Three experiments investigated the effects of rime consistency on reading and spelling among developing readers ranging in age from 7 to 11 years. Experiment 1 found that children read words with inconsistent feedforward mappings between orthography and phonology (O [right arrow] P) less accurately than consistent words. OP consistency interacted…

In 4 experiments, the authors addressed the mechanisms by which grammatical gender (in Italian and German) may come to affect meaning. In Experiments 1 (similarity judgments) and 2 (semantic substitution errors), the authors found Italian gender effects for animals but not for artifacts; Experiment 3 revealed no comparable effects in German. These…

How do people judge which of 2 risks claims more lives per year? The authors specified 4 candidate mechanisms and tested them against people's judgments in 3 risk environments. Two mechanisms, availability by recall and regressed frequency, conformed best to people's choices. The same mechanisms also accounted well for the mapping accuracy of…

People acquire spatial information from many sources, including maps, verbal descriptions, and navigating in the environment. The different sources present spatial information in different ways. For example, maps can show many spatial relations simultaneously, but in a description, each spatial relation must be presented sequentially. The present…

The United States faces an economic-influenced educational crisis. According to the U.S. Department of Commence, Census Bureau data (2002) the difference in household earnings between the upper and lower quintiles has worsened over the last forty years. Future generations possess suspect knowledge to properly manage this income, as youth possess…

If people believe that some property is true of all members of a class such as sofas, then they should also believe that the same property is true of all members of a conjunctively defined subset of that class such as uncomfortable handmade sofas. A series of experiments demonstrated a failure to observe this constraint, leading to what is termed…

Purpose: This study assessed the fast mapping performance of children with specific language impairment (SLI) across the preschool to kindergarten age span in relation to their phonological memory and vocabulary development. Method: Fifty-three children diagnosed with SLI and 53 children with normal language (NL) matched for age and gender (30…

Purpose: The authors asked whether adolescents with Down syndrome (DS) could fast-map novel nouns and verbs when word learning depended on using the speaker's pragmatic or syntactic cues. Compared with typically developing (TD) comparison children, the authors predicted that syntactic cues would prove harder for the group with DS to use and that…

Making connections is an emerging education theme of the 21st century. Science teachers are encouraged to connect new learning with prior knowledge, learning with student interests and experience, and classroom activities with the history and nature of science. Strategies that facilitate these connections enrich and enhance instruction. In this…

The difficulty in education to determine causality between means and ends brings various issues and variables to the discussion about the antecedents of school effectiveness. Although teachers' level of professional development is clearly among the factors influencing student outcomes, little is known about the extent to which teachers connect…

This study measured the analysis of verbal flows by means of volume-elasticity measures and the analysis of information flow structures and their representations in the form of a metaphysical cube. A special purpose system of computer programs (PERTEX) was used to establish the language space in which the textual flow patterns occurred containing…

This study investigated the influence of specific cognitive factors believed associated with the onset and maintenance of depression. Of specific interest was the relationship of dysfunctional attitudes to levels of depression in a comparison of two research populations of helping professionals: Presbyterian Church (USA) clergy and mental health…

This paper presents findings of a study that explored how principals "enacted" and "structured" the environments of their schools. Weick's theoretical framework is used to understand the cognitive process by which managers selectively construct and attend to certain features of their environment while ignoring others. Data were obtained from…

The subject of this theoretical study emerges from the identification of a gap in the theories of first, second, and third order change. Through synthesis and critique of existing theory (Bateson, 1972; Watzlawick, Weakland, and Fisch, 1974; and Bartunek and Moch, 1987), an integrated three-part theory of change is proposed to include continuous…

A discussion of English native-language vocabulary acquisition in children takes a closer look at the assumption that vocabulary is learned by common association of word with event, focusing on the acquisition of verb meanings. The intuitive power of the view that words are learned by noticing real-world contingencies for their use is…