The literature on learning with animations has focused so far on subject matters in which changes over time depicted in the animation are mapped onto changes over time in the reality of the concepts to be learned. The experiments presented in this article, however, suggest that also a nontemporal mapping of facts, as in paired-associate learning…

Structural priming (or syntactic priming) is a speaker's tendency to reuse the same structural pattern as one that was previously encountered (Bock, 1986). This study investigated (a) whether the implicit learning processes involved in long-lag structural priming lead to differential second language (L2) improvement in producing two structural…

Although the use of brain imaging techniques, such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is increasingly common in educational research, only a few studies regarding science learning have so far taken advantage of this technology. This paper aims to facilitate the design and implementation of brain imaging studies relating to science…

We assessed the relationship between brain structure and function in 10 individuals with specific language impairment (SLI), compared to six unaffected siblings, and 16 unrelated control participants with typical language. Voxel-based morphometry indicated that grey matter in the SLI group, relative to controls, was increased in the left inferior…

Background and purpose: This paper reports on part of an ongoing research project in England concerning the Nature of Science (NOS). The particular focus is on the initial thinking of the graduate scientists starting a one-year, Postgraduate Certificate of Education (PGCE) course and the way the course approaches adopted influence their views and…

This study investigates the phonological nature of the lexical links in the bilingual lexicon using different-script bilinguals. Highly proficient Hindi-English bilinguals performed a translation recognition task (i.e., decide whether two words presented sequentially are a correct translation pair). For the critical trials, the second word was a…

Although activity in premotor and motor cortices is commonly observed in neuroimaging studies of spoken language processing, the degree to which this activity is an obligatory part of everyday speech comprehension remains unclear. We hypothesised that rather than being a unitary phenomenon, the neural response to speech perception in motor regions…

Background: Youth diagnosed with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) often show deficits in cognitive control processes, potentially contributing to characteristic difficulties monitoring and regulating behavior. Modification of performance following conflict can be measured by examining conflict adaptation, the adjustment of cognitive resources based…

The study reported in this article investigated task-repetition with young Japanese children. Fifteen children with no prior knowledge of English completed a communicative listening task that was designed to introduce new vocabulary. The same task was repeated nine times over five weeks. In line with Allwright's (1984) claim that "interaction…

When playing percussion instruments, the main activity is done with the help of a motion or motor skills; to perform it, developed fine motor skills are necessary: the speed and precision of fingers, hands and palms. The aim of the research was to study and test the development of young adults' fine motor skills while learning to play percussion…

What helps us determine whether a word is a noun or a verb, without conscious awareness? We report on cues in the way individual English words are spelled, and, for the first time, identify their neural correlates via functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). We used a lexical decision task with trisyllabic nouns and verbs containing…

Healthy aging is characterized by a number of changes on brain structure and function. Several neuroimaging studies have shown an age-related reduction in hemispheric asymmetry on various cognitive tasks, a phenomenon captured by Cabeza (2002) in the Hemispheric Asymmetry Reduction in Older Adults (HAROLD) model. Although this phenomenon is…

A printed module should consist of media elements, namely text and pictures, which are self-instructional and could cater to the needs of the user. However, the typical platform of such visualization frequently overloads the limited working memory causing split attention and redundancy effects. The purpose of this study is to design and develop a…

Adult and developing humans share with other animals analog magnitude representations of number that support nonsymbolic arithmetic with large sets. This experiment tested the hypothesis that such representations may be more accurate for addition than for subtraction in children as young as 3 1/2 years of age. In these tasks, the experimenter hid…

Two experiments examined whether over-selectivity is the product of a post-acquisition performance deficit, rather than an attention problem. In both experiments, children with Autistic Spectrum Disorder were presented with a trial-and-error discrimination task using two, two-element stimuli and over-selected in both studies. After behavioral…