The present study examined lexical richness in maternal input to Turkish preschool children in the Netherlands and the relationship with their vocabulary. Fifteen Turkish mother-child dyads were videotaped at the age of 3 and 4 in three settings: book reading, picture description and block building. Children's vocabulary in Turkish was measured at…

We describe an Indigenous Social Desirability Scale for Mexico developed using a mixed-methods approach. Scores on the scale with two dimensions show adequate reliability and validity.

Although many studies have suggested positive effects for speaking or output practice on L2 grammar development, the question of how speaking affects L2 grammar remains. This study specifically examines how output affects the explicit and implicit knowledge of Spanish indirect object pronouns (IOPs). It also investigates levels of L2 grammar…

French liaison is a phonological process that takes place when an otherwise silent word-final consonant is pronounced before a following vowel-initial word. It is a process that has been evolving for centuries, and whose patterns of realization are influenced by a wide range of interacting linguistic and social factors. French speakers therefore…

The technological and social/cultural demands of the 21st century are reshaping communication requirements. Students not only need to be able to communicate effectively in oral and written language, but they also need to communicate effectively in multimodal ways--they need to become skilled in multiliteracies. This article explains the two…

An eye tracking methodology was used to evaluate 3- and 4-year-old children's sensitivity to speaker affect when resolving referential ambiguity. Children were presented with pictures of three objects on a screen (including two referents of the same kind, e.g., an intact doll and a broken doll, and one distracter item), paired with a prerecorded…

In this article we report on two experiments about the perception of audiovisual cues to emotional speech. The article addresses two questions: (1) how do visual cues from a speaker's face to emotion relate to auditory cues, and (2) what is the recognition speed for various facial cues to emotion? Both experiments reported below are based on tests…

Why are snakes such a common target of fear? One current view is that snake fear is one of several innate fears that emerge spontaneously. Another is that humans have an evolved predisposition to learn to fear snakes. In the first study reported here, 9- to 10-month-old infants showed no differential spontaneous reaction to films of snakes versus…

Distraction by irrelevant background sound of visually-based cognitive tasks illustrates the vulnerability of attentional selectivity across modalities. Four experiments centred on auditory distraction during tests of memory for visually-presented semantic information. Meaningful irrelevant speech disrupted the free recall of semantic…

This study aimed to evaluate the effects of cueing in visual search paradigm for people with and without intellectual disabilities (ID). A total of 36 subjects (18 persons with ID and 18 persons with normal intelligence) were recruited using convenient sampling method. A series of experiments were conducted to compare guided cue strategies using…

The effect of response complexity on simple RT, first reported by Henry and Rogers (H&R), is a robust phenomenon for complexity measured by the number of chunks in a multiple-chunk response. However, there are problems with the memory drum theory H&R used to account for this result, and no fully satisfactory alternative explanation has been…

In six experiments we studied the effects of a single re-exposure to a conditioned stimulus (CS; "retrieval trial") prior to extinction training (extinction-reconsolidation boundary) on the development of and recovery from fear extinction. A single retrieval trial prior to extinction training significantly augmented the renewal and reinstatement…

Two matching-to-sample (MTS) and four same/different (S/D) experiments employed tests to distinguish between item-specific learning and relational learning. One MTS experiment showed item-specific learning when concept learning failed (i.e., no novel-stimulus transfer). Another MTS experiment showed item-specific learning when pigeons'…

According to Bowers, the finding that there are neurons with highly selective responses to familiar stimuli supports theories positing localist representations over approaches positing the type of distributed representations typically found in parallel distributed processing (PDP) models. However, his conclusions derive from an overly narrow view…

Implicit task sequence learning may be attributed to learning the order of perceptual stimulus features associated with the task sequence, learning a series of automatic task set activations, or learning an integrated sequence that derives from 2 correlated streams of information. In the present study, our purpose was to distinguish among these 3…