An implicit word learning paradigm was designed to test the hypothesis that children who came to the task of L2 vocabulary acquisition with poorer L1 phonological awareness (PA) are less capable of extracting phonological patterns from L2 and thus have difficulties capitalizing on this knowledge to support L2 vocabulary learning. A group of…

Usage patterns for common nouns continue to change well past the early years of language acquisition in free naming (Andersen, 1975; Ameel, Malt, & Storms, 2008). The current research evaluates whether this continued evolution is shown in receptive judgments as well, given their differing cognitive demands. We found an extended learning…

This paper looks at the drawings of a sample of 118 children aged between 4 and 7 years old on the topic of plant life and relates the content to their knowledge of the concept of living things. The research project uses two types of tests: a task to analyse the level of understanding of the concept of living things and a free drawing activity.…

Adult literacy training is known to be difficult in terms of teaching and maintenance (Abadzi, 2003), perhaps because adults who recently learned to read in their first language have not acquired reading automaticity. This study examines fast word recognition process in neoliterate adults, to evaluate whether they show evidence of perceptual…

The development of a gendered identity is a process that both boys and girls navigate to construct ideas about the men and women they will become. There is little research on this process for men with intellectual disabilities (ID). This study aimed to explore the ideas that teenage boys with ID develop while thinking about the men they will…

This article reports on the usage of Interactive read-alouds to help students decode science diagrams and other visual information. Three short vignettes are featured from a second-grade teacher, illustrating the research-based recommendations for introducing students to the graphics of science within an authentic classroom activity--the…

Participants studied category-exemplar pairs ("FRUIT Cherry," "FRUIT Grape") and then practiced some of the items ("Cherry"). In Experiment 1, practice that involved retrieving the item from memory suppressed recall of related items ("Grape"), a finding known as the retrieval-induced forgetting (RIF) effect.…

Attentional theories of associative learning and categorization propose that learning about the predictiveness of a stimulus influences the amount of attention that is paid to that stimulus. Three experiments tested this idea by looking at the extent to which stimuli that had previously been experienced as predictive or nonpredictive in a…

Mand training is often a primary focus in early language instruction and typically includes mands that are positively reinforced. However, mands maintained by negative reinforcement are also important skills to teach. These include mands to escape aversive demands or unwanted items. Another type of negatively reinforced mand important to teach…

The Deese/Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm comprises the study of lists in which words (e.g., bed, pillow, etc.) are all associates of a single nonstudied critical item (e.g., sleep). The probability of falsely recalling or recognising nonstudied critical items is often similar to (or sometimes higher than) the probability of correctly recalling…

Inhibition of Return (IOR) is conventionally defined by slow responses to targets that appear at the same location as a prior attentional cue, relative to a condition in which targets appear at a different location from a prior attentional cue (Posner & Cohen, 1984). A number of recent studies have extended the study of IOR to non-spatial…

Purpose: To examine whether semantic access by speech requires attention in children. Method: Children ("N" = 200) named pictures and ignored distractors on a cross-modal (distractors: auditory-no face) or multimodal (distractors: auditory-static face and audiovisual- dynamic face) picture word task. The cross-modal task had a low load,…

Purpose: The aim of this study was to investigate the influence of phonomotor treatment on the types of errors produced during a confrontation naming task for people with aphasia (PWA). Method: Ten PWA received 60 hr of phonomotor treatment across 6 weeks. Confrontation naming abilities were measured before and after treatment, and responses were…

Heritage language acquisition has been characterized by various asymmetries, including the differential acquisition rates of various linguistic areas and the unbalanced acquisition of different categories within a single area. This paper examines Arabic heritage speakers' knowledge of subject-verb agreement versus noun-adjective agreement with the…

Researchers in the fields of cognitive psychology and education have been studying the negative effects of noise on human performance for almost a century. A new empirical study that builds upon past relevant research on (1) test accommodations and (2) auditory distraction and academic performance was conducted with elementary age students.…