The construct of anxiety is often believed to be the affective factor with the greatest potential to pervasively affect the learning process (Horwitz, 2001), and recent research has demonstrated that anxiety can mediate whether learners are able to notice feedback and subsequently produce output (Sheen, 2008). In order to reduce the negative…

The present paper explores cross-cultural variation in spatial cognition by comparing spatial reconstruction tasks by Dutch and Namibian elementary school children. These two communities differ in the way they predominantly express spatial relations in language. Four experiments investigate cognitive strategy preferences across different levels of…

A review of recent large-scale studies on gender differences in processing speed and on the cognitive factors assumed to affect processing speed was performed. It was found that females have an advantage in processing speed tasks involving digits and alphabets as well as in rapid naming tasks while males are faster on reaction time tests and…

Purpose: To compare articulation and speech rates of school-aged children who do and do not stutter across sentence priming, structured conversation, and narration tasks and to determine factors that predict children's speech and articulation rates. Method: 34 children who stutter (CWS) and 34 age- and gender-matched children who do not stutter…

In a multi-study naturalistic quasi-experiment involving 269 students in a semester-long introductory philosophy course, we investigated the effect of teaching argument diagramming (AD) on students' scores on argument analysis tasks. An argument diagram is a visual representation of the content and structure of an argument. In each study, all of…

Facial expression recognition was investigated in 20 males with high functioning autism (HFA) or Asperger syndrome (AS), compared to typically developing individuals matched for chronological age (TD CA group) and verbal and non-verbal ability (TD V/NV group). This was the first study to employ a visual search, "face in the crowd" paradigm with a…

Individuals with aphasia have more problems detecting small differences between speech sounds than larger ones. This paper reports how phonemic processing is impaired and how this is influenced by speechreading. A non-word discrimination task was carried out with "audiovisual", "auditory only" and "visual only" stimulus display. Subjects had to…

Category formation lies at the heart of a number of higher-order behaviors, including language. We assessed the ability of human adults to learn, from distributional information alone, categories embedded in a sequence of input stimuli using a serial reaction time task. Artificial grammars generated corpora of input strings containing a…

In 4 experiments, we intermixed trials in which the stimulus color was relevant with trials where participants had to judge the stimulus shape or parity and found that the logical-recoding rule (Hedge & Marsh, 1975) applied to the relevant dimension in a task can generalize to the irrelevant dimension of the other task. The mapping…

Synaptically released Zn[superscript 2+] is a potential modulator of neurotransmission and synaptic plasticity in fear-conditioning pathways. Zinc transporter 3 (ZnT3) knock-out (KO) mice are well suited to test the role of zinc in learned fear, because ZnT3 is colocalized with synaptic zinc, responsible for its transport to synaptic vesicles,…

This paper investigated children's ability to use syntactic structures to infer semantic information. The particular syntax-semantics link examined was the one between transitivity (transitive/intransitive structures) and telicity (telic/atelic perspectives; that is, boundedness). Although transitivity is an important syntactic reflex of telicity,…

As young children make sense of mathematics, they begin to see with new eyes. What once was uncertain may now be determined. Objects become countable; fingers become tools; and numbers become more than just names. Educators revel in such developments--which mark significant progress toward more sophisticated understanding of number--and work…

Two experiments investigated how absolute and relative distance shape adults' and young children's ratings concerning the extent to which the term "by" describes the relation between locations. Three- and 4-year-old children and adults were asked to rate how well the word "by" described the relation between several blocks and a landmark. The…

Purpose: In this study, the authors aimed to examine the accuracy, latency, and errors of noun (object) and verb (action) naming in children with and without specific language impairment (SLI) and to determine whether children with SLI have a particularly large noun-verb performance gap. Method: Children with SLI, age-matched peers (AM), and…

Purpose: In this study, the authors tested the unique checking constraint (UCC) hypothesis and the usage-based approach concerning why young children variably use tense and agreement morphemes in obligatory contexts by examining the effect of subject types on the production of auxiliary "is". Method: Twenty typically developing 3-year-olds were…