This study examined lexical organization in English language learners (ELLs) who acquired their second language (L2) either during or after the period of maximal sensitivity related to the critical period hypothesis. Twenty-three native-Spanish-speaking ELLs completed psycholinguistic tasks to examine age effects in bilingual lexical organization.…

Introduction: Under the influence of Vygotsky, dynamic assessment (DA) has recently crept into the realm of L2 testing to assess learners' cognitive modification through the concept of mediation and zone of proximal development (ZPD) (Ableeva, The Effects of Dynamic Assessment on L2 Listening Comprehension 2008; Lantolf, Sociocultural theory and…

Preparation over time is a ubiquitous capacity which implies decreasing uncertainty about when critical events will occur. This capacity is usually studied with the variable foreperiod paradigm, which consists in the random variation of the time interval (foreperiod) between a warning stimulus and a target. With this paradigm, response time (RT)…

This paper describes a single-case study that focused on an intervention to teach sight words to a preschool student with Down syndrome through a collaborative approach in which responsibility for design and implementation was shared by the child's parents and her early childhood special education teacher. The intervention was consciously tailored…

Interventions for drug abuse and other maladaptive habitual behaviors may yield temporary success but are often fragile and relapse is common. This implies that current interventions do not erase or substantially modify the representations that support the underlying addictive behavior--that is, they do not cause true unlearning. One example of an…

The aim of this study was to explore automaticity of lexical access and executive functions of language learners and bilinguals while considering their language automaticity. Three groups of youths aged 14 to 18 were tested: Croatian-German early bilinguals, Croatian high school students who participated in a German immersion programme at school…

Purpose: Despite the apparent primacy of syntactic deficits, children with developmental language disorder (DLD) often also evidence lexical impairments. In particular, it has been argued that this population have difficulty forming lexical representations that are detailed enough to support effective spoken word processing. In order to better…

The purpose of this study was to examine what components of executive function (EF)--inhibition, shifting and updating/working memory--predict reading comprehension in young adults. Ninety university students (65 females, 25 males; mean age = 21.82 years) were assessed on shifting (Planned Connections and Colour/Shape Shifting), inhibition…

The purpose of this study was to compare the acute effects of Aerobic Exercise (AE), Resistance Exercise (RE), and a nonexercise (NE) control on measures of academic achievement (AA) and cognition in 10th grade males and females. This study utilized a randomized crossover design. Tenth grade males and females performed three exercise trials (AE,…

This interlanguage study examines the L2 mental lexicon of Thai EFL learners with different degrees of language exposure--i.e., the high exposure group and the low exposure group. The scores from the English Language Exposure (ELE) Questionnaire were used to select the two groups of participants. To explore the lexical processing and the…

Research investigating links between academic achievement and active music instruction has not previously differentiated between different types of instruction. In the current study, 155 seventh- and eighth-grade middle school band students were divided into two groups. Both groups received 2 months of instruction in jazz phrasing, scales, and…

Research has highlighted the role of working memory and inhibition on the performance of pupils in mathematics. This study was an attempt to look into the relationship between executive function including working memory capacity and inhibition on the one hand and mathematical abilities on the other. 30 primary school students were selected from…

The current study examined how morpho-semantic processing of derivational morphology develops from later childhood through adolescence to adulthood in Finnish. Finnish is a synthetic language rich both in derivation and inflection. It has been suggested that children gradually acquire the ability to process morphologically complex word structures.…

In this dissertation, I investigated how cognitive resources as well as formal, and informal language experience impact language learning in two studies. In the first study (Chapter 2), I examined the learning of Spanish grammatical gender by Chinese international students who were studying abroad in the US. The goal of that study was to uncover…

Joint attention--the mutual focus of 2 individuals on an item--speeds detection and discrimination of target information. However, what happens to that information beyond the initial perceptual episode? To fully comprehend and engage with our immediate environment also requires working memory (WM), which integrates information from second to…