For Vygotsky, language is a cultural-psychological concept emerged from social interactions and is applied for higher cognitive functions such as thinking, meaning making, and knowledge construction. In this study, a sociocultural perspective was applied to analyze the language produced by 40 sophomore Iranian EFL learners during dialogic…

Analysis of large-scale sequential data has become an important task in machine learning and pattern recognition, inspired in part by numerous scientific and technological applications such as the document and text classification or the analysis of biological sequences. However, current computational methods for sequence comparison still lack…

The purpose of this study was to describe member perceptions of the culture of the Oklahoma CAP using an online version of the Douglas Grid/Group typology. This study further described and compared differences in how men and women in the organization view its culture. All senior members of the Oklahoma CAP with a valid email address on file…

We consider the situation in which a learner must induce the rule that explains an observed set of data but the hypothesis space of possible rules is not explicitly enumerated or identified. The first part of the article demonstrates that as long as hypotheses are sparse (i.e., index less than half of the possible entities in the domain) then a…

Most theories of categorization emphasize how continuous perceptual information is mapped to categories. However, equally important are the informational assumptions of a model, the type of information subserving this mapping. This is crucial in speech perception where the signal is variable and context dependent. This study assessed the…

Although there is universal consensus both in the science education literature and in the science standards documents to the effect that students should learn not only the content of science but also its nature, there is little agreement about what that nature is. This led many science educators to adopt what is sometimes called "the consensus…

The purpose of this study is to determine individuals' usage purposes of social networks with a focus on the possible differences between females and males. Facebook, which is one the most popular and being most widely used social network, is investigated in this study. The study group consisted of 870 Facebook users who responded to an online…

It has been suggested that verbally sophisticated individuals engage in a series of precurrent behaviors (e.g., covert intraverbal behavior, grouping stimuli, visual imagining) to solve problems such as answering questions (Palmer, 1991; Skinner, 1953). We examined the effects of one problem solving strategy--visual imagining--on increasing…

Contact between languages often leads to linguistic changes. Although the social factors and the typological characteristics of the languages influence the change process, the interaction between these factors is not well-known. This is partially due to the fact that the long-term and short-term effects of language contact are rarely brought…

Children hold the belief that social categories have essences. We investigated what kinds of properties children feel licensed to infer about a person based on social category membership. Seventy-two 4-6-year-olds were introduced to novel social categories defined as having one internal--psychological or biological--and one external--behavioral or…

The race to establish regional education hubs is a recent development in cross-border higher education. This article briefly examines the rationales and strategies used by three countries in the Middle East and three in South East Asia which are working towards positioning themselves as regional education hubs. The different approaches and…

Purpose: To determine whether language scores at age 6 years suggest that specific language impairments (SLIs) distribute in a categorical or in a dimensional fashion. Method: A taxometric analysis of language scores from 601 six-year-old children who were free of neonatal risk factors was performed. From among 4 candidate indicators of SLI, 2…

High-density ERPs evoked by rotated alphanumeric characters were examined to determine how neural processing is affected by stimulus orientation during letter/digit classifications and during mirror/normal discriminations. The former task typically produces response times that are unaffected by stimulus orientation while the latter is thought to…

This contribution discusses two issues: (a) it provides a definition and an analysis of the term "non-linguist", which is conceptualized as a non-discrete category on a continuum and as an activity rather than as a permanent status, and (b) it discusses the general value of folk linguistic theories, which should not, despite their potential…

A typology of music listeners was constructed on the basis of importance attributed to music and four types of music use: mood enhancement; coping with problems; defining personal identity; and marking social identity. Three Listener Groups were identified through Latent Class Analysis of internet survey data of 997 Dutch respondents, aged 12-29.…