We examined the size, content, and use of evaluative lexis by 26 English monolingual and 20 Spanish-English bilingual 30-month-old children in interaction with their mothers. We extracted the evaluative words, defined as words referring to cognition, volition, or emotion. Controlling for overall vocabulary skills as measured by the MacArthur-Bates…

This article focuses on Problem-based Learning (PBL) training within a Teaching Development Programme (TDP) and the subsequent application of PBL by candidates, as respondents in this study. An analysis of the training, which followed a medical model approach, is provided, as is the implementation of PBL within the various disciplinary contexts of…

Background: Event-related potentials (ERPs), which are electrophysiological neural responses time-locked to a stimulus, have become an increasingly common tool in language and communication disorders research. They can provide complementary evidence to behavioural measures as well as unique perspectives on communication disorders. ERPs have the…

Between 6 and 9 years of age, children's free associations shift from syntagmatic to paradigmatic relationships. "Syntagmatic relations" are words that are syntactically adjacent, thematically related ("summer-vacation"), or both; "paradigmatic relations" are words from the same grammatical class, taxonomic category…

There are lots of information and knowledge can be extracted from a discussion forum. Despite a discussion is opened by submitting a thread as the topic of discussion, however, the discussion may open out to different topics. This paper aims to present a model to find out a topic of discussion through latent semantic approach, named Topics Finding…

Gestures are physical manifestations of cognitive processes. Geology students often use gestures to describe geologic features and processes. The gestures allow students to convey 3- and 4-dimensional information about the rocks. Studying and characterizing these gestures can be useful in understanding students' learning processes; however,…

Mind-wandering (i.e., thoughts irrelevant to the current task) occurs frequently during reading. The current study examined whether mind-wandering was associated with reduced rereading when the reader read the so-called garden-path jokes. In a garden-path joke, the reader's initial interpretation is violated by the final punchline, and the…

Semantic knowledge accumulates through explicit means and productive processes (e.g., analogy). These means work in concert when information explicitly acquired in separate episodes is integrated, and the integrated representation is used to self-derive new knowledge. We tested whether (a) self-derivation through memory integration extends beyond…

Some links between linguistic meanings and markers change systematically and cyclically in what are known as "grammaticalization paths." Although the empirical observations that give rise to these characterizations are cross-linguistically robust, the representations and cognitive processes that support these shifts are still not well…

There is now considerable evidence regarding the types of interventions that are effective at remediating reading disabilities on average. It is generally unclear, however, what predicts the magnitude of individual-level change following a given intervention. We examine new predictors of intervention gains that are theoretically grounded in…

The present study endeavors to investigate the learning of the comprehension of semantic interpretation of metaphor in the expository writing by EFL learners at Albalqa Applied University, Jordan. Moreover, the study attempts to see the role of mother tongue influences in the learning and comprehension of semantic interpretation of metaphor in…

In the current study, we examined relations between text features (e.g., word concreteness, referential cohesion) and reading comprehension using multilevel logistic models. The sample was 158 native English-speaking students between 8 years, 8 months and 11 years, 2 months of age with a wide range of reading ability. In line with the simple view…

Several previous studies showed that prime-target pairs with orthographical overlap but no semantic or morphological relationship (e.g., freeze-free) produced a masked priming effect in second language (L2) speakers but not in first language (L1) speakers. The present study further explored this intriguing L1-L2 difference by comparing English…

The delayed acquisition of Spanish "ser" and "estar" is generally understood as rooted in the cognitive demands imposed by the integration of semantic-pragmatic and world-knowledge factors associated with their lexical meanings. Here we ask (1) what is the nature of this language world-knowledge integration? and (2) what is the…

Negotiating meaning can be difficult for the deaf-mute people when being in the hearing and speaking world. Social media offers a platform where the deaf and the mute can engage in meaningful conversations among themselves and between people with hearing and speaking abilities. This paper determined the paralinguistic signals that the deafmute…