Reading comprehension is considered a salient source of input and an important language skill in English as Foreign Language (EFL) learning contexts. Moreover, connectors are regarded as main constituents of reading materials. Connectors refer to linguistic devices which provide cohesion in texts and thus are highly likely to contribute to the…

What aspects of infants' prelinguistic communication are most valuable for learning to speak, and why? We test whether early vocalizations and gestures drive the transition to word use because, in addition to indicating motoric readiness, they (a) are early instances of intentional communication and (b) elicit verbal responses from caregivers. In…

From limited evidence, children track the regularities of their language impressively fast and they infer generalized rules that apply to novel instances. This study investigated what drives the inductive leap from memorizing specific items and statistical regularities to extracting abstract rules. We propose an innovative entropy model that…

Language acquisition may come naturally for people without sensorial disabilities. But for deaf children, language acquisition happens differently and comparably delayed than hearing children. This case study made an in-depth inquiry of the communication skills of the Special Education (SPED) students in one of the community colleges in Quezon…

This research sought to investigate EFL nursing students' use of vocabulary learning strategies to learn medical terminology and further assess strategies used in relation to learning outcomes measured by two types of vocabulary knowledge: meaning recall (passive recall) and meaning recognition (passive recognition). The participants, 138 EFL…

This article synthesizes the roles of morphology in English reading acquisition and reports a meta-analytic structural equation modeling study (k = 107, N = 21,818) that tested the effects of morphological awareness (MA) on reading comprehension in school-aged readers. Moderator analysis was conducted through a set of subgroup comparisons based on…

This article aims to convince readers of the value of intersecting the scholarship of interdisciplinarity with the field of argumentation studies. The interdisciplinarity literature has not much engaged with the vehicle that carries interdisciplinary learning, languages, and locutions: the argument. On the argumentation studies side, despite the…

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of the context clue instruction program to infer meaning from context as a way to enhance reading comprehension. Participants were fifth-grade middle school students (four boys) who were at a frustration reading level (initial comprehension score range = 40%-48%) at their grade level. In…

We regularly compare magnitudes and describe these comparisons to other people. This article reports 9 experiments that examine how messages about the relative magnitude of two items affect inferences about the items' spatial arrangement. Native English speakers were given sentences such as "One tree is taller than the other," and their…

The Iowa Gambling Task (IGT) is widely used to study decision-making within healthy and psychiatric populations. However, the complexity of the IGT makes it difficult to attribute variation in performance to specific cognitive processes. Several cognitive models have been proposed for the IGT in an effort to address this problem, but currently no…

Three-experiments examined the number of qualitatively different processing dimensions needed to account for inductive and deductive reasoning. In each study, participants were presented with arguments that varied in logical validity and consistency with background knowledge (believability), and evaluated them according to deductive criteria…

Assessing the causal effects of interventions on ordinal outcomes is an important objective of many educational and behavioral studies. Under the potential outcomes framework, we can define causal effects as comparisons between the potential outcomes under treatment and control. However, unfortunately, the average causal effect, often the…

During communication, conversational partners should offer as much information as is required and relevant. For instance, the statement "Some Xs Y" is infelicitous if one knows that all Xs Y. Do children understand the link between speaker knowledge and utterance strength? In Experiment 1, 5-year-olds (N = 32) but not 4-year-olds…

This study describes a close replication of Friedrich, Buday, and Kerr's late 1990s survey of statistics instruction in undergraduate psychology programs. Disciplinary reform efforts at that time such as the report of the APA Task Force on Statistical Inference, together with recent progress in the "new statistics" movement, raise…

This case study describes how our research team conducted the qualitative think-aloud approach (or cognitive pretesting) to obtaining cognitive validity evidence for a biology inference-making and reasoning measure for undergraduate students. The main goal of our work was to gather high-quality student think-aloud data of reasoning while they were…