Interview guides and a questionnaire were developed in order to find what factors demotivated students in Japanese high school English classrooms. Five college students who were attending two private universities and one public university shared their views about demotivation in the interviews. Forty-two students at a public university responded…

Since learning English is very popular in non-English speaking countries, developing modern assisted-learning tools that support effective English learning is a critical issue in the English-language education field. Learning English involves memorization and practice of a large number of vocabulary words and numerous grammatical structures.…

When students ask for a study advice, many professors would say something like this: "Read carefully. Write down unfamiliar terms and look up their meanings. Make an outline. Reread each chapter." That's not terrible advice. Some scientists would say that professors left out the most important step: "Put the book aside and hide the notes. Then…

Difficulties in social interaction are a central feature of Asperger syndrome. Effective social interaction involves the ability to solve interpersonal problems as and when they occur. Here we examined social problem-solving in a group of adults with Asperger syndrome and control group matched for age, gender and IQ. We also assessed…

We calculated visual ability in 13 strains of mice (129SI/Sv1mJ, A/J, AKR/J, BALB/cByJ, C3H/HeJ, C57BL/6J, CAST/EiJ, DBA/2J, FVB/NJ, MOLF/EiJ, SJL/J, SM/J, and SPRET/EiJ) on visual detection, pattern discrimination, and visual acuity and tested these and other mice of the same strains in a behavioral test battery that evaluated visuo-spatial…

This study examined the development of spoken discourse among L2 learners of Japanese who received extensive practice on grammatical chunks. Participants in this study were 22 college students enrolled in an elementary Japanese course. They received instruction on a set of grammatical chunks in class through communicative drills and the…

Good language learner studies show that attending to form is associated with successful learning. This paper reports interviews with three university English majors who had won prizes in nationwide English speaking competitions and debate tournaments in China. The interviewees regarded text memorization and imitation as the most effective methods…

When presented with linguistic material, elderly adults are often unable to report as much material as are younger people. To ascertain whether elderly adults are as sensitive as young adults to the underlying structure of the to-be-remembered sentences, a study was conducted using the item recognition priming technique. In this technique, people…

Developmental changes in preschool children's awareness of the relative effectiveness of four nonverbal strategies in a memory-for-location task were investigated. Fifty-two preschool children (12 three-year-olds, 20 four-year-olds, and 20 five-year-olds) made paired comparison judgments as to the mnemonic effectiveness of marking, touching,…

This study investigates different methods of increasing children's use of active rehearsal in recall, and the extent to which this active rehearsal improves their recall. Seven groups of second grade children and one group of adults were asked to memorize a list of everyday words in four study-test trials. Two of the groups of children were given…

The levels of processing framework for understanding memory development has generated little empirical or theoretical work that furthers an understanding of the developmental memory system. Although empirical studies by those testing the levels of processing framework have demonstrated that mnemonic strategies employed by children are the critical…

An increase in the amount of material to be learned increases the difficulty of the learning task. The function describing this length difficulty relation was obtained by measuring the amount of time 20 college students spent studying arrays of four, six, eight, and ten consonants before they were ready to be tested on them. Identification and…

If the contextual similarity between learning and recall within a single trial in a short-term memory (STM) paradigm is varied, recall varies proportionately. This context effect was demonstrated using variations of the Peterson-Peterson (1959) paradigm for both aurally and visually presented material, verbal and arithmetic context, and within and…

Examines fourth grade children's memory for information contained in target sentences presented 24 hours earlier. Examines the occurrence of interference by presenting multiple choice response options consisting of a correct word, a new word, and a word which occurred in a previous sentence. Attempts to extend the principles of frequency theory.…