Purpose: Using a dual-task paradigm, 2 experiments (Experiments 1 and 2) were conducted to assess differences in the amount of listening effort expended to understand speech in noise in audiovisual (AV) and audio-only (A-only) modalities. Experiment 1 had equivalent noise levels in both modalities, and Experiment 2 equated speech recognition…

The current study aimed to assess the implicit attitudes of vegetarians and non-vegetarians towards meat and vegetables, using the Implicit Association Test (IAT) and the Implicit Relational Assessment Procedure (IRAP). Both measures involved asking participants to respond, under time pressure, to pictures of meat or vegetables as either positive…

An examinee faced with a test item will engage in solution behavior or rapid-guessing behavior. These qualitatively different test-taking behaviors bias parameter estimates for item response models that do not control for such behavior. A mixture Rasch model with item response time components was proposed and evaluated through application to real…

A latent variable analysis was conducted to examine the nature of individual differences in lapses of attention and their relation to executive and fluid abilities. Participants performed a sustained attention task along with multiple measures of executive control and fluid abilities. Lapses of attention were indexed based on the slowest reaction…

Five psychological refractory period (PRP) experiments were conducted with an especially time-consuming first task (Experiments 1, 3, and 5: mental rotation; Experiments 2 and 4: memory scanning) and with equal emphasis on the first task and on the second (left-right tone judgment). The standard design with varying stimulus onset asynchronies…

We assessed linkages between parents' beliefs and their children's self-construals with 60 7th and 8th graders. Early adolescents completed an open-ended, Self-Guide Questionnaire and an independent and interdependent reaction-time measure. The self-guide responses were coded for independent and interdependent traits. Parents reported beliefs…

With an increasing population living at a high altitude (HA), the impact of HA residence on human cognitive function has raised concerns. We recruited two groups of college students with one group born and grew up at HA until early adulthood and the control group born and grew up at near sea level (SL); the two groups were matched at age, gender…

Young English-speaking monolingual and bilingual adults were examined for English proficiency, language use history, and performance on a flanker task. The bilinguals, who were about twenty years old, were divided into two groups (early bilinguals and late bilinguals) according to whether they became actively bilingual before or after the age of…

Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are characterized by a deficit of dorsal visual stream processing as well as the impairment of inhibitory control capability. However, the cognitive processing mechanisms of executive dysfunction have not been addressed. In the present study, the endogenous Posner paradigm task was administered to 15 children with…

Many second language acquisition (SLA) studies have traditionally limited their scope of investigation to the description and analysis of errors in L2 learners' use of multiword units. Recently, researchers have begun to approach this topic from a psycholinguistic perspective, examining the processing of multiword units by L2 learners. However,…

This paper presents a framework for incorporating the assessment of psycholinguistic constructs into spoken language proficiency testing. Although response time and automaticity of language processing are vital factors in language acquisition, as constructs they are rarely explicitly assessed in language tests. It is proposed that efficiency of…

This study investigates how inaccurate phoneme processing affects recognition of partially onset-overlapping pairs like "DAFFOdil-DEFIcit" and of minimal pairs like "flash-flesh" in second-language listening. Two cross-modal priming experiments examined differences between native (L1) and second-language (L2) listeners at two…

Purpose: It is well known that people with aphasia have sentence comprehension impairments. The present study investigated whether lexical factors contribute to sentence comprehension impairments in both the auditory and written modalities using online measures of sentence processing. Method: People with aphasia and non brain-damaged controls…

The purpose of this mixed-methods study was to identify and define the conditions that facilitate learning in music among students with special needs. Children with special needs met once a week for 10 consecutive weeks and received instruction in primarily music as well as the other arts. The children completed pre- and posttest evaluations that…

The effects of properties of words on their reading aloud response times (RTs) are 1 major source of evidence about the reading process. The precision with which such RTs could potentially be predicted by word properties is critical to evaluate our understanding of reading but is often underestimated due to contamination from individual…