Neighborhood size and neighborhood frequency were orthogonally varied in two experiments on Italian nonwords. In Experiment 1, an inhibitory effect of neighborhood frequency on visual lexical decision was found: The presence of one high-frequency neighbor increased response latencies and error rates to nonwords. By contrast, no effect of…

This study addresses an issue of global concern in skills training, namely, the rapid and permanent eradication of persistent habit errors, and bad or unsafe working practices. This article offers an alternative human factors explanation for the profound difficulties and low transfer of training experienced during error pattern retraining, and the…

The author has discovered that errors in grades often occur when scores are combined for final marks. These errors are not related to the grading individual assignments. Rather, they occur when teachers at all grade levels bring individual test and assignment scores together for the students' final grades. Unfortunately, professors of mathematics…

Changes in consonant and syllable-level error patterns of three children diagnosed with childhood apraxia of speech (CAS) were investigated in a 3-year longitudinal study. Spontaneous speech samples were analyzed to assess the accuracy of consonants and syllables. Consonant accuracy was low overall, with most frequent errors on middle- and…

Background: Williams syndrome (WS) and Down syndrome (DS) are two neurodevelopmental genetically based disorders which exhibit mental retardation with a unique cognitive profile. Naming in individuals with WS and DS has been investigated in several studies, with results indicating that the performance of children with WS and DS is at a similar…

Prosecutorial misconduct involves the intentional use of illegal or improper methods for attaining convictions against defendants in criminal trials. Previous research documented extensive errors in the prosecution of severe crimes. A theory formulated to explain this phenomenon proposes that in serious cases, increased pressure to convict…

The purpose of the current study is to evaluate the reading comprehension of hearing impaired 8th graders who are being trained through an auditory-oral approach. The evaluation is conducted through miscue analysis using complex stories. To realize this aim, the following research questions are formulated. (1) To what extent do hearing impaired…

Although it is recognized that ESL students often need assistance to become more comprehensible speakers, their teachers usually have limited time to devote to pronunciation instruction. Research should help teachers set priorities for pronunciation teaching to address these students' needs as efficiently as possible. Here we test the usefulness…

Despite the repeated adage that "no two LD (learning disabled) students are alike, it is not only possible but important to focus on the most common errors of LD college writers in order to learn how best to serve these students. There are in fact two main categories of these students: severely learning disabled and classically learning…

This study examined how engaging calculus students in Writing to Learn Mathematics affected the types of conceptual and procedural errors that the students made on their examinations. Students in two sections of an introductory college calculus course in Fall 1994 were the respondents in this study. A classification system was developed that…

Research on the role of the first language (L1) in second language (L2) learning is reviewed, offering historical background but focusing primarily on work within the last two decades. Attention is given mainly to two aspects of the L1-L2 relationship: positive transfer of knowledge from L1 in the process of learning L2, and negative transfer, or…

The Spanish psychological verb construction seems to be especially difficult for native English-speaking learners to acquire. Since some of the most common Spanish psych verbs, such as "gustar" (to please) and "encantar" (to delight), require a grammatical structure that is different from that of the English verbs frequently…

Failure to progress on the language proficiency scale is often due to lack of linguistic accuracy. Even motivated students are sometimes unable to improve proficiency ratings beyond a particular level. Pedagogical factors contributing to this problem include: focus on form and meaning at the same time; fossilization; overuse of communicative…

This paper encourages the use of Total Quality Management (TQM) tactics and other strategies as a practical means of fostering a quality culture in institutional research offices of higher education institutions. In particular, four approaches are advocated for understanding and minimizing errors: (1) use of TQM tactical tools to enhance work…

Designed to analyze systematically the relative effects of different types of oral reading errors on comprehension, this instrument consists of a basic set (each with an easy and a hard version) of six stories. Every story is transformed so that it contains simulated errors of a particular type: (1) correct, (2) semantically related visually…