Previous research suggests that block adding, subtracting and counting direction are early forms of number-space mapping. In this study, an embodiment perspective on these skills was taken. Embodiment theory assumes that cognition emerges through sensory-motor interaction with the environment. In line with this assumption, it was investigated if…

We investigated the effects of age on proactive and reactive cognitive control in a large population sample of 809 individuals, ranging in age between 5 and 97 years. For that purpose, we used an anticue paradigm, which required a consistent remapping of cue location and response hand: Left-sided cues required right-hand responses and vice versa.…

This article aims to investigate how Dutch children may eventually converge on a targetlike distribution of "hoeven" 'need,' a modal verbal NPI (Negative Polarity Item), based on its appearance in the scope of merely some but not all of its possible licensers in the language input (i.e., the induction problem). Imitation performance was…

This study investigates the relationship between nonword repetition (NWR) and vocabulary in 2-year-olds. Questions addressed are whether (1) NWR and vocabulary are associated, (2) phonotactic probability affects NWR, and (3) there is an interaction effect between phonotactic probability and vocabulary on NWR performance. The general aim of the…

Morphophonological processing involves the phonological analysis of morphemes. Item-specific phonological characteristics have been shown to influence morphophonological skills in children. This study investigates the relative contributions of broad phonological skills and vocabulary to production and judgement accuracies of the Dutch past tense…

This functional magnetic resonance imaging study examined the neural correlates of coherence-break detection during reading in the context of a contradiction paradigm. Young adults (N = 31, ages 19-27) read short narratives (half contained a break in coherence) that were presented sentence by sentence in a self-paced, slow event-related design.…

Embodied theories of language comprehension propose that readers construct a mental simulation of described objects that contains perceptual characteristics of their real-world referents. The present study is the first to investigate directly whether implied object size is mentally simulated during sentence comprehension and to study the potential…

This study investigated potential differences in inductive behavioural and verbal strategy-use between children (aged 6-8 years) from indigenous and non-indigenous backgrounds. This was effected by the use of an electronic device that could present a series of tasks, offer scaffolded assistance and record children's responses. Children from…

In many decision making tasks negative feedback is probabilistic and, as a consequence, may be given when the decision is actually correct. This feedback can be referred to as nonrepresentative negative feedback. In the current study, we investigated developmental and gender related differences in such switching after nonrepresentative negative…

Process diagrams describe how a system functions (e.g. photosynthesis) and are an important type of representation in Biology education. In the present study, we examined students' learning activities while studying process diagrams, related to their resulting comprehension of these diagrams. Each student completed three learning tasks. Verbal…

The present study tests whether presenting video modeling examples from the learner's (first-person) perspective promotes learning of an assembly task, compared to presenting video examples from a third-person perspective. Across 2 experiments conducted in different labs, university students viewed a video showing how to assemble an 8-component…

This paper reports on an experimental study investigating alternative communication modes to English as a Lingua Franca. The purpose was to examine the effectiveness of different modes of communication and to gain insight in communication strategies used by interlocutors to solve referential conflicts. Findings show that ELF may not necessarily be…

The present study aims to examine relations between number representations and various sources of individual differences within early stages of development of number representations. The mental number line has been found to develop from a logarithmic to a more linear representation. Sources under investigation are counting skills and executive…

This study aimed to investigate the effectiveness of training tutors in content knowledge of a particular domain versus training them in tutoring skills of pedagogical knowledge when tutoring on a complex tutee task. Forty-seven tutor--tutee pairs of fourth-year secondary school students were created and assigned to one of the two treatments.…

The present article examines production and on-line processing of definite articles in Turkish-speaking sequential bilingual children acquiring English and Dutch as second languages (L2) in the UK and in the Netherlands, respectively. Thirty-nine 6-8-year-old L2 children and 48 monolingual (L1) age-matched children participated in two separate…