Six Mandarin affricates (i.e., zh[ts], ch[ts[superscript h]], z[ts], c[ts[superscript h]], j[tc], q[tc[superscript h]), which are not universally present in other languages, have been extensively challenging for learners of Mandarin Chinese. In the current study, perception of these affricates was investigated via an experiment in which native…

Effective criterion referenced assessment requires grade descriptors to clarify to students what skills are required to gain higher grades. But do students and staff actually have the same perception of the grading system, and if so, do they perform better than those whose perceptions are less accurately aligned with those of staff? Since…

The purpose of this study was to examine principals' perceptions of parental involvement at various levels in terms of their role in facilitation and parent involvement in school processes. The principals in this study (n = 171) were receptive to their roles in facilitation, but not to parental involvement in school processes. Because there are…

The own-race bias (ORB) is a well-known finding wherein people are better able to recognize and discriminate own-race faces, relative to cross-race faces. In 2 experiments, participants viewed Asian and Caucasian faces, in preparation for recognition memory tests, while their eye movements and pupil diameters were continuously monitored. In…

Much of speech perception research has focused on brief spectro-temporal properties in the signal, but some studies have shown that adults can recover linguistic form when those properties are absent. In this experiment, 7-year-old English-speaking children demonstrated adultlike abilities to understand speech when only sine waves (SWs)…

The mechanisms underlying the poorer serial recall of talker-variable lists (e.g., alternating female-male voices) as compared with single-voice lists were examined. We tested the novel hypothesis that this "talker variability effect" arises from the tendency for perceptual organization to partition the list into streams based on voice…

The role of a studio music teacher is a delicate balance of creativity and organization. In a one-on-one setting a teacher must guide a student through the physical challenges of playing an instrument as well as conveying the abstract notions of music and aesthetics. The goal of guiding a student into becoming a fine musician is universal, but…

Failure to adapt to the demands of higher education (HE) is often cited as a cause of withdrawal from the course. Parker and others (Parker, J.D.A., L.J. Summerfeldt, M.J. Hogan, and S.A. Majeski. 2004. "Emotional intelligence and academic success: Examining the transition from high school to university." "Personality and Individual…

This study tested if children with specific language impairment (SLI) or children with specific reading disability (SRD) have abnormal brain responses to sounds. We tested 6- to 12-year-old children with SLI (N = 19), children with SRD (N = 55), and age-matched controls (N = 36) for their passive auditory event-related potentials (ERPs) to tones,…

Introduction: Developmental dyslexia (DD) is a frequent language-based learning disorder. The predominant etiological view postulates that reading problems originate from a phonological impairment. Method: We studied mismatch negativity (MMN) and Late Discriminative Negativity (LDN) to syllables change in both children (n = 12; 8-12 years) and…

The Tactual Profile assesses tactual functioning of children with severe visual impairments between 0 and 16 years of age. The Tactual Profile consists of 430 items, measuring tactile skills required for performing everyday tasks at home and in school. Items are graded according to age level and divided into three domains: tactual sensory, tactual…

Background: Previous research has found that newborn infants can match phonetic information in the lips and voice from as young as ten weeks old. There is evidence that access to visual speech is necessary for normal speech development. Although we have an understanding of this early sensitivity, very little research has investigated older…

This article examines and critiques the leadership capacity of department leaders in a high school and attempts to gain a deeper understanding of how department leaders perceive their role as teacher leaders, making a distinction between what an individual department leader does in his or her position and teacher leadership as a form of continuous…

This paper focuses on approaches by non-government organisations (NGOs) to reach primary school-aged children excluded from access to the conventional state education system. It highlights recent shifts in international literature and agency priorities from the portrayal of NGO provision as a (non-formal) "alternative" to (formal) state…

The difference in cognitive resources required for imagination and perception was tested in two experiments by examining the reduced substitutability of imagination and perception in problem solving by college undergraduates. Eighty subjects in Experiment 1 drew capital letters from lines or descriptions of lines in a seven-page booklet. The…