Research has shown that the use of pre-reading activities, such as graphic or advance organizers can positively affect student acquisition of vocabulary and meaning when reading new concepts presented in text. One particularly effective strategy, semantic mapping, can significantly impact students who previously had a lack of prior knowledge on…

In this paper the author attempts to describe the actual linguistic problems of the retardates, compare their language with that of normal children and thereby tries to illustrate that although the language of retardates delay, they acquire language in the same sequence, as compared with the normal children. Three moderately retarded children with…

Attitudes toward older people can influence how they are treated and their cognitive and physical health. The populations of the United States and many other countries have become more ethnically diverse, and are aging. Yet little research examines how ethnic diversity affects attitudes toward older people. Our study addresses this research gap.…

We present 4 experiments investigating dynamic and flexible aspects of semantic activation spread during speech planning. In a semantic blocking paradigm, pictures of objects were presented in categorically homogeneous blocks consisting of semantic category members (e.g., foods), in blocks consisting of seemingly unrelated objects that could…

Research in automated creation of test items for assessment purposes became increasingly important during the recent years. Due to automatic question creation it is possible to support personalized and self-directed learning activities by preparing appropriate and individualized test items quite easily with relatively little effort or even fully…

This longitudinal investigation on Dutch children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) aimed at determining the predictive value of statistically uncorrelated language proficiencies on later reading and spelling skills in Dutch. Language abilities, tested with an extensive test battery at the onset of formal reading instruction, were…

Research has shown that English and German native speakers use prosodic cues during speech production to convey the intended meaning of an utterance. However, little is known about whether American L2 learners of German also use such cues during L2 production. The present study shows that inter-mediate-level L2 learners of German (English L1) use…

The scrambling complexity hypothesis based on working memory or locality accounts as well as syntactic accounts have proposed that processing a scrambled structure is difficult. However, the locus of this difficulty in sentence processing remains debatable. Several studies on multiple languages have explored the effect of scrambling on sentence…

Using event-related potentials (ERPs), we investigated the N400 (an ERP component that occurs in response to meaningful stimuli) in children aged 8-10 years old and examined relationships between the N400 and individual differences in listening comprehension, word recognition and non-word decoding. Moreover, we tested the claim that the N400…

This study applied volumetric analysis and voxel-based morphometry (VBM) of brain magnetic resonance (MR) images to assess whether correlations exist between global and regional gray/white matter volume and the cognitive functions of semantic memory and short-term memory, which are relatively well preserved with aging, using MR image data from 109…

The present study investigated proximal and distal predictors of reading comprehension by including latent factors such as alphabet knowledge, phonological awareness, semantic knowledge, word reading, oral reading fluency, and reading comprehension. The sample consisted of 79 five-year-old Korean-monolingual children who were assessed at the end…

Purpose: To explore whether individuals with aphasia exhibit differences in the M350, an electrophysiological marker of lexical activation, compared with healthy controls. Method: Seven people with aphasia, 9 age-matched controls, and 10 younger controls completed an auditory lexical decision task while cortical activity was recorded with…

In the present study, the development of semantic categorization and its relationship with reading was investigated across Dutch primary grade students. Three Exemplar-level tasks (Experiment 1) and two Superordinate-level tasks (Experiment 2) with different types of distracters (phonological, semantic and perceptual) were administered to assess…

This paper combines the use of corpus techniques with discourse analysis in order to investigate adverbials of result in the writing of advanced academic student writers. It focuses in detail on the phraseology and functions of "thus," "therefore," "then," "hence," "so" and "consequently." Two corpora of native-speaker theses are examined: 190,000…

The purpose of this paper is to explore how and when verbal labels facilitate relational reasoning and transfer. We review the research and theory behind two ways words might direct attention to relational information: (1) words generically invite people to compare and thus highlight relations (the Generic Tokens [GT] hypothesis), and/or (2) words…