls during oral reading tasks. An earlier meta-analysis of imaging studies identified stutter-related regions, but recent studies report less agreement with those regions. A PET study on adult dextral PWS (n = 18) and matched fluent…

"AU" /o/ and "AN" /a/ in French are both complex graphemes, but they vary in their strength of association to their respective sounds. The letter sequence "AU" is systematically associated to the phoneme /o/, and as such is always parsed as a complex grapheme. However, "AN" can be associated with either one…

Atypical electrodermal and cardiovascular response patterns in psychopathic individuals are thought to be biological indicators of fearless and disinhibition. This study investigated the relationship between psychopathic traits and these autonomic response patterns using a countdown task in 843 children (aged 9-10 years). Heart rate (HR) and…

In a companion study, eye-movement analyses in the Tower of London task (TOL) revealed independent indicators of functionally separable cognitive processes during problem solving, with processes of building up an internal representation of the problem preceding actual planning processes. These results imply that processes of internalization and…

This study assessed knowledge of numerically quantified English sentences in two learner populations--second language (L2) learners and deaf learners--whose acquisition of English occurs under conditions of restricted access to the target language input. Under the experimental test conditions, interlanguage parallels were predicted to arise from…

Differences in infant distress and regulatory behaviors based on the quality of attachment to mother, emotion context (frustration versus fear), and whether or not mothers were actively involved in the emotion-eliciting tasks were examined in a sample of ninety-eight 16-month-old infants and their mothers. Dyads participated in the Strange…

Background: Current theories of self-regulated learning predict a positive link between student monitoring accuracy and performance: students who more accurately monitor their knowledge of a particular set of materials are expected to more effectively regulate their subsequent study of those materials, which in turn should lead to higher test…

Pronouns seem to be acquired in an asymmetrical way, where children confuse the meaning of pronouns with reflexives up to the age of six, but not vice versa. Children's production of the same referential expressions is appropriate at the age of four. However, response-based tasks, the usual means to investigate child language comprehension, are…

While increasing evidence points to a critical role for the motor system in language processing, the focus of previous work has been on the linguistic category of verbs. Here we tested whether nouns are effective in modulating the motor system and further whether different kinds of nouns--those referring to artifacts or natural items, and items…