Language exposure plays a large role in language acquisition, and bilingual children must acquire both of their languages in environments that typically include abundant speech variability. The specific goals of this dissertation were to examine how speech exposure affected phonological retuning and lexical access in bilingual children's second…

Spanish native speakers are known to pronounce onset /sC/ clusters in English with a prothetic vowel, as in "esport" for sport, due to their native language phonotactic constraints. We assessed whether accurate production of e.g. "spi" instead of "espi" was related to accurate perceptual discrimination of this…

An enduring challenge in visual-spatial research has been to identify the factors contributing to individual differences in ability. This research investigated the overall, verbal, and nonverbal visual-spatial ability of 61 (34 boys) three- to five-year-olds (M[subscript age] = 57.3 months; SD = 7.9) and the following factors known to be related…

The number of individuals with comorbid visual impairment and autism spectrum disorder is growing rapidly. The purpose of this qualitative phenomenological study was to describe the lived experiences of teachers who strategically create active learning culture for tactile-defensive students who have autism and visual impairment. Little research…

This study investigates how second language (L2) listeners' perception is affected by two factors: the listeners' experience with the target dialect -- North American English (NAE) vs. Standard Southern British English (SSBE) -- and talkers' language background: native vs. non-native talkers; i.e. interlanguage speech intelligibility benefit…

Individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) exhibit alterations in sensory processing, including changes in the integration of information across the different sensory modalities. In the current study, we used the sound-induced flash illusion to assess multisensory integration in children with ASD and typically-developing (TD) controls.…

Drawing from complexity theory, this dissertation develops a schema of rhetorical memory that exhibits extended characteristics. Scholars traditionally conceptualize memory, the fourth canon in classical rhetoric, as place (loci) or image (phantasm). However, memory rhetoric resists the traditional loci-phantasm framework and instead emerges from…

This study aimed to examine how different forms (still pictures vs. animations) of seductive illustrations impact text-and-graphic learning processes, perceptions, and outcomes. An eye-tracking experiment of three groups (static, dynamic, and control) was conducted with 60 college and graduate students while learning with PowerPoint slides about…

In Tanzania, the education system focuses on schools and teachers as key educators of children, while little attention is paid to the home environment. This study examines motivational factors that may influence parental involvement at home and at school, using Hoover-Dempsey and Sandler's model of parental involvement as a theoretical framework.…

Work intensification has increased the workload and complexity of work performed by principals and vice-principals. This case narrative provides an account of work intensification on the secondary vice-principal role. The vice-principal role consists of administrating to various school operations and instructional leadership duties as assigned by…

Initial teacher education (ITE) offers an underutilized opportunity for bridging the gap between neuroscience research and educational practice. This article reports on innovations embedded within an ITE program to support trainee teachers to recognize and challenge the persistence of neuromyths. Education researchers, neuroscientists, and…

The purpose of this study is to examine if school principals' roles and responsibilities in China, Ghana, Hungary, Turkey, Poland and the United States are significantly different from one another. This study adopts a survey design which provides a quantitative or qualitative description of trends, attitudes, or opinions of a population by…

Understanding how students learn is crucial for helping them succeed. We examined brain function in 107 undergraduate students during a task known to be challenging for many students--physics problem solving--to characterize the underlying neural mechanisms and determine how these support comprehension and proficiency. Further, we applied module…

Recent research has shown superior memory retrieval when participants make a series of horizontal saccadic eye movements between the memory encoding phase and the retrieval phase compared to participants who do not move their eyes or move their eyes vertically. It has been hypothesized that the rapidly alternating activation of the two hemispheres…

Vision of the body modulates somatosensation, even when entirely non-informative about stimulation. For example, seeing the body increases tactile spatial acuity, but reduces acute pain. While previous results demonstrate that vision of the body modulates somatosensory sensitivity, it is unknown whether vision also affects metric properties of…