The influence of different instructional presentations upon meaning and pronunciation acquisition in character learning was examined. High school students learned to identify a series of characters in terms of their associated pinyin and English translation prompts. Acquisition was shown to proceed more rapidly when the Chinese character was…

EEG was recorded as adults watched short segments of spontaneous discourse in which the speaker's gestures and utterances contained complementary information. Videos were followed by one of four types of picture probes: cross-modal related probes were congruent with both speech and gestures; speech-only related probes were congruent with…

This article considers how teachers can begin to reconcile their value for creativity with a pedagogy that supports it. First, teachers' experiences of finding themselves caught in the middle between valuing creativity and helping students conform to the constraints of the classroom are considered. Next, the role that constraints play in…

Two experiments with the inductive generalization procedure tested whether 16- and 20-month-old infants understand that animals and not vehicles follow a rational path to reach a goal. Infants were tested with four different events and the model exemplar was either an animal or ambiguous block. Results showed that infants at 20 months of age, but…

We measured long-term memory for a narrative film. During the study session, participants watched a 27-min movie episode, without instructions to remember it. During the test session, administered at a delay ranging from 3 h to 9 mo after the study session, long-term memory for the movie was probed using a computerized questionnaire that assessed…

To date, much information about Sign Bilingualism, gleaned from parents and/or teachers, has been written from a strong hearing viewpoint. As deaf children should be the main beneficiaries from a Sign Bilingual Education, this project was designed to enable the children to recall their experiences and share their multi-aspect views with other deaf…

C. M. MacLeod and P. A. MacDonald (2000) suggested that congruent and incongruent Stroop stimuli cause more task conflict than neutral stimuli because the anterior cingulate cortex is more activated with these stimuli. This study investigated behavioral expression for this pattern. Experiment 1 reduced task conflict control by increasing the…

English-speaking children spell letters correctly more often when the letters' names are heard in the word (e.g., B in "beach" vs. "bone"). Hebrew letter names have been claimed to be less useful in this regard. In Study 1, kindergartners were asked to report and spell initial and final letters in Hebrew words that included full (CVC), partial…

Several phonological and prosodic properties of words have been shown to relate to differences between grammatical categories. Distributional information about grammatical categories is also a rich source in the child's language environment. In this paper we hypothesise that such cues operate in tandem for developing the child's knowledge about…

This study examines 16-month-olds' understanding of word order and inflectional properties of familiar nouns and verbs. Infants preferred grammatical sentences over ungrammatical sentences when the ungrammaticality was cued by both misplaced inflection and word order reversal of nouns and verbs. Infants were also sensitive to inflection alone as a…

The Assessment of Basic Learning Abilities (ABLA) test requires a tester to attempt to teach to a person, using standard prompting and reinforcement procedures, six tasks that are hierarchically ordered in difficulty. Performance on the test provides valuable information for teachers and rehabilitation workers to match the difficulty of training…

This paper reports on an initial examination of the use of out-group linguistic forms by speakers in a multilingual speech community in Malaysia. It employs the poststructuralist model of identity, and within codeswitching research, considers the notions of contextualisation cues, accommodation and the practice of crossing as a conceptual…

Studies of basic (nonspeech) auditory processing in adults thought to have developmental dyslexia have yielded a variety of data. Yet there has been little consensus regarding the explanatory value of auditory processing in accounting for reading difficulties. Recently, however, a number of studies of basic auditory processing in children with…

We evaluated a video-based error correction procedure for teaching four adults with developmental disabilities to set a table. Video clips were initially used as an antecedent prompt. However, only one of the adults learned to set the table with this procedure. Consequently, the remaining three adults received intervention in which the video clips…

We tested Chinese-English bi-scriptal fourth-graders on reading aloud and comprehension in Chinese and English and their understanding of some structural principles underlying Chinese orthography. These principles concern phonological and semantic representation in written Chinese. Regressions showed that knowledge about phonological…