Few attempts have been made to look systematically at the relationship between musical and intonation analysis skills, a relationship that has been to date suggested only by informal observations. Following Mackenzie Beck (2003), who showed that musical ability was a useful predictor of general phonetic skills, we report on two studies…

We explored the circumstances in which rats engage either declarative memory (and the hippocampus) or habit memory (and the dorsal striatum). Rats with damage to the hippocampus or dorsal striatum were given three different two-choice discrimination tasks (odor, object, and pattern). These tasks differed in the number of trials required for…

It has been proposed that poor non-word repetition is a marker of specific language impairment (SLI), and a precursor and marker of dyslexia. This study investigated whether a non-word repetition deficit underlies both disorders. A group of Dutch preschool SLI children and children at familial risk of dyslexia, as well as school-going groups of…

Concerns about the importance of variation in statistics education and a lack of research in this topic led to a preliminary study which explored pre-service teachers' ideas in this area. The teachers completed a written questionnaire about variation in sampling and distribution contexts. Responses were categorised in relation to a framework that…

This study examines the development of children's ability to reason about proportions that involve either discrete entities or continuous amounts. Six-, 8- and 10-year olds were presented with a proportional reasoning task in the context of a game involving probability. Although all age groups failed when proportions involved discrete quantities,…

Recent research on early word learning suggests that children's behavior when-generalizing novel nouns integrates their prior vocabulary knowledge with the specifics of the task. This study examines how these factors interact on the moment-to-moment time scale of the training children receive and the sequence of stimuli they are shown. In 1…

Objective: Time reproduction is deficient in children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Whether this deficit is familial and could therefore serve as a candidate endophenotype has not been previously investigated. It is unknown whether timing deficits are also measurable in adolescent children with ADHD and nonaffected…

The Spellings Commission report stresses that higher education must become more accountable, more transparent, and more open to the scrutiny of its stakeholders. The key word is always "accountability," to which the canonical reaction among educators is a reaffirmation of the remarkable diversity of American colleges and universities and the…

Much developmental work has been devoted to "scalar implicatures." These are implicitly communicated propositions linked to relatively weak terms (consider how "Some" pragmatically implies "Not all") that are more likely to be carried out by adults than by children. Children tend to retain the linguistically encoded…

This paper studies the development of taxonomic processing as measured by an adapted version of the Wechsler Similarities subtest, which distinguishes between categorization of concrete and abstract words. Two factors--age and concreteness--are also tested by a recall task. The results show an age-related increase in taxonomic categorization,…

The present study focuses on noun and verb processing during language acquisition, whereby the word production and the word comprehension of preschool children of different ages were investigated across three languages. Two hypotheses were put forward: first, given that languages differ with respect to the clarity of the noun-verb distinction and…

Three accounts of common ground maintenance make different assumptions about speakers' responsibilities regarding listener-privileged information. Duplicated responsibility requires each interlocutor to assimilate the other's knowledge before designing appropriate utterances. Shared responsibility appeals to least collaborative effort [Clark, H.…

This observational study supplements the strong and consistent link found between childhood depression and deficits in interpersonal functioning by examining the relationship between a high versus low score on the Children's Depression Inventory (CDI) and children's emotions when interacting with their best friends. High-CDI and low-CDI target…

This study explored Mikhail Bakhtin's conceptualization of carnival as it applies to 2 second language (L2) learners in an American kindergarten classroom. Unwilling to engage in two story retelling tasks, the children nevertheless invoked the imaginative, playful, and dialogic world of carnival, creating meaningful, contingent contexts for…

We investigated processing of metaphoric sentences using event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Seventeen healthy subjects (6 female, 11 male) read 60 novel short German sentence pairs with either metaphoric or literal meaning and performed two different tasks: judging the metaphoric content and judging whether the sentence…