While there is overall consensus that narratives obtained by means of visual stimuli contain less natural language than free narratives, it has been less clear how the naturalness of a narrative can be measured in a crosslinguistically meaningful way. Here this question is addressed by studying the differences between free narratives and…

It is critical that teachers have opportunities to engage in meaningful, teacher-centered professional learning about the Common Core. This article introduces a creative activity format designed to help teachers gain deep understandings of the mathematics content standards. The idea was born out of the fact that the teachers in the authors' region…

Two visual world experiments investigated the processing of the implicature associated with "some" using a "gumball paradigm." On each trial, participants saw an image of a gumball machine with an upper chamber with orange and blue gumballs and an empty lower chamber. Gumballs dropped to the lower chamber, creating a contrast…

Purpose: Visual attention is essential in many areas ranging from everyday life situations to the workplace. Different circumstances such as driving in traffic or participating in sports require immediate adaptation to constantly changing situations and frequently the conscious perception of 2 objects or scenes at the same time. Method: The…

Toddlers performed a spatial mapping task in which they were required to learn the location of a hidden object in a vertical array and then transpose this location information 90° to a horizontal array. During the vertical training, they were given (a) no labels, (b) alphabetical labels, or (c) numerical labels for each potential spatial location.…

How we make sense of what we see and where best to look is shaped by our experience, our current task goals and how we first perceive our environment. An established way of demonstrating these factors work together is to study how eye movement patterns change as a function of expertise and to observe how experts can solve complex tasks after only…

One experiment determined the relationship between renewed associative strength and attention. Following cue1-outcome pairings in Context A, cue1 was extinguished in Context B while cue2 was conditioned. On test cue2 was chosen as a predictor of the outcome in Context B. Both cues were chosen equally often as predictors in Context A. Consistent…

Infants are precocious word learners, and seem to possess systematic expectations about how words refer to object kinds. For example, while monolingual infants show a one-to-one mapping bias (e.g. mutual exclusivity), expecting each object to have only one basic level label, previous research has shown that this is less robust in bi- and…

Purpose: The aim of this article is to summarize recent published and unpublished research from our 2 laboratories on improving speech understanding in complex listening environments by listeners fit with cochlear implants (CIs). Method: CI listeners were tested in 2 listening environments. One was a simulation of a restaurant with multiple,…

Differential reinforcement procedures may promote unprompted correct responding, resulting in a quicker transfer of stimulus control than nondifferential reinforcement. Recent studies that have compared reinforcement arrangements have found that the most effective arrangement may differ across participants. The current study conducted an…

It is assumed that color has an influence on human cognition and behavior. The red effect has been taken up by a large body of research and the purpose of the study was to test the influence of red as a background color on the appraisal of pictures. Participants were randomly divided into two conditions: red or white. They appraised the levels of…

The current study examined cognitive effects of two pathways of second language (L2) acquisition longitudinally in Chinese speakers learning English in an L2-dominant environment. Thirty-nine participants who attended an intensive 10-week English course (L2-instruction group) were compared to 38 participants who attended regular university courses…

Listeners can access information about a speaker such as age, gender identity, socioeconomic status, and their linguistic background upon hearing their speech. However, it is still not clear if listeners use these factors to assess speakers' speech. Here, an audio-visual (matched-guise) test is used to measure whether listeners' accentedness…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine the extent to which phonological competition and semantic priming influence lexical access in school-aged children with cochlear implants (CIs) and children with normal acoustic hearing. Method: Participants included children who were 5-10 years of age with either normal hearing (n = 41) or…

Smartwatches may provide a natural, portable, and unobtrusive strategy by which to support directive-following for individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). A mentor can send visual supports (e.g., photographs, videos, text) "just-in-time" (JIT) to a learner's smartwatch. This may reduce the need for extraneous face-to-face…