We investigated the effect of lexical stress on 16-month-olds' ability to form associations between labels and paths of motion. Disyllabic English nouns tend to have a strong-weak (trochaic) stress pattern, and verbs tend to have a weak-strong (iambic) pattern. We explored whether infants would use word stress information to guide word-action…

There are many continuous quantitative dimensions in the physical world. Philosophical, psychological and neural work has focused mostly on space and number. However, there are other important continuous dimensions (e.g., time, mass). Moreover, space can be broken down into more specific dimensions (e.g., length, area, density) and number can be…

This case study, the framework of which is provided by Kelly's Personal Construct Theory, investigates how a female novice ELT teacher structures her constructs on the qualities of an effective teacher. Repertory grid, a cognitive mapping approach, based on Kelly's theory was used as an elicitation technique in the study. The study focused on four…

This qualitative study explores how 14 institutional agents (graduate diversity officers or GDOs) work towards improving retention for graduate students of Color. Consistent with Lovitt's framework of graduate student retention, findings reveal GDOs implement diverse strategies that promote opportunities for academic integration, social…

Graphic novels in the K-12 classroom are most often used to motivate marginalized readers because of the lower text load and assumption of easy reading. This assumption has thus far been unexplored by reading research. This qualitative multiple-case study utilized think-aloud protocols in a new attention-mapping activity to better understand how…

There are marked individual differences in the formation of cognitive maps both in the real world and in virtual environments (VE; e.g., Blajenkova, Motes, & Kozhevnikov, 2005; Chai & Jacobs, 2010; Ishikawa & Montello, 2006; Wen, Ishikawa, & Sato, 2011). These differences, however, are poorly understood and can be difficult to…

This study analyses the expression of locative and existential predicates elicited through an oral production task in the speech of two groups of learners of Spanish as a second language (L2) (first language English, n = 18; first language Moroccan Arabic, n = 14), and a native control group (n = 18). A total of 25,000 words were analysed, with…

Learning to navigate toward a goal is an essential skill. Place learning is thought to rely on the ability of animals to associate the location of a goal with surrounding environmental cues. Using the Morris water maze, a task popularly used to examine place learning, we demonstrate that distal cues provide animals with distance and directional…

Learning relational categories--whose membership is defined not by intrinsic properties but by extrinsic relations with other entities--poses a challenge to young children. The current work showed 3-, 4- to 5-, and 6-year-olds pairs of cards exemplifying familiar relations (e.g., a nest and a bird exemplifying "home for") and then tested whether…

This paper examines the impact of L1/L2 form-meaning differences in the domain of aspect to investigate whether L2 learners are able to acquire properties of the L2 that are different from the L1. Oral data were collected from English- and German-speaking university learners of French L2 (n = 75) at two different levels of proficiency. The results…

Learning word-referent mappings is complex because the word and its referent tend to co-occur with multiple other words and potential referents. Such complexity has led to proposals for a host of constraints on learning, though how these constraints may interact has not yet been investigated in detail. In this paper, we investigated interactions…

This paper proposes and explains the design of a prototype learning tool named the DiaCog. The DiaCog visualizes dialog interactions within an online dialog game by using dynamically created cognitive maps. As a purposefully designed tool for enhancing learning effectiveness the DiaCog might be applicable to dialogs at discussion boards within a…

The lexical mapping of abstract functional words like modal verbs is an open problem in acquisition (e.g., Gleitman et al. 2005). In diachronic linguistics it has been proposed that learner mapping errors are responsible for innovations in the historical record (see Kiparsky 1974; Roberts & Roussou 2003, among others). This suggests that child…

To gain insight in the social processes that underlie knowledge sharing in teams, this article questions which team learning behaviors lead to the construction of a shared mental model. Additionally, it explores how the development of shared mental models mediates the relation between team learning behaviors and team effectiveness. Analyses were…

Background and purpose: Research in formative assessment often pays close attention to the strategies which can be used by teachers. However, less emphasis in the literature seems to have been paid to study the application of formative assessment designs in practice. In this paper, we argue that a formative assessment design that we call…