There are reasons to believe that infant-directed (ID) speech may make language acquisition easier for infants. However, the effects of ID speech on infants' learning remain poorly understood. The experiments reported here assess whether ID speech facilitates word segmentation from fluent speech. One group of infants heard a set of nonsense…

This study explores how infants encode an object's spatial extent. We habituated 6.5-month-old infants to a dowel inside a container and then tested whether they dishabituate to a change in absolute size when the relation between dowel and container is held constant (by altering the size of both container and dowel) and when the relation changes…

This research investigates the effects of prosody on children's recall for stories using two successive studies. Study 1 is an ethnographic exploration of a group of fifth graders creating summaries of a children's story with overt prosodic elements. Study 2 is a quasi-experiment in which the story summaries created by students who heard one of…

In 3 studies, participants viewed sequences of multiattribute objects (e.g., colored shapes) appearing with varying frequencies and judged the likelihood of the attributes of those objects. Judged probabilities reflected a compromise between (a) the frequency with which each attribute appeared and (b) the ignorance prior probability cued by the…

For many purposes, it is useful to collect a corpus of texts all produced to the same stimulus, whether to measure performance (as on a test) or to test hypotheses about population differences. This paper examines several methods for measuring similarities in phrasing and content and demonstrates that these methods can be used to identify…

Groups are a fundamental part of the business world. Yet, as companies continue to expand internationally, a major challenge lies in promoting effective communication among employees who work in varying time zones. Global expansion often requires group collaboration through computer systems. Computer-mediated groups lead to different communicative…

This single case study examined a Deaf teacher's behaviors and beliefs that reflect her expectations of her deaf students. Primary modes of communication used were American Sign Language and written English. Data were collected via videotaped observations and interviews. Analysis was done by coding utterances of the participants using a deductive…

A multiple baseline design across participants was used to investigate the effects of reciprocal questioning strategy instruction delivered in cooperative pairs on the question generation and responding of children with autism spectrum disorder. Three children with autism spectrum disorder and nine general education peers participated in the…

Julie Foertsch and Morton Ann Gernsbacher present the results of an evaluation of an online undergraduate course in psychology that adheres to the seven widely accepted principles of effective online teaching and suggests an eighth principle: using the unique benefits and constraints of online communication to prompt critical thinking about…

This paper reports on a study on the relationship between cognitive task complexity and linguistic performance in L2 writing. In the study, two models proposed to explain the influence of cognitive task complexity on linguistic performance in L2 are tested and compared: Skehan and Foster's Limited Attentional Capacity Model (Skehan, 1998; Skehan…

How and why does a given social value come to shape the way an individual thinks, feels, and acts in a specific social situation? This study links ideas from Goffman's frame analysis to other lines of research, proposing that dramatic narratives of variable content, vividness, and language-in-use produce variation in the accessibility of…

The author investigated the importance of processing considerations within implicit memory in a developmental design. Second-graders (n = 87) and college students (n = 81) completed perceptual (word stem completion) and conceptual (category generation) implicit memory tests after studying target items either nonsemantically (read) or semantically…

This study examined the effects of a work system on the independent work and play skills of students with autism. Work systems, an element of structured teaching developed by Division TEACCH, are organized sets of visual information that inform a student about participation in work or play areas. A single subject withdrawal of treatment design,…

Despite notable steps toward gender equality and significant changes in gender roles, women continue to face tension between academic aspirations and the more traditional role of caregiver. The goal of the present research was to examine how this conflict might be revealed through assessments of associations that cannot be consciously controlled.…

Through associative learning, cues for biologically significant reinforcers such as food may gain access to mental representations of those reinforcers. Here, we used devaluation procedures, behavioral assessment of hedonic taste-reactivity responses, and measurement of immediate-early gene (IEG) expression to show that a cue for food engages…