This study has investigated the comparability of computer-based testing writing prompts in the Test of English as a Foreign LanguageTM (TOEFL) for examinees of different native language backgrounds. A total of 81 writing prompts introduced from July 1998 through August 2000 were examined using a 3-step logistic regression procedure for ordinal…

This paper does a fine job of advancing discussion concerning a question that is indeed quite underrepresented in the literature, that is, how language learners comprehend and produce language in real time. The paper is firmly rooted in the dual mechanism approach to language processing and takes as its starting point the assumption that normal…

Understanding how memory works is important for success in school, for "all" students. One way for teachers to help students with disabilities learn about memory is to use picture books and then learn strategies. Picture books are useful for students with disabilities because these resources have moved beyond a means to scaffold early literacy…

The effect of second language experience and vocabulary ability was investigated in a semantic priming experiment with weakly related English word pairs (e.g., "city"-"grass"). Participants made lexical decisions to targets preceded by unrelated or weakly related primes or to nonword targets preceded by words. Reliable priming was found for…

Semantic priming refers to a reduction in the reaction time to identify or make a judgment about a stimulus that has been immediately preceded by a semantically related word or picture and is thought to result from a partial overlap in the semantic associates of the two words. A semantic priming lexical decision task using spoken words was…

This paper describes a Hebrew naming test that consists of 48 line drawings ordered by word frequency. The initial validation phase included 48 young adults (ages 20-28), 48 old adults (ages 67-85), and 27 individuals with Alzheimer's disease (ages 68-87). Results indicated a modest odd-even internal consistency effect, word frequency effect, and…

The present experiments assessed the effects of different manipulations between cue preexposure and cue-outcome pairings on latent inhibition (LI) in a predictive learning task with human participants. To facilitate LI, preexposure and acquisition with the target cues took place while participants performed a secondary task. Presentation of…

Consistent with social agency theory, we hypothesized that learners who studied a set of worked-out examples involving proportional reasoning narrated by an animated agent with a human voice would perform better on near and far transfer tests and rate the speaker more positively compared to learners who studied the same set of examples narrated by…

Based on in-depth qualitative interviews, this article gives the opportunity to 145 sixth graders to tell, in their own words, how they felt and reacted when verbally and emotionally abused by their classmates. Content analysis of interviews revealed gender differences in students reactions to verbal aggression. Another interesting finding was the…

This paper invokes a poststructuralist lens--and, in particular, Foucauldian ideas--in conceptualizing teacher emotions as "discursive practices." It is also argued that within this theoretical framework, teacher identity is theorized as constantly becoming in a context embedded in power relations, ideology, and culture. In terms of the…

Three experiments explored the effect of affectively congruent or incongruent primes on evaluation responses to positive or negative valenced targets (the "affective priming" effect). Experiment 1 replicated the basic affective priming effect with Spanish nouns: reaction time for evaluative responses (pleasant/unpleasant) were slower on…

This paper provides three representative examples that highlight the ways in which procedures can be combined to study interactions across traditional domains of study: segmentation, word learning, and grammar. The first section uses visual familiarization prior to the Headturn Preference Procedure to demonstrate that synchronized visual…

Extinction of classically conditioned fear, like its acquisition, is active learning, but little is known about its molecular mechanisms. We recently reported that temporal massing of conditional stimulus (CS) presentations improves extinction memory acquisition, and suggested that temporal spacing was less effective because individual CS…

It is now well-established that there is a causal connection between children's phonological skills and their acquisition of reading and spelling. Here we study low-level auditory processes that may underpin the development of phonological representations in children. Dyslexic and control children were given a battery of phonological tasks,…

This study investigated the role that agency information plays in children's early interpretations of grammatical aspect morphology, in particular, the progressive "-ing" and simple past forms. Fifty-nine children (two-, four- and five-year olds) were presented with a forced-choice sentence-to-scene matching task very similar to the one used by…