P. A. Frazier, A. P. Tix, and K. E. Barron (2004) highlighted a normal theory method popularized by R. M. Baron and D. A. Kenny (1986) for testing the statistical significance of indirect effects (i.e., mediator variables) in multiple regression contexts. However, simulation studies suggest that this method lacks statistical power relative to some…

Cognitive load theorists have frequently used subjective measures of cognitive load to test the effectiveness of instructional procedures. This study sought to broaden the applications of subjective measures by testing their ability to detect variations in intrinsic cognitive load within tasks. In two experiments students were asked to complete…

Studies of sentence comprehension deficits in Parkinson's disease (PD) patients suggest that language processing involves circuits connecting subcortical and cortical regions. Anatomically segregated neural circuits appear to support different cognitive and motor functions. To investigate which functions are implicated in PD comprehension…

Background: Studies focusing on reading errors can help to understand how children learn to read and to structure key components of reading instruction. However, no prior studies have examined which letters might be a greater source of difficulty for beginning readers in Spanish. Aims: First, to examine the pattern of reading errors in beginning…

While peer review is a common practice in college composition courses, there is little consistency in approach and effectiveness within the field, owing in part to the dearth of empirical research that investigates peer-review processes. This study is designed to shed light on what a peer reviewer actually reads and attends to while providing…

An important element of learning to read and write at school is the ability to define word boundaries. Defining word boundaries in text writing is not a straightforward task even for children who have mastered graphophonemic correspondences. In children's writing, unconventional word segmentation has been observed across a range of languages and…

This study examined the development of integrated knowledge or automatic competence in adult SLA. Automatic competence was operationalized in terms of the participants' sensitivity to grammatical errors in a self-paced reading task. Their sensitivity was determined by observing whether there was a delay in reading ungrammatical sentences. Native…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between the types of speech errors that are produced by children with speech-sound disorders and the children's phonological awareness skills during their prekindergarten and kindergarten years. Method: Fifty-eight children with speech-sound disorders were assessed during the…

This study systematically investigates the English writing research in Taiwan, over the span of time from 1989 to 2008, a 19-year time period. Data collection consisted of five major sources. Guided by Juzwik et al's (2006) study, the data were analyzed based on the general problems under investigated, the age groups being researched, the…

Young Filipino children are expected to solve mathematical word problems in English, which is not their mother tongue. Because of this, it is often assumed that Filipino children have difficulties in solving problems because they cannot read or comprehend what they have read. This study tested this assumption by determining whether presenting word…

Overview: Behavioural data reveal an inverted U-shaped function in the efficiency of prospective memory from childhood to young adulthood to later adulthood. However, prior research has not directly compared processes contributing to age-related variation in prospective memory across the lifespan, hence it is unclear whether the same factors…

The purposes of this study are to test whether the processing of subject relative (SR) clauses is easier than that of object relative (OR) clauses in Turkish and to investigate whether the comprehension of SRs can be better explained by the linear distance hypothesis or structural distance hypothesis (SDH). The question is examined in two groups…

In a study on L2 proficiency in writing, conducted among 84 Dutch university students of Italian and 75 students of French, manipulation of task complexity led in the complex task to a significant decrease of errors, while at the same time a trend for a lexically more varied text was observed (Kuiken and Vedder 2005, 2007, in press). Based on this…

Thomas Jefferson recognized the value of reason and scientific experimentation in the eighteenth century. This chapter extends the idea in contemporary ways to standards that may be used to judge the ethical propriety of randomized trials and the dependability of evidence on effects of social interventions.

Letter names play an important role in early literacy. Previous studies of letter name learning have examined the Latin alphabet. The current study tested learners of Hebrew, comparing their patterns of performance and types of errors with those of English learners. We analyzed letter-naming data from 645 Israeli children who had not begun formal…