During spoken language comprehension, listeners make use of both knowledge-based and signal-based sources of information, but little is known about how cues from these distinct levels of representational hierarchy are weighted and integrated online. In an eye-tracking experiment using the visual world paradigm, we investigated the flexible…

It is well known that article usage is difficult for learners of English to acquire. Indeed, learner errors such as "*many of people" are not uncommon. A closer look at similar multiword sequences reveals why learners might have difficulty using articles properly in such expressions: No definite article is required in phrases like…

To what extent can language acquisition be explained in terms of different associative learning mechanisms? It has been hypothesized that distributional regularities in spoken languages are strong enough to elicit statistical learning about dependencies among speech units. Distributional regularities could be a useful cue for word learning even…

How toddlers' attention is distributed in the visual field during a magic trick was examined using three expectation conditions. Results showed that 2.5-year-old children assigned to the condition with major task-relevant information (i.e., a verbal cue to attend to one of the visual targets) (i) outperformed those who were assigned to the…

The ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) has consistently appeared altered in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Although the vmPFC is thought to support the extinction of learned fear responses, several findings support a broader role for this structure in the regulation of fear. To further characterize the relationship between vmPFC…

Theories of visual narrative understanding have often focused on the changes in meaning across a sequence, like shifts in characters, spatial location, and causation, as cues for breaks in the structure of a discourse. In contrast, the theory of visual narrative grammar posits that hierarchic "grammatical" structures operate at the…

Purpose: Across the treatment literature, behavioral speech modifications have produced variable intelligibility changes in speakers with dysarthria. This study is the first of two articles exploring whether measurements of baseline speech features can predict speakers' responses to these modifications. Method: Fifty speakers (7 older individuals…

Italian relative clauses like "Il bambino che bacia la mamma" 'the child that kisses the mom' are ambiguous between a subject reading and an object reading with postverbal subject. However, the latter is scarcely accessible for word order and theory-internal considerations. This study aims at investigating the role of semantic…

Previous studies independently demonstrated impairments in rapid orienting/disengagement and zooming-out of spatial attention in autism spectrum disorder (ASD). These attentional mechanisms, however, are not completely independent. Aiming at a more complete picture of spatial attention deficits in ASD, we examined the relationship between…

A number of researchers have done extensive work on ontologies, epistemologies and pedagogies in relation to Pasifika research, but little on methodologies. Vaioleti describes talanoa as a phenomenological research approach which is ecological, oral and interactive. Halapua's article Talanoa Process: The Case of Fiji (2008) emphasises talanoa as a…

This study attempted to answer whether strategically designed and placed metacognitive prompts within an online prerequisite teacher education course can make a difference in the amount and quality of student self-reported use of metacognitive strategies. The study found significant metacognitive results for students in an online introductory…

Students with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) display social communication differences that may affect reading comprehension. The enjoyment of storybooks is a natural part of childhood. Students with ASD experience difficulty with understanding the thoughts and feelings of others, which may impede their comprehension of character motive in…

The present study implemented an individual differences approach in conjunction with response time (RT) variability and distribution modeling techniques to better characterize the cognitive control dynamics underlying ongoing task cost (i.e., slowing) and cue detection in event-based prospective memory (PM). Three experiments assessed the relation…

English-learning infants attend to lexical stress when learning new words. Attention to lexical stress might be beneficial for word learning by providing an indication of the grammatical class of that word. English disyllabic nouns commonly have trochaic (strong-weak) stress, whereas English disyllabic verbs commonly have iambic (weak-strong)…

The purpose of this article is to address the issue that children's natural singing voices and pitch perception are in a treble range, and a male elementary general music teacher's natural singing voice is an octave below. There are many strategies to overcome this significant but manageable obstacle in daily teaching, including monitoring of…