An emergent debate surrounds the nature of language processing in bilingual children as an extension of broader questions about their morphosyntactic development in comparison to monolinguals, with the picture so far being nuanced. This paper adds to this debate by investigating the processing of morphosyntactically complex which-questions (e.g.,…

We used a novel linguistic training paradigm to investigate the experience-dependent acquisition, representation, and processing of novel emotional and neutral abstract concepts. Participants engaged in mental imagery (n = 32) or lexico-semantic rephrasing (n = 34) of linguistic material during five training sessions and successfully learned the…

Background & aims: Throughout typical development, children prioritize different perceptual, social, and linguistic cues to learn words. The earliest acquired words are often those that are perceptually salient and highly imageable. Imageability, the ease in which a word evokes a mental image, is a strong predictor for word age of acquisition…

People are increasingly aware that metacognition can help us solve problems more effectively. Scholars believe that students' metacognition can be facilitated by promoting the interplay between the unlimited long work memory for holding schemas and limited work memory for processing ongoing activities. In this study, a workshop designed teacher…

Purpose: The study examined the effects of imageability and phonological neighborhood density on the acquisition of word production in Czech, controlling for part-of-speech class, word length, and word frequency. Phonological neighborhood density is of interest because previous research has not examined highly inflected languages such as Czech.…

Relative to abstract words, concrete words typically elicit faster response times and larger N400 and N700 event-related potential (ERP) brain responses. These effects have been interpreted as reflecting the denser links to associated semantic information of concrete words and their recruitment of visual imagery processes. Here, we examined…

Conceptual grammatical knowledge is an area which causes problems at different levels of education. This article examines the ideas of conceptual change theory as a basis for establishing a new grammar teaching method. The research strategy which I use is educational design research and the research data have been collected from teacher students…

This meta-analysis integrates 296 effect sizes reported in eye-tracking research on expertise differences in the comprehension of visualizations. Three theories were evaluated: Ericsson and Kintsch's ("Psychol Rev" 102:211-245, 1995) theory of long-term working memory, Haider and Frensch's ("J Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cognit" 25:172-190, 1999)…

Human language is a rich and complex part of human behaviour that can be studied in many ways. The author and his colleagues are developing an application that accepts simple texts as input and presents an animated display of characters acting out the text. It mimics the human visualization of texts, the so-called Theatre of the Mind. In so doing,…

The development of mental imagery in relation to the comprehension of concrete proverbs (e.g., "one rotten apple spoils the barrel") was examined in children, adolescents, and adults who were ages 11 to 29 years old (n = 210). The findings indicated that age-related changes occurred in mental imagery and in proverb comprehension during the years…

Discusses the role of visualization of information in learning. Theorizes that the comprehension of visualizations is a process of structure mapping between a visuo-spatial configuration and a mental model. Tests the model and finds differences in the use of text and picture information to answer different kinds of text questions. (DSK)

In two studies, sixth graders (Study 1) and fourth graders (Study 2) listened to or read a text. Some students were asked to imagine pictures of the material. Oral presentation of the material produced better results than written-only forms. Fourth graders benefited more from mental imagery than did sixth graders. (Author/JJD)

A current area of controversy within the literature on visual word recognition concerns the extent to which semantic information influences the computation of phonology. Experiment 1 revealed that both the imageability effect and the ambiguity advantage seen in the speeded naming task are confined to words with atypical mappings between spelling…

Discusses a longitudinal case study of the literacy levels and styles of thinking of a group of males disabled in print acquisition. Finds that subjects rapidly perceived a whole gestalt, executed with an economy of language, and retained strengths in visuospatial, nonverbal processing, while losing verbal language abilities. (RS)

An investigation of a saturation advertising campaign to acquaint the public with changes in radio wavelengths showed that repeated presentation of material does not lead to learning unless appropriate encoding occurs. Such encoding will occur when subjects are allowed to use previously acquired learning strategies. (PMJ)