Understanding ambiguous words, phrases, and sentences is an important part of reading well, communicating skillfully, and enjoying humor based on word play. With this seven-unit activity book--filled with creative, ready-to-use activities based on jokes and puns--students will learn how to decipher the language ambiguities they encounter inside…

Previous research has demonstrated that a positive relationship between teacher and student improves student performance in school. However, less information is available regarding the verbal and nonverbal communications between the students with special needs and their teachers within this middle school subgroup. Personal attention and support…

Scope and Method of Study. The purpose of this research study was to determine the effectiveness of math teachers' judgments regarding a student's future achievement. Judgments were based on external observations or cues used as predictors of success. This study used Social Judgment Theory (SJT) to demonstrate a possible method for better…

Background: Many school-age children with specific language impairment produce sentences that appear to conform to the adult grammar. It may be premature to conclude from this, however, that their language formulation ability is age appropriate. Aims: To determine whether a more subtle measure of language use, speech disruptions during sentence…

Recent work on adult metacognition indicates that although metacognitive monitoring often guides control operations, sometimes it follows control operations and is based on the feedback from them. Consistent with this view, in self-paced learning, judgments of learning (JOLs) made at the end of each study trial "decreased" with the amount of time…

Perceptual-cognitive processes play an important role in open, fast-paced, interceptive sports such as tennis, basketball, and soccer. Visual information processing has been shown to distinguish skilled from less skilled athletes. Research on the perceptual demands of sports performance has raised questions regarding athletes' visual information…

Individuals with Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) experience difficulties understanding the non-verbal cues conveyed by others that provide symbolic information about relationships between self, other, and environmental events. This study examined whether these difficulties reflect underlying problems in the identification of temporal…

A central feature of autistic spectrum disorders (ASDs) is a difficulty in identifying and reading human expressions, including those present in the moving human form. One previous study, by Blake et al. (2003), reports decreased sensitivity for perceiving biological motion in children with autism, suggesting that perceptual anomalies underlie…

Buddy Reading, a peer tutoring programme, is popularly adopted in Singapore schools to increase the reading proficiency of lower primary children who are not reading at age appropriate levels. However, this programme is rarely subjected to systematic evaluation. In view of this, the present study undertakes an evaluation of the programme as it is…

Two-year-olds assign appropriate interpretations to verbs presented in two English transitivity alternations, the causal and unspecified-object alternations (Naigles, 1996). Here we explored how they might do so. Causal and unspecified-object verbs are syntactically similar. They can be either transitive or intransitive, but differ in the semantic…

Previous studies have shown that it is particularly difficult for second language (L2) learners to overcome the effects of transfer when they need to unlearn specific aspects of the native language in the absence of explicit input that indicates which properties of the first language (L1) are ruled out by the L2 grammar (Inagaki, 2001;…

When children act to involve mothers in positive interaction, they influence the amount, timing, and content of parent-child exchanges. By assessing children's smiling and positive initiation, we examined child behaviors that function to create positive interaction. In a non-clinical North American sample of 103 mothers and their 14- to…

This study investigated the effects of textual enhancement formats (number and choice of typographical cues) on the intake of plural markers in English as a second language among grade eight native French-speaking students. An experimental reading task integrating different formats of textual enhancement into a text was created. A split-plot…

Background: The relationship between psychopathic traits and aggression in children may be explained by their reduced sensitivity to signs of distress in others. Emotional cues such as fear and sadness function to make the perpetrator aware of the victim's distress and supposedly inhibit aggression. As children high in psychopathic traits show a…

Neuronal modifications that accompany normal aging occur in brain neuropils and might share commonalties across phyla including the most successful group, the Insecta. This study addresses the kinds of neuronal modifications associated with loss of memory that occur in the hemimetabolous insect "Periplaneta americana." Among insects that display…