This article examines whether the idea of "temperament" is a useful construct for families to understand babies' and toddlers' behavior. The author suggests that "regulatory skill" may be a more neutral term than temperament for parents and practitioners to use in discussing individual differences among babies and toddlers and suggests that…

Purpose: Aims to investigate the way that the semantic web is being used to represent and process social network information. Design/methodology/approach: The Swoogle semantic web search engine was used to construct several large data sets of Resource Description Framework (RDF) documents with social network information that were encoded using the…

What is the nature of the change represented by digital communications technologies? How will the impact of the digital compare with the massive changes spawned in its time by print and books? These are the two key questions addressed in this article. The authors answer the first of these questions by comparing the emergence of the printed book…

The authors studied sensitivity to semantic priming, as distinct from semantic judgment, in poor readers. Association strength (high vs. low semantic association) was manipulated factorially with semantic association type (categoric vs. thematic association). Participants were 11-year-old poor readers (n = 15) who were matched with a group of…

The present study examined the neural correlates of speech and hand gesture comprehension in a naturalistic context. Fifteen participants watched audiovisual segments of speech and gesture while event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded to the speech. Gesture influenced the ERPs to the speech. Specifically, there was a right-lateralized N400…

Five experiments, using a subject-verb agreement error elicitation procedure, investigated syntactic planning processes in production. The experiments examined the influence of semantic integration--the degree to which phrases are tightly linked at the conceptual level--and contrasted two accounts of planning: serial stack-based systems and…

Dissociations in the recognition of specific classes of words have been documented in brain-injured populations. These include deficits in the recognition and production of morphologically complex words as well as impairments specific to particular syntactic classes such as verbs. However, functional imaging evidence for distinctions among the…

The effects of age of acquisition (AoA) in the first (L1) and second (L2) languages of Spanish--English bilinguals were explored using a translation judgement task in which participants decided whether or not pairs of words in the two languages were translations of each other (i.e., had the same meaning). Experiment 1 found an effect of second…

The purpose of this study was to investigate how retrospective verbal reports can contribute to our understanding of the factors influencing the interlanguage development of tense and grammatical aspect. The goal was to gain insights into (1) the mental representations second language learners hold of tense and grammatical aspect, and (2) the…

Many students with autism spectrum disorders show good decoding combined with poor comprehension. Twenty adolescent students with autism spectrum disorders participated in a study concerning the effects of three kinds of facilitation on reading comprehension. In a within-subjects design, each students read passages under four conditions: answering…

The study examined children and adolescents' ability to improve root spelling in Hebrew words by paying attention to phonological, semantic and orthographic properties of priming roots. One hundred and fifty 8, 9, 10, 11 and 15-year olds were administered two spelling tests in Hebrew. The same 40 target words were used in both tests, each word…

This study investigates the role of the temporal lobes in levels-of-processing tasks (phonetic and semantic encoding) according to the nature of recall tasks (free and cued recall). These tasks were administered to 48 patients with unilateral temporal epilepsy (right ''RTLE''=24; left ''LTLE''=24) and a normal group (n=24). The results indicated…

This article is concerned with the correspondence conditions that hold between certain semantic relations--including part-whole relations, possession, location, and the semantic features [+- animate] or [+- count]--and certain syntactic structures including genitives and relative clauses. The objective is to determine the extent to which these…

Adults learned the meanings of rare words (e.g., gloaming) and then made meaning judgments on pairs of words. The 1st word was a trained rare word, an untrained rare word, or an untrained familiar word. Event-related potentials distinguished trained rare words from both untrained rare and familiar words, first at 140 ms and again at 400-600 ms…

Until recently most models of word recognition have assumed that semantic effects come into play only after the identification of the word in question. What little evidence exists for early semantic effects in word recognition has relied primarily on priming manipulations using the lexical decision task, and has used visual stimulus presentation.…