Flash cards have been shown to be useful for teaching sight-word reading. To date, the most effective flash-card instruction method is incremental rehearsal (IR). This method involves the instructor interspersing unknown stimulus items into the presentation of known stimulus items. In this study, we compared IR to a modified IR…

Learning the Chinese tone system is a major challenge to students of Chinese as a second or foreign language. Part of the problem is that the spoken Chinese syllable presents a complex perceptual input that overlaps tone with segments. This complexity can be addressed through directing attention to the critical features of a component (tone in…

This pilot study examined the feasibility of a home-school partnership for improving emergent literacy skills in Spanish-speaking pre-school children of migrant farmworkers. Parents were requested to send labeled drawings of family activities to their children's classroom for supplementing bilingual language and literacy instruction. Participants…

In this article, we focus on the use of the visual for reflection in "alternative" pre-service teacher education and, in particular, we address the question: "How and what can we learn about teacher education using the visual?" By way of illustration, we focus on the use of pre-service teachers' photographs in a public…

Background: Dysprosody is a common feature in speakers with hypokinetic dysarthria. However, speech prosody varies across different types of speech materials. This raises the question of what is the most appropriate speech material for the evaluation of dysprosody. Aims: To characterize the prosodic impairment in Cantonese speakers with…

This perceptual study describes changes in how listeners perceive VCV elements within successive truncations taken from an iambic phrase containing l (e.g. "a leaf", or "a load") spoken by four male speakers of General American English. Evidence of the respective roles of dorsal gestural affiliation between l and the reduced…

The paper provides detailed assessment of a multilingual dementia patients using Boston Diagnostic Aphasia Examination (BDAE) adapted into Hindi by the author. After providing a brief review of literature on Dementia as understood in the west, the responses of the patient under different components of the BDAE are presented. The latter part of…

Behavioural, neuroimaging and neurophysiological approaches emphasise the active and constructive nature of visual perception, determined not solely by the environmental input, but modulated top-down by prior knowledge. For example, degraded images, which at first appear as meaningless "blobs", can easily be recognized as, say, a face, after…

This study was conducted to compare the effectiveness of video prompting and picture prompting when used as antecedents for teaching daily living skills to two adolescents with autism. Participants were taught two different skills, and the effects of the instructional conditions were compared and evaluated using an adapted alternating-treatments…

This paper proposes a reading support technique for Arabic students of English. These students must overcome the L1 interference "reversal of reading direction." PowerPoint presentations, utilizing a simple fade effect with adjustable delay between words such that the text appears nicely in a left-to-right manner, line by line with voice…

Recent findings indicate that individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) could, surprisingly, infer traits from behavioural descriptions. Now we need to know whether or not individuals with ASD are able to use trait information to identify people by their faces. In this study participants with and without ASD were presented with pairs of…

Video-modeling (VM) is a widely used instructional technique that has been applied to the education of children with developmental disabilities. One form of VM that lacks in-depth analysis is point-of-view video modeling (POVM). The current study investigated the use of POVM to teach three children diagnosed with autism to initiate and maintain a…

In this study, the effects of eliciting positive and negative emotions on various cognitive functions of four- to five-year-old preschool children were examined. Emotions were elicited through presentations of "happy" and "sad" video clips, before the children performed the cognitive tasks. Behavioural (facial expressions) and…

In an influential study, R. J. Bootsma and P. C. W. van Wieringen (1990) argued that 2 of their 5 participants used visual information continuously during the attacking forehand drive in table tennis, its brief duration vis-a-vis the visuomotor delay notwithstanding. The authors repeated Bootsma and van Wieringen's experiment and included a…

Child characteristics including age, gender, risk-taking behaviour and sensation seeking are thought to influence children's ability to appraise risks. The present study investigated children's risk perceptions and appraisals in the context of common outdoor physical play activities. Risk perceptions and appraisal of four- and five-year olds were…