Previous evidence suggests that when speakers produce sentences from memory or as picture descriptions, their choices of sentence structure are influenced by how easy it is to retrieve sentence material (accessibility). Three experiments assessed whether this pattern holds in naturalistic, interactive dialogue. Pairs of speakers took turns asking…

Scientists and teachers have worked together to produce teaching materials for the Very Small Radio Telescope (VSRT), an easy-to-use, low-cost apparatus that can be used in multiple laboratory experiments in high school and university physics and astronomy classes. In this article, we describe the motivation for the VSRT and several of the…

Surface acting and deep acting with customers are strategies for service performance, but evidence for their effectiveness is limited and mixed. We propose that deep acting is an effective strategy for most employees, whereas surface acting's effect on performance effectiveness depends on employee extraversion. In Study 1, restaurant servers who…

A tracking state increases the bandwidth of pen-based interfaces. However, this state is difficult to detect with default visual feedback. This paper reports on two experiments that are designed to evaluate multimodal feedback for pointing tasks (both 1D and 2D) in tracking state. In 1D pointing experiments, results show that there is a…

The use of silver in commercial products has proliferated in recent years owing to its antibacterial properties. Food containers impregnated with micro-sized silver promise long food life, but there is some concern because silver can leach out of the plastic and into the stored food. This laboratory experiment gives students the opportunity to…

An experimental procedure, using an apparatus that is easy to construct, was developed to incorporate a quantitative electrogravimetric determination of the solution nickel content into an undergraduate or advanced high school quantitative analysis laboratory. This procedure produces results comparable to the procedure used for the gravimetric…

An experiment has been developed in which the hydrogen-atom abstraction and the coupling of propionitrile, using Fenton's reagent, are investigated. Students learn about the regiochemistry of radical formation, the stereochemistry of product formation, and the interpretation of GC-MS data, in a safe reaction that can be easily completed in one…

A five-session laboratory project was designed to familiarize or increase the laboratory proficiency of biology students and others with techniques and instruments commonly used in molecular biology research laboratories and industries. In this project, the EZ-Tn5 transposon is used to generate and screen a large number of cells transformed with…

This article provides an example of a teacher's learning, since the author only became aware of the microscale technique described very late in his professional career. The technique provides a convenient method of preparing and manipulating gases on a very small scale and a relatively safe means of demonstrating reactions that would be very…

Reduced costs and greater time efficiency are often quoted among the main benefits of microscale chemistry. Do these benefits outweigh some of the limitations and difficulties faced in terms of students needing to develop new manipulation skills, and teachers requiring training in terms of implementation and management? This article describes a…

In 2008, nearly 31% of vehicle fatalities were related to failure to adhere to safe vehicle speeds (National Highway Traffic Safety Administration [NHTSA], 2009). The current study evaluated the effect of a rectangular rapid-flashing beacon (RRFB) triggered by excessive speed on vehicle speed using a combined alternating treatments and reversal…

Eye movements were monitored as subjects read sentences containing high- or low-predictable target words. The extent to which target words were predictable from prior context was varied: Half of the target words were predictable, and the other half were unpredictable. In addition, the length of the target word varied: The target words were short…

We designed two experiments to investigate subsyllabic unit preference in reading Pinyin in Chinese kindergarteners. Pinyin is an alphabetic transcription used in Mainland China to assist children in learning to read Chinese characters. In Pinyin instruction, teachers rely heavily on onset-rime division. Spoken Chinese, however, encourages…

This laboratory exercise is an inquiry-based investigation developed around the core experiment where students, working alone or in groups, each purify and analyze their own prescreened colored proteins using immobilized metal affinity chromatography (IMAC). Here, we present reagents and protocols that allow 12 different proteins to be purified in…

This article examines the issue of using authentic speech data in an experimental research paradigm. We report exploratory studies to replicate a seminal investigation of listeners' abilities to predict sentence completion in constructed read-aloud data. Our initial intention was to see whether the same gating instrument used on authentic talk…