Much developmental work has been devoted to "scalar implicatures." These are implicitly communicated propositions linked to relatively weak terms (consider how "Some" pragmatically implies "Not all") that are more likely to be carried out by adults than by children. Children tend to retain the linguistically encoded…

This paper studies the development of taxonomic processing as measured by an adapted version of the Wechsler Similarities subtest, which distinguishes between categorization of concrete and abstract words. Two factors--age and concreteness--are also tested by a recall task. The results show an age-related increase in taxonomic categorization,…

The present study focuses on noun and verb processing during language acquisition, whereby the word production and the word comprehension of preschool children of different ages were investigated across three languages. Two hypotheses were put forward: first, given that languages differ with respect to the clarity of the noun-verb distinction and…

Three accounts of common ground maintenance make different assumptions about speakers' responsibilities regarding listener-privileged information. Duplicated responsibility requires each interlocutor to assimilate the other's knowledge before designing appropriate utterances. Shared responsibility appeals to least collaborative effort [Clark, H.…

This observational study supplements the strong and consistent link found between childhood depression and deficits in interpersonal functioning by examining the relationship between a high versus low score on the Children's Depression Inventory (CDI) and children's emotions when interacting with their best friends. High-CDI and low-CDI target…

This study explored Mikhail Bakhtin's conceptualization of carnival as it applies to 2 second language (L2) learners in an American kindergarten classroom. Unwilling to engage in two story retelling tasks, the children nevertheless invoked the imaginative, playful, and dialogic world of carnival, creating meaningful, contingent contexts for…

We investigated processing of metaphoric sentences using event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Seventeen healthy subjects (6 female, 11 male) read 60 novel short German sentence pairs with either metaphoric or literal meaning and performed two different tasks: judging the metaphoric content and judging whether the sentence…

Teachers' competence to estimate the effectiveness of learning materials is important and often neglected in programmes for teacher education. In this lecture I will try to explore the possibilities of designing scaffolding instruments for a "priori" assessment of language learning tasks, based on insights from SLA and cognitive psychology, more…

Given Russian students' general lack of group work and opportunities to develop student responsibility in their prior schooling experiences, the purpose of this study was to examine how a group of Russian high school students responds to novel demands of participation in a sport education season. Forty-two students from two ninth-grade physical…

Studies of monolingual speakers have shown a strong association between lexical learning and short-term memory (STM) capacity, especially STM for serial order information. At the same time, studies of bilingual speakers suggest that phonological knowledge is the main factor that drives lexical learning. This study tested these two hypotheses…

VALEURTECH is a pilot project under the European Commission's Leonardo II programme. It includes 35 partners from higher education institutions and professional organizations in eight European countries and has the major objectives: of (a) setting up a homogeneous "labelling" process, such as a diploma supplement, based on a common…

The effects of data-gathering methods on pragmatic data have been well documented, yet an inquiry into the interactive effects of assessment tasks with pragmatic instruction has received scant attention. This study investigated the interaction between two assessment tasks (e-mail and phone) and two types of pragmatic instruction (explicit and…

Despite the proliferation of taught masters courses, the experiences of masters students in general have received comparatively little attention within the research literature, and the dissertation process in particular has not been investigated extensively. The present article focuses on the findings of detailed interviews with 15 professionals…

The present study was designed to determine whether parents (three mothers and one grandmother) could implement CBI with SP reliably for teaching community skills to their children and the effects of parent-delivered intervention on teaching the community skills. Maintenance and generalization effects of the intervention were also analyzed in the…

This review critically examines the research findings which characterize the cognitive, behavioral, and neuroanatomical features of Williams syndrome (WS). This article analyzes 178 published studies in the WS literature covering the following areas: 1) General intelligence, 2) Language skills, 3) Visuospatial and face processing skills, 4)…