Studies examined the potential use of VEs in teaching historical chronology to 127 children of primary school age (8-9 years). The use of passive fly-through VEs had been found, in an earlier study, to be disadvantageous with this age group when tested for their subsequent ability to place displayed sequential events in correct chronological…

Reviews of the effects of noise on performance carried out in the 1980s suggested that results depended on the type of noise, nature of the task, and characteristics of the person performing in noise. This general view has been confirmed in the recent meta-analysis and synthesis by Szalma and Hancock (2011). There are, however, some notable…

In two studies, 4- to 6-year-olds were asked to name pictures of animals for the benefit of a watching hand puppet (the ongoing task) but to refrain from naming and to remove from view any pictures of dogs (the prospective memory [PM] task). Children also completed assessments of verbal ability, cognitive inhibition, working memory, and…

As recent studies and theoretical assumptions suggest that the quality of texts composed by children and adolescents is affected by their transcription skills, this experimental field trial aims at investigating the impact of combined handwriting/spelling training on fluency, spelling and text quality among normally developing 3rd graders…

Executive function (EF) describes a complex set of skills, including flexible attention, inhibitory control, and working memory, that coordinate to achieve behavioral regulation. Visuospatial skills (VS) describe the capacity to visually perceive and understand spatial relationships among objects. Emerging research suggests VS skills are…

Second language (L2) educators have proposed a unique anxiety for general L2 learning and an anxiety specific to L2 reading. Since the early 1990s, the L2 anxiety concept has been challenged on theoretical and empirical grounds. In this investigation, U.S. high school L2 learners were administered the Foreign Language Reading Anxiety Scale (FLRAS)…

This study investigated the effects of auditory and audiovisual text presentation on the three levels of mental representations assumed in theories of discourse processing. A sample of 106 children aged 7, 9, and 11 years listened to 16 short narrative texts, 8 of which were accompanied by a series of pictures illustrating the content.…

The goal of this study was to examine oral word reading fluency from a developmental perspective in a longitudinal study of students from second grade to sixth grade. The sample consisted of native English speaking students that took part in a large longitudinal study. Participants were assessed on cognitive and literacy measures such as working…

Working memory capacities are associated with mathematical development. Many studies have tried to improve working memory abilities through training. Furthermore, the central executive has been shown to be the component of working memory, which is the most strongly related to numerical and arithmetical skills. Therefore, we developed a training…

The current meta-analysis synthesized findings from profiling research on Chinese children with reading difficulties (RD). We reviewed a total of 81 studies published between 1964 and May 2015, representing a total of 9735 Chinese children. There are 982 effect sizes for the comparison between children with RD and age-matched typically developing…

This study examines the relationship between different types of language learning aptitude (measured via the LLAMA test) and adult second language (L2) learners' attainment in speech production in English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) classrooms. Picture descriptions elicited from 50 Japanese EFL learners from varied proficiency levels were analyzed…

Background: Problematic alcohol use is associated with neuropsychological consequences, including cognitive biases. The goal of the study was to explore the moderating role of executive control and readiness to change on the relationship between alcohol use and cognitive biases in light and problematic drinkers with and without mild to borderline…

Working memory is considered a well-established predictor of individual variation in reading comprehension in children and adults. However, how storage and processing capacities of working memory in both the phonological and semantic domain relate to reading comprehension is still unclear. In the current study, we investigated the contribution of…

Childhood socioeconomic status (SES), as measured by parental education and family income, is highly predictive of academic achievement, but little is known about how specific cognitive systems shape SES disparities in achievement outcomes. This study investigated the extent to which executive function (EF) mediated associations between parental…

The sequence in which problems of different concepts are studied during instruction impacts concept learning. For example, several problems of a given concept can be studied together (blocking) or several problems of different concepts can be studied together (interleaving). In the current study, we demonstrate that the 2 sequences impact concept…