Large and reliable laterality effects have been found using a dichotic target detection task in a recent experiment using word stimuli pronounced with an emotional component. The present study tested the hypothesis that the magnitude and reliability of the laterality effects would increase with the removal of the emotional component and variations…

Low self-efficacy is a key component of depression. Toddlers of depressed mothers may be at risk for impaired development of self-efficacy because of maternal modeling, diminished encouragement of toddlers' efforts, and/or biological contributions. We examined emerging self-efficacy in 70 toddlers of depressed mothers and 62 toddlers of…

Problem solving as a skill is emphasized within the revised Japanese Course of Study for schools. This experimental study, conducted among Japanese high school students, evaluates an effort to develop student ability to identify reasons for "different" points of view, not just personally favored views. First, the ability of all students…

Three experiments were undertaken to examine second and fifth grade Telugu-speaking children's awareness of phonological and orthographic properties of familiar Telugu words. Experiment 1 focused on the strategies the children used in completing word fragments. Experiment 2 examined the children's ability to judge and generate rhyming words, and…

The aim of the present study was to examine differences among "regular" and dyslexic adult bilingual readers when processing reading and reading related skills in their first (L1 Hebrew) and second (L2 English) languages. Brain activity during reading Hebrew and English unexpected sentence endings was also studied. Behavioral and…

Multielement visual tracking and visual search are 2 tasks that are held to require visual-spatial attention. The authors used the attentional operating characteristic (AOC) method to determine whether both tasks draw continuously on the same attentional resource (i.e., whether the 2 tasks are mutually exclusive). The authors found that observers…

Words and pictures with earlier learned labels are processed faster than words and pictures with later learned labels. This age-of-acquisition (AoA) effect has been extensively investigated in many different types of tasks. This article provides a review of these studies including picture naming, word naming, speeded word naming, word…

This paper reports on a study that was carried out to determine learners' attitudes to learning grammar through the use of two types of consciousness-raising tasks. A deductive task provided explicit explanations of a grammar structure, while an inductive task required learners to discover the grammar rules for themselves. The study investigated…

This paper describes an action research project undertaken to look into the effectiveness of tasks designed to raise learner awareness of conversational strategies. The goal was to test whether tasks and direct instruction aimed at promoting learner awareness of conversational language at the discourse-level had any impact on the students'…

This exploratory study was conducted in an introductory biology course to determine 1) how students used the large lecture environment to create their own learning tasks during studying and 2) whether meaningful learning resulted from the students' efforts. Academic task research from the K-12 education literature and student approaches to…

"Theory of mind" development is now an important research field in deaf studies. Past research with the classic false belief task has consistently reported a delay in theory of mind development in deaf children born of hearing parents, while performance of second-generation deaf children is more problematic with some contradictory results. The…

This study investigated attention control in tasks involving the processing of relational terms (more highly grammaticized linguistic stimuli: spatial prepositions) and non-relational terms (less highly grammaticized lexical stimuli: nouns) in a first (L1) and second language (L2). Participants were adult bilinguals with greater proficiency in…

This study demonstrated how the tenets of positive behavior support could be used to teach an educational activity. Emphasis was placed on the implementation of practical strategies to minimize errors during instruction and maximize positive outcomes. A 9-year-old boy with Asperger syndrome served as the participant, and the skill targeted for…

Surface similarity generally promotes reasoning by analogy and physical similarity has been shown to have a powerful positive effect on very young children's use of a scale model as a source of information about another space. The research reported here investigated 2 1/2-year-old children's performance in an object retrieval task when asked to…

A relatively new feature of human performance technology (HPT) is e-training, which, while considerably more economical and time-efficient than traveling to a remote location for training, presents other challenges. Course length remains a problem, and there are professional organizations for which performance improvement is too difficult to…