Social categories are often defined by the boundaries that they form between individuals. However, many social structures describe "complementary" relationships between individuals, defining both the power that we hold over others and our obligations to them and vice versa. In two studies conducted in the U.S., we investigated a sample…

Although the school ICT coordinator's role has been institutionally defined by the Andalusian Education Administration (Spain), individual factors may be key in the emerging role-building process. Multidimensional scaling (MDS) of the priority given by coordinators to their different functions and a subsequent cluster analysis of the MDS solution…

The development of (early) numerical cognition builds on children's ability to understand and manipulate quantities and numbers. However, previous research did not find conclusive evidence on the role of symbolic and non-symbolic skills in the development of (early) numerical cognition. The aim of the current study was to clarify the relation…

Task-Based Language Teaching (TBLT) is purportedly the only L2 pedagogy rooted in SLA theory and research and is unique in its psycholinguistic, ecological and pedagogical validity. Theoretical entities such as Processability Theory (Pienemann & Lenzing, 2020), the cognitive-interactionist approach (Gass & Mackey, 2020), and emergentism…

Objective: Our objective was to examine the role of semantics in the relation between syntactic awareness and contextual facilitation in word reading. Methods: Grade 3 children (N = 77) completed a syntactic awareness task in which we manipulated the possible reliance on semantic information. They also completed a task of word reading in isolation…

Purpose: The current study examined the role of attention and language ability in nonverbal rule induction performance in a demographically diverse sample of school-age children. Method: The participants included 43 English-speaking monolingual and 65 Spanish-English bilingual children between the ages of 5 and 9 years. Core Language Index…

The current theories suggest the fundamental role of semantic memory in creativity, mediating bottom-up (divergent thinking) and top-down (fluid intelligence) cognitive processes. However, the relationship between creativity, intelligence, and the organization of the semantic memory remains poorly-characterized in children. We investigated the…

Orthographic learning is one of the steps needed to achieve reading fluency. There are different variables that could influence the formation of orthographic representations. The aim of this study was to investigate the role of the previous semantic and phonological knowledge on the formation of orthographic representations. We used a decrease of…

We examined the unique contributions of prosodic awareness and morphological awareness to school-aged children's word reading and reading comprehension. A total of 110 elementary-age children from Grades 4 and 5 participated in the current study. To measure prosodic awareness, children were asked to listen to and reflect on the stress patterns of…

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to investigate the role of external feedback in auditory perceptual learning of school-age children as compared with that of adults. Method: Forty-eight children (7-9 years of age) and 64 adults (20-35 years of age) conducted a training session using an auditory frequency discrimination (difference limen for…

Some inconsistency is observed in the results from studies of reading development regarding the role of the syllable in visual word recognition, perhaps due to a disparity between the tasks used. We adopted a word-spotting paradigm, with Spanish children of second grade (mean age: 7 years) and sixth grade (mean age: 11 years). The children were…

Verb use and the production of verb argument structure in the written texts of children in elementary school is a key stepping stone towards academic writing success that has remained relatively unexplored and is a notable gap in our understanding of writing development. To evaluate the role of verbs in the written narrative texts of children, we…

Several studies in Spanish and other languages have shown that, in a lexical decision task, children are more likely to accept pseudowords with a known morphological structure as words as compared to non-morphological pseudowords. Morphology also facilitates visual word recognition of actual words in children with reading difficulties. In the…

The role of working memory (WM) in language acquisition has been widely reported in the developmental literature, but few studies have explored the role of sentence recall in the way WM and related linguistic abilities evolve. This study seeks to explore the organization and development of the memory architecture underlying language using a…

The present study aims at exploring: (a) the role of the educational setting in the acquisition of aspect and executive functions (i.e. updating) skills, (b) the acquisition of the aspectual features in Greek-German bilingual children and (c) the impact of updating on the acquisition of aspect. Imperfective aspect has been found to be acquired…