The purpose of this study was to investigate the influence of conceptual and perceptual properties of words on the speed and accuracy of lexical retrieval of children who do (CWS) and do not stutter (CWNS) during a picture-naming task. Participants consisted of 13 3-5-year-old CWS and the same number of CWNS. All participants had speech, language,…

The purpose of this investigation is to examine the relationship of structural knowledge as measured by semantic maps to three traditional learning outcomes, specifically, identification, terminology, and comprehension multiple-choice posttests. Instructional treatments were provided that encourage either proposition-specific processing or…

In this study, 13 individuals with high-functioning autism (HFA), 15 individuals with Asperger's disorder (AD), and age-, and IQ-matched controls were presented a list of sentences auditorily. Participants then evaluated semantically related but new sentences and reported whether they were old or new. The total rates of false recognition for…

Do the viewpoint costs incurred when naming rotated familiar objects arise during initial identification or during consolidation? To answer this question we employed an attentional blink (AB) task where two target objects appeared amongst a rapid stream of distractor objects. Our assumption was that while both targets and distractors undergo…

When bisecting words in their middle, people reveal leftward bisection errors. This tendency might emerge from an attentional bias towards the beginning of the word. However, when longer meaningless letter strings are presented, people reveal a rightward bisection bias. To test the role of semantic information on leftward or rightward bisection…

It is generally well known that linguistic perseveration is a common symptom in individuals with brain damage and that its manifestation may be at the phonological, syntactic and/or semantic levels. The influence of perseveratory behavior on a subject's response to test stimuli and in therapeutic process has triggered the interests of the speech…

Three experiments were conducted to test the phonological recoding hypothesis in visual word recognition. Most studies on this issue have been conducted using mono-syllabic words, eventually constructing various models of phonological processing. Yet in many languages including English, the majority of words are multi-syllabic words. English…

Juliette Goldman and Christine Collier have recently proposed that the editor of "Sex Education" should adopt a policy of replacing the phrase "opposite sex" with "other sex" in all published articles, on the grounds that the word "opposite" has connotations of hostility or adversity. In this brief reply I…

The ability of school children (N = 233) to acquire new scientific vocabulary was examined. Children from two age groups (M = 4.8 and M = 6.5) were introduced to previously unknown words in an educational video. Word knowledge was assessed through accuracy and latency for production and comprehension over a 9-month period. A draw and write task…

We tested Chinese-English bi-scriptal fourth-graders on reading aloud and comprehension in Chinese and English and their understanding of some structural principles underlying Chinese orthography. These principles concern phonological and semantic representation in written Chinese. Regressions showed that knowledge about phonological…

Knowledge of familiar people is essential to guide social interaction, yet there is uncertainty about whether semantic knowledge for people is stored in a categorical structure as for objects. Four priming experiments using hard-to-perceive primes investigated whether occupation forms a category connecting famous persons in semantic memory. Primes…

Different languages map semantic elements of spatial relations onto different lexical and syntactic units. These crosslinguistic differences raise important questions for language development in terms of how this variation is learned by children. We investigated how Turkish-, English-, and Japanese-speaking children (mean age 3;8) package the…

A traditional distance learning system requires supervisors or teachers always available on online to facilitate and monitor a learner's progress by answering questions and guiding users. We presents an English chat room system in which students discuss course contents and ask questions to and receive from teachers and other students. The…

Although Communicative Language Teaching is accepted by many English teachers in China as one of the most effective approach in English language teaching, there are still a number of misunderstandings about it. By comparing Johnstone; Sato and Kleinsasser and Thompson as well as Spada, this article focuses on four of the main misunderstandings,…

This paper critically examines one particular issue against the background of changes in South Africa's higher education system consequent upon the advent of a non-racial democracy--the possibility of implementing multilingual instructional polices that include indigenous African languages in its universities. Currently, a great deal of applied…