The present investigation is a study of the definitional style of nouns and verbs in typically developing school-age children. A total of 30 children in upper-elementary grades provided verbal definitions for 10 common high-frequency nouns (e.g., apple, boat, baby) and 10 common high- frequency verbs (e.g., climb, sing, throw). All definitions…

In Mandarin Chinese, word meaning is partially determined by lexical tone (Wang, 1973). Previous studies suggest that lexical tone is processed as linguistic information and not as pure tonal information (Gandour, 1998; Van Lanker & Fromkin, 1973). The current study explored the online processing of lexical tones. Event-related potentials were…

A recent focus in web based learning systems has been the development of reusable learning materials that can be delivered as personalized courses depending of a number of factors such as the user's background, his/her learning preferences, current knowledge based on previous assessments, or previous browsing patterns. The student is often…

The authors present data from 2 feature verification experiments designed to determine whether distinctive features have a privileged status in the computation of word meaning. They use an attractor-based connectionist model of semantic memory to derive predictions for the experiments. Contrary to central predictions of the conceptual structure…

In written French, the acquisition of the nominal plural ("-s") occurs earlier and faster than the acquisition of the verbal plural ("-nt") (Totereau, Thevenin & Fayol, 1997, "Learning to Spell"). The reasons for this difference are not well known. The objective of the present research is to test two alternative hypotheses, which may provide an…

This paper presents a discussion of the constraints imposed on lexicalisation during production by language-specific patterns, such as whether words exist in a language to describe a given event and whether language-specific syntactic and phonological information correlates with semantic properties. First, we introduce in broad strokes relevant…

The nature of working memory operation during complex sentence comprehension was studied by means of eye-tracking methodology. Readers had difficulty when the syntax of a sentence required them to hold 2 similar noun phrases (NPs) in working memory before syntactically and semantically integrating either of the NPs with a verb. In sentence …

This study examined whether language deficits persist even in children with optimal outcomes. We examined a group of children with prior diagnoses on the autism spectrum who had IQs in the normal range, were in age-appropriate mainstream classes, and had improved to such an extent that they were considered to be functioning at the level of their…

The paper reviewed studies in word-level processing skills and related areas, and profiled how the development of L2 word recognition and integration skills would contribute to autonomous "kango" (Chinese originated words or words created from Chinese originated words) vocabulary learning. Despite the fact that the acquisition of a…

The perceived crisis in reading achievement may be misplaced--the real crisis may be what is ignored in the curriculum. People are alarmed at the lack of emphasis being placed on teaching content knowledge in many of today's classrooms. They laugh when Jay Leno takes to the street, interviewing teenagers and young adults who do not have the…

This study compared the uses of emotion vocabulary in narratives elicited from monolingual speakers of Russian and English and advanced American learners of Russian. Monolingual speakers differed significantly in the distribution of emotion terms across morphosyntactic categories: English speakers favored an adjectival pattern of emotion…

Spanish-speaking (SS) children with language impairment (LI) present with deficits in morphology and verb argument structure. These language areas may be useful for clinical identification of affected children. This study aimed to evaluate the discrimination accuracy of spontaneous language measures with SS preschoolers to tease out what…

The aim of this study was to examine the relationship between the performance on a test for the assessment of creative behavior and teacher ratings on scales for the assessment of behavior commonly seen as negative. The sample consisted of 71 Austrian elementary school students (33 boys and 38 girls), from seven to ten years of age. The children…

The purpose of this study was to describe international perspectives concerning terms, definitions, and meanings of adapted physical activity (APA) as (a) activities or service delivery, (b) a profession, and (c) an academic field of study. Gergen's social constructionism, our theory, guided analysis of multiple sources of data via qualitative…

Purpose--Training multimedia projects often face identical knowledge-transfer obstacles that partly originate in the multidisciplinarity of the project team. The purpose of this paper is to describe these difficulties and the tools used to overcome them. In particular, the aim is to show how elements of cognitive psychology theory (concept maps,…