An experiment was carried out to compare the time course of the acquisition of two basic spelling mechanisms in Spanish, a shallow system, and French, a deep system. The first was lexical. It relies on the orthographic lexicon, a hypothetical structure containing the orthographic representations of words accessible for word spelling. To evaluate…

Children rely on both evidence and prior knowledge to make physical causal inferences; this study explores whether they make attributions about others' behavior in the same manner. A total of one hundred and fifty-nine 4- and 6-year-olds saw 2 dolls interacting with 2 activities, and explained the dolls' actions. In the person condition, each doll…

This study assessed how socioeconomic status (SES), race/ethnicity, and birth weight interacted to predict differential patterns of body mass index (BMI) growth among U.S. children born in the early 1990s. Three BMI growth trajectories emerged--one above the 50th percentile across the age range of 5 to 14, one in which children rapidly became…

Previous research has revealed that people choose to aim toward an "optimal" endpoint when faced with a movement task with externally imposed payoffs. This optimal endpoint is modeled based on the magnitude of the payoffs and the probability of hitting the different payoff regions (endpoint variability). Endpoint selection, however, has only been…

Perceptual grouping can lead observers to perceive a multielement scene as a smaller number of hierarchical units. Past work has shown that grouping enables more elements to be stored in visual working memory (WM). Although this may appear to contradict so-called discrete resource models that argue for fixed item limits in WM storage, it is also…

In Japanese, the same word can be written in either morphographic Kanji or syllabographic Hiragana and this provides a unique opportunity to disentangle a word's lexical frequency from the frequency of its visual form--an important distinction for understanding the neural information processing in regions engaged by reading. Behaviorally,…

Speakers show a remarkable tendency to align their productions with their interlocutors'. Focusing on sentence production, we investigate the cognitive systems underlying such alignment (syntactic priming). Our guiding hypothesis is that syntactic priming is a consequence of a language processing system that is organized to achieve efficient…

The purpose of this research is to evaluate the impact of firm strategies and corporate performance on enterprise software market growth in emerging regions. The emerging regions of Asia Pacific, Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and Latin America, currently represent smaller overall markets for software vendors, but exhibit high growth…

Several studies identify inequitable educational outcomes for students from diverse racial, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds. For example, when compared to White/Caucasian students, such students are more likely to be disciplined in school settings. School-wide positive behavior support (SWPBS) is an intervention likely to improve disproportionate…

This work develops a computational methodology new to linguistics that empirically evaluates competing linguistic theories on Spanish verbal mood choice through the use of computational techniques to learn mood and other hidden linguistic features from Spanish belief statements found in corpora. The machine learned probabilistic linguistic models…

How much information do natural systems store and process? In this work we attempt to answer this question in multiple ways. We first establish a mathematical framework where natural systems are represented by a canonical form of edge-labeled hidden fc models called e-machines. Then, utilizing this framework, a variety of measures are defined and…

This dissertation consists of three studies that investigate the extent to which speakers and listeners can and do plan ahead during production and comprehension. Study 1 investigates the attentional requirements of word selection. In two dual-task experiments, subjects categorized tones and then named pictures while word selection difficulty was…

There is increasing agreement among researchers and policymakers that teachers vary widely in their ability to improve student achievement, and the difference between effective and ineffective teachers has substantial effects on standardized test outcomes as well as later life outcomes. However, there is not similar agreement about how to improve…

Prediction of aromatic and anti-aromatic behavior of organic compounds is a vitally important tool for students of chemistry at graduate and post-graduate level for solving different kinds of problems regarding reactivity, stability and acidic properties etc. In this manuscript we try to present a simple and innovative method for easy…

This study examined the development of adolescent self-reported instrumental-overt, instrumental-relational, reactive-overt, and reactive-relational aggression during middle school ("N" = 384; 12-14 years; 53% boys). Growth modeling indicated average increases in instrumental-relational aggression, and decreases in reactive-overt and…