Phonotactic probability, a measure of the likelihood of occurrence of a sound sequence, appears to facilitate noun learning (H. L. Storkel, 2001). Nouns and verbs, however, tend to differ in rate of acquisition, indicating that word-learning mechanisms may differ across grammatical class. The purpose of the current study was to examine the effect…

Most studies have been unable to identify reliable acoustic cues for the recognition of the English nonsibilant fricatives /f, v, [theta], [eth]/. The present study was designed to test the extent to which the perception of these fricatives by normal-hearing adults is based on other sources of information, namely, linguistic context and visual…

This paper describes research investigating the perception of intrusive music, that is, music heard when choice, volume, and occurrence are not under the control of the participant. Participants were directed to record diary accounts of episodes in which music was played in instances when they were not in control of the decision to play the music…

Twelve-month-old infants' ability to perceive gaze direction in static video images was investigated. The images showed a woman who performed attention-directing actions by looking or pointing toward 1 of 4 objects positioned in front of her (2 on each side). When the model just pointed at the objects, she looked straight ahead, and when she just…

Scaffolding has proven an especially interesting and promising area for postsecondary teaching and learning practices. Particular interest has emerged in scaffolding student learning in technology-enhanced environments--especially those designed to promote critical thinking. This study examined participant perceptions and use of scaffolding in an…

To be understood, visually, often depends on how skilled one is in catching form and translating it into a two-dimensional surface. This is a challenge we are confronted with early in life. Children's learning strategies in drawing are not always understood or encouraged. This article presents a socio-cultural analysis from Norway of a pedagogical…

This article explores the way young people's responses to an image evolve when they engage with it repeatedly. An analysis of the sequential encounters of six adolescents with a Renaissance painting reveals that, as they gained experience with the picture, the youngsters probed for increasingly deeper layers of meaning in the work. Specifically,…

The term "visual representation" is used purposefully to include a wide range of visual meaning-making devices and symbols. Although visual representations are considered important as meaning-making devices across theoretical constructs, little has been done to examine their role in the assessment and evaluation of learning in all areas of the…

Recent work suggests that once the auditory cortex of deaf persons has been reorganized by cross-modal plasticity, it can no longer respond to signals from a cochlear implant (CI) installed subsequently. To further examine this issue, we compared the evoked potentials involved in the processing of visual stimuli between CI users and hearing…

Depressive realism refers to a cognitive style wherein depressed people sometimes have more accurate perceptions of reality than nondepressed people. The notion of depressives being "sadder yet wiser" was controversial when first presented, and continues to be heavily debated. Self-perception studies provide maximum external validity,…

What does business want from higher education? What does higher education want from business? To shed light on these issues, the author conducted an interview with presidents of two distinctly different higher education systems, James H. Craiglow and Stephen J. Reno. Craiglow is the chancellor of Antioch University, a private five-campus…

The role of teachers in the social, personal and moral development of students apart from education is discussed.

This article describes how the quilts fashioned by Joanne Marian of Boswell have helped children with exceptional needs. Marian's quilts, which are freely given, are created using donated scraps of texture-rich fabrics, patterns, and embellishments to heighten the intensity of tactile detail for exceptional children who may be visually impaired or…

In contextual cueing, the position of a target within a group of distractors is learned over repeated exposure to a display with reference to a few nearby items rather than to the global pattern created by the elements. The authors contrasted the role of global and local contexts for contextual cueing in naturalistic scenes. Experiment 1 showed…

Some potential contributions of invariants, heuristics, and exemplars to the perception of dynamic properties in the colliding balls task were explored. On each trial, an observer is asked to determine the heavier of 2 colliding balls. The invariant approach assumes that people can learn to detect complex visual patterns that reliably specify…