The demise of the Communist Party's monopoly over education in Europe created a new dilemma for educational leaders in post-Communist states. They faced a difficult question: How should a nation-state that accepts ideological pluralism handle the difficult relationship between religion and education? As is well known, Western liberal democracies…

"Second Life" (SL) is currently the most mature and popular multi-user virtual world platform being used in education. Through an in-depth examination of SL, this article explores its potential and the barriers that multi-user virtual environments present to educators wanting to use immersive 3-D spaces in their teaching. The context is set by…

This paper introduces the mixture general diagnostic model (MGDM), an extension of the general diagnostic model (GDM). The MGDM extension allows one to estimate diagnostic models for multiple known populations as well as discrete unknown, or not directly observed mixtures of populations. The GDM is based on developments that integrate located…

Items commonly belong to many categories. Cross-classification is the classification of a single item into more than one category. This research explored 2- to 6-year-old children's use of 2 different category systems for cross-classification: script (e.g., school-time items, birthday party items) and taxonomic (e.g., animals, clothes). The…

An Auditory Ambiguity Test (AAT) was taken twice by nonmusicians, musical amateurs, and professional musicians. The AAT comprised different tone pairs, presented in both within-pair orders, in which overtone spectra rising in pitch were associated with missing fundamental frequencies (F0) falling in pitch, and vice versa. The F0 interval ranged…

Categorization judgments may be right or wrong and more or less useful. When a child calls a whale "a fish," is she making an error, or just describing an interesting similarity? This chapter explores the challenges children face in learning to conform to conventions governing categorization. (Contains 1 figure.)

A category-specific naming effect penalizing living things has often been reported in patients suffering from Alzheimer's disease (AD) and in other brain damaged populations, while the opposite dissociation (i.e., lower accuracy in naming nonliving than living things) is much rarer. In this study, we investigated whether the use of line drawings…

Patterns of typical Internet use provide the basis for defining "functional Internet literacy." Internet use commonly includes communication, information, recreation, and commercial activities. Technical competence with connectivity, security, and downloads is a prerequisite for using the Internet for such activities. Bloom's taxonomy of cognitive…

This article focuses on the syntax of a number of subcategories of verb in French which are compatible with a following bare infinitive and which express various kinds of grammatical tense, mood, modality, aspect and voice, as well as such (more lexical?) notions as perception, causation and locomotion. The article starts by cataloguing a number…

The Cantonese language has a complex classifier system and young learners need to pay attention to both the semantics and syntax of classifiers. This study investigated the repertoire of classifiers produced by 492 Cantonese-speaking preschoolers in three age groups (3;0, 4;0 and 5;0). Spontaneous utterances produced in 30-minute toy-play contexts…

Systematic Treatment Selection (STS) is a form of technical eclectism that develops and plans treatments using empirically founded principles of psychotherapy. It is a model that provides systematic guidelines for the utilization of different psychotherapeutic strategies based on patient qualities and problem characteristics. Historically, it…

This article sheds light on issues concerning discrimination in the history of deaf people in Sweden in the 20th century. With the help of a specific typology of concepts for analysing discrimination exercised through the use of language, it is shown how the categorization of the hearing impaired has changed over time and how, in this process of…

Culture and vocabulary are widely accepted as important elements for language courses, and pictures (photographs, slides, drawings, pictures from magazines, etc.) have long been a favorite tool of language teachers at all levels. Although pictures provide an excellent means of integrating culture with vocabulary acquisition, their use is not only…

Objects and substances bear fundamentally different ontologies. In this article, we examine the relations between language, the ontological distinction with respect to individuation, and the world. Specifically, in cross-linguistic developmental studies that follow Imai and Gentner (1997), we examine the question of whether language influences our…

The ambiguity disadvantage (slower processing of ambiguous words relative to unambiguous words) has been taken as evidence for a distributed semantic representational system like that embodied in parallel distributed processing (PDP) models. In the present study, we investigated whether semantic ambiguity slows meaning activation, as PDP models…