This study investigates whether number dissimilarities on subject and object DPs facilitate the comprehension of subject- and object-extracted centre-embedded relative clauses in children with Grammatical Specific Language Impairment (G-SLI). We compared the performance of a group of English-speaking children with G-SLI (mean age: 12;11) with that…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine the English phonological skills of English language learners (ELLs) over 5 time points. Method: Sound class accuracy, whole-word accuracy, percentage of occurrence of phonological patterns, and sociolinguistic correlational analyses were investigated in 19 ELLs ranging in age from 5;0…

Games provide important informal learning activities for young children, and spatial game play (e.g., puzzles and blocks) has been found to relate to the development of spatial skills. This study investigates 4- and 5-year-old children's use of scaled and unscaled maps when solving mazes, asking whether an important aspect of spatial…

Purpose: This study examines accuracy and comparability of 4 trademarked acoustic analysis software packages (AASPs): Praat, WaveSurfer, TF32, and CSL by using synthesized and natural vowels. Features of AASPs are also described. Method: Synthesized and natural vowels were analyzed using each of the AASP's default settings to secure 9…

Purpose: One possible source of tense and agreement limitations in children with specific language impairment (SLI) is a weakness in appreciating structural dependencies that occur in many sentences in the input. This possibility was tested in the present study. Method: Children with a history of SLI (H-SLI; n = 12; M = 9;7 [years;months]) and…

While there is ample evidence that study abroad (SA) enhances oral fluency in a foreign language, the effects of different types of learning context on other aspects of oral skills, such as vocabulary use, have not received much attention in academic research and are less clear. The present study tries to fill this void by investigating lexical…

Although participation in academic speaking events is a key to developing disciplinary understanding, students for whom English is a second language may have limited access to these learning events due to an increasingly dialogic and active higher education pedagogy which places considerable demands on their oracy skills. Drawing on the Oracy…

This study examines elicited imitation (EI) both as a measure of implicit grammatical knowledge and more global semantic and syntactic knowledge. It also examines whether length affects the difficulty of EI tests when they contain both grammatical and ungrammatical items. Fifty language learners took an EI test and an oral narrative task. The data…

Based on our own experiences teaching grammar in developmental writing classes and classes not dedicated to writing instruction, along with a history of scholarship that indicates a need for grammar pedagogies (e.g., Dougherty, 2012), instructor-designed grammar games can likely help facilitate learning about these mechanics of writing while…

The verification of student identity has always been a matter of concern in distance education programs. In short, how could a college know if the person performing the work was the same person receiving the credit? Colleges and universities have approached the problem in a variety of ways. Some have done virtually nothing, while others have begun…

A majority of substantiated maltreatment reports are made by educators and thus, teacher knowledge of child maltreatment reporting mandates and reporting behavior has been a focus of research. The knowledge and behavior of school psychologists, however, has not received similar attention. This study investigated the child maltreatment reporting…

When conducting experiments involving the measurement of physically related quantities, choosing an appropriate spacing for the experimental independent variable is a crucial procedure whose consequences may go beyond data graphical visualization. This is particularly true if the measured quantities are nonlinearly related and experimental errors…

We compared two contrasting hypotheses of how multifeatured objects are stored in visual working memory (vWM); as integrated objects or as independent features. A new procedure was devised to examine vWM representations of several concurrently held objects and their features and our main measure was reaction time (RT), allowing an examination of…

The standardized mean difference (SMD) is perhaps the most important meta-analytic effect size. It is typically used to represent the difference between treatment and control population means in treatment efficacy research. It is also used to represent differences between populations with different characteristics, such as persons who are…

Given the many inaccuracies in the original "New York Times" 38-witnesses version of the Kitty Genovese story, this study examined the accuracy of this story in current introductory psychology textbooks, 50 years later. Recent studies have shown that there is no evidence for the following three key features of the original story: (1)…