In a series of experiments, it was found that emotional arousal can influence height perception. In Experiment 1, participants viewed either arousing or nonarousing images before estimating the height of a 2-story balcony and the size of a target on the ground below the balcony. People who viewed arousing images overestimated height and target…

Persons with traumatic brain injury (TBI) often have difficulty recognizing emotion in others. This is likely due to difficulties in interpreting non-verbal cues of affect. Although deficits in interpreting facial cues of affect are being widely explored, interpretation of vocal cues of affect has received much less attention. Accurate…

The purpose of this study is to translate principles of multimedia learning from college-age readers to middle grade students, when reading science texts with a supporting diagram. In this experimental study, sixth-grade students (n = 180) were randomly assigned to display conditions before reading. Each student read two explanatory sciences…

Eye gaze plays a pivotal role during communication. When interacting deceptively, it is commonly believed that the deceiver will break eye contact and look downward. We examined whether children's gaze behavior when lying is consistent with this belief. In our study, 7- to 15-year-olds and adults answered questions truthfully ("Truth" questions)…

Can readers exert control (albeit unconsciously) over activation at particular loci in the reading system? The authors addressed this issue in 4 experiments in which participants read target words aloud and the factors of prime-target relation (semantic, repetition), context (related, unrelated), stimulus quality (bright, dim), and relatedness…

Two studies assessed the ability of 12 pre-school children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD; N = 7) or Specific Language Impairment (SLI; N = 5) to use semantic context and eye gaze to infer the meanings of novel nouns, and to recall those meanings after a 24-hour delay. In Experiment 1, the children heard statements containing a familiar,…

This study investigated whether children with language learning disability (LLD) differed from typically-developing peers in their ability to learn meanings of novel words presented during reading. Fifteen 9-11-year-old children with LLD and 15 typically-developing peers read four passages containing 20 nonsense words. Word learning was assessed…

This study examined how web-based integration and procedure question prompts differentially affected students' knowledge acquisition and ill-structured problem solving skills, particularly in representing problem(s), developing solutions, and monitoring and evaluating a plan of action within the social science context. Eighty-four undergraduate…

Purpose: This study was aimed at determining the role of prosody and situational context in children's understanding of expressive utterances. Which one of these 2 cues will help children grasp the speaker's intention? Do children exhibit a "contextual bias" whereby they ignore prosody, such as the "lexical bias" found in other studies (M. Friend…

Most modern research on the effects of feedback during learning has assumed that feedback is an error correction mechanism. Recent studies of feedback-timing effects have suggested that feedback might also strengthen initially correct responses. In an experiment involving cued recall of trivia facts, we directly tested several theories of…

There is a scarcity of empirically validated treatments for infants and toddlers under age 3 years with autism spectrum disorders (ASD), as well as a scarcity of empirical investigation into successful intervention characteristics for this population. Yet early screening efforts are focused on identifying autism risk in children under age 3 years.…

In four experiments, we investigated the role of shared word order and alignment with a dialogue partner in the production of code-switched sentences. In Experiments 1 and 2, Dutch-English bilinguals code-switched in describing pictures while being cued with word orders that are either shared or not shared between Dutch and English. In Experiments…

Two experiments examined the hypothesis that L1 phonological awareness plays a role in children's ability to extract morphological patterns of English as L2 from the auditory input. In Experiment 1, 84 Chinese-speaking third graders were tested on whether they extracted the alternation pattern between the base and the derived form (e.g.,…

The present experiments tested whether endogenous and exogenous cues produce separate effects on target processing. In Experiment 1, participants discriminated whether an arrow presented left or right of fixation pointed to the left or right. For 1 group, the arrow was preceded by a peripheral noninformative cue. For the other group, the arrow was…

Probabilistic retroactive interference (RI) refers to the interfering effects of intermixing presentations of an earlier studied response (A-B) with presentations of a competing response (A-D). As an example, for a 2/3 condition, a cue word was presented with its earlier studied response twice and its competing response once during the…