We investigated expectations regarding a writer's responsibility to proofread text for spelling errors when using a word processor. Undergraduate students read an essay and completed a questionnaire regarding their perceptions of the author and the quality of the essay. They then manipulated type of spelling error (no error, homophone error,…

Students completing a time calculation exercise identified the International Date Line (IDL) as a conceptual source of confusion and poor performance. From the early 1950s to the present, various geography textbooks have promulgated misstatements involving the occurrence of midnight at the IDL. This condition's persistence and ubiquity manifests a…

Many current generativist theorists suggest that young children possess the grammatical principles of inversion required for question formation but make errors because they find it difficult to learn language-specific rules about how inversion applies. The present study analyzed longitudinal spontaneous sampled data from twelve 2-3-year-old…

Although there is extensive documentation of the morphological limitations of children with specific language impairment (SLI), few studies have reported on complex syntax acquisition in children with SLI. This case study examined the development of complex syntax in a child with SLI between 3 and 7 years. Twelve conversational samples were…

Previous research has shown that short-term memory for serial order can be influenced by background knowledge concerning regularities of sequential structure. Specifically, it has been shown that recall is superior for sequences that fit well with familiar sequencing constraints. The authors report a corresponding effect pertaining to serial…

The person-response function (PRF) relates the probability of an individual's correct answer to the difficulty of items measuring the same latent trait. Local deviations of the observed PRF from the expected PRF indicate person misfit. We discuss two new approaches to investigate person fit. The first approach uses kernel smoothing to estimate…

This study examined word identification skills among Chinese and Korean college students learning to read English as a second language in a naming experiment and an auditory category judgment task. Both groups demonstrated faster and more accurate naming performance on high-frequency words than low-frequency words and on regular words than…

Time-window sequential analyses test whether a target behavior occurs within a temporal window (e.g., within 2 seconds) after an antecedent behavior more than is expected by chance. This type of question is common when we need to know how one person or event may immediately affect another event or person in the natural environment. Theoretically,…

The effect of two linguistic factors in Broca's and Wernicke's aphasia was examined using Dutch and English subjects. Three tasks were used to test (1) the comprehension and (2) the construction of sentences, where verbs (in Dutch) and verb arguments (in Dutch and English) are in canonical versus non-canonical position; (3) the production of…

This study tested the hypothesis that memory is a major source of variance in temporal processing. Participants categorized intervals as short or long. The number of base durations and interval types mixed within blocks of trials varied from 1 session to another. Results revealed that mixing 2 base durations within blocks increased categorization…

We tested the hypothesis that rapid eye movement (REM) sleep is important for complex associative learning by restricting rats from entering REM sleep for 4 h either immediately after training on an eight-box spatial task (0-4 REMr) or 4 h following training (4-8 REMr). Both groups of REM-restricted rats eventually reached the same overall…

In Mandarin Chinese, word meaning is partially determined by lexical tone (Wang, 1973). Previous studies suggest that lexical tone is processed as linguistic information and not as pure tonal information (Gandour, 1998; Van Lanker & Fromkin, 1973). The current study explored the online processing of lexical tones. Event-related potentials were…

Prior research (DeLoache, Uttal & Rosengren, 2004) has documented that 18- to 30-month-olds occasionally make scale errors: they attempt to fit their bodies into or onto miniature objects (e.g. a chair) that are far too small for them. The current study explores whether scale errors are limited to actions that directly involve the child's…

Overgeneralization occurs when a child uses the wrong word to name an object and is often observed in the early stages of word learning. We develop a method to elicit overgeneralizations in the laboratory by priming children to say the names of objects perceptually similar to known and unknown target objects. Experiment 1 examined 18 two-year-old…

Most of the spelling error analysis has been conducted in Latin orthographies and rarely conducted in other orthographies like Arabic. Two hundred and eighty-eight students in grades 1-9 participated in the study. They were presented nine lists of words to test their spelling skills. Their spelling errors were analyzed by error categories. The…