Individuals with developmental dyslexia are often impaired in their ability to process certain linguistic and even basic non-linguistic auditory signals. Recent investigations report conflicting findings regarding impaired low-level binaural detection mechanisms associated with dyslexia. Binaural impairment has been hypothesized to stem from a…

Current modeling of response times on test items has been strongly influenced by the paradigm of experimental reaction-time research in psychology. For instance, some of the models have a parameter structure that was chosen to represent a speed-accuracy tradeoff, while others equate speed directly with response time. Also, several response-time…

Two experiments examined cross-trial positional priming (V. Maljkovic & K. Nakayama, 1994, 1996, 2000) in visual pop-out search. Experiment 1 used regularly arranged target and distractor displays, as in previous studies. Reaction times were expedited when the target appeared at a previous target location (facilitation relative to neutral…

The authors develop and test generalized versions of take-the-best (TTB) and rational (RAT) models of multiattribute paired-comparison inference. The generalized models make allowances for subjective attribute weighting, probabilistic orders of attribute inspection, and noisy decision making. A key new test involves a response-time (RT)…

We assessed potential facilitation of congruent body posture on access to and retention of autobiographical memories in younger and older adults. Response times were shorter when body positions during prompted retrieval of autobiographical events were similar to the body positions in the original events than when body position was incongruent.…

An unresolved issue in the study of sentence comprehension is whether the process of gap-filling is mediated by the construction of empty categories (traces), or whether the parser relates fillers directly to the associated verb's argument structure. We conducted an event-related potentials (ERP) study that used the violation paradigm to examine…

The purpose of the present experiment was to determine whether repeated cocaine exposure differentially affects sucrose-reinforced operant responding in rats raised in an enriched condition (EC) or an isolated condition (IC). Specifically, the performance of EC and IC rats pressing a lever for sucrose under a high fixed-ratio schedule (FR 30)…

This dissertation investigates the acquisition of oblique relative clauses in L2 Spanish by English and Moroccan Arabic speakers in order to understand the role of previous linguistic knowledge and its interaction with Universal Grammar on the one hand, and the relationship between grammatical knowledge and its use in real-time, on the other hand.…

We explored the affective states that students experienced during effortful problem solving activities. We conducted a study where 41 students solved difficult analytical reasoning problems from the Law School Admission Test. Students viewed videos of their faces and screen captures and judged their emotions from a set of 14 states (basic…

The purpose of this study was to investigate and compare the mechanisms of brain activity, as revealed by a combination of the visuospatial attention shifting paradigm and event-related potentials (ERP) in children with developmental coordination disorder (DCD) and typically developing children. Twenty-eight DCD children and 26 typically…

Six experiments examined whether novelty versus familiarity influences global versus local processing styles. Novelty and familiarity were manipulated by either framing a task as new versus familiar or by asking participants to reflect upon novel versus familiar events prior to the task (i.e., procedural priming). In Experiments 1-3, global…

We investigate how L1 phonology and semantics affect processing of interlingual homographs by manipulating language context before, and auditory input during, a visual experiment in the L2. Three experiments contained German-English homograph primes ("gift" = German "poison") in English sentences and was performed by German (L1) learners of…

The article summarizes results from two experimental studies on reactivity. In the first experiment, 24 college-age participants received a computerized treatment that delivered a grammar lesson, practice, and feedback on assignment of semantic functions in Latin. Verbalizations did not induce reactivity on accuracy, but they slowed down posttest…

Bilinguals spontaneously switch languages in conversation even though laboratory studies reveal robust cued language switching costs. The authors investigated how voluntary-switching costs might differ when switches are voluntary. Younger (Experiments 1-2) and older (Experiment 3) Spanish-English bilinguals named pictures in 3 conditions: (a)…

Single pulse transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) was applied to the hand area of the left primary motor cortex or, as a control, to the vertex (STIMULATION: TMS[subscript M1] vs. TMS[subscript vertex]) while right-handed volunteers silently read verbs related to hand actions. We examined three different tasks and time points for stimulation…