Response congruency effects in task switching reflect worse performance for incongruent targets associated with different responses across tasks than for congruent targets associated with the same response. In the present study, the author investigated whether the effects can be produced solely by a mediated route for response selection, whereby…

Empirical directions to innovate e-assessments and to support the theoretical development of e-learning are discussed by presenting a new learning assessment system based on cognitive technology. Specifically, this system encompassing trained neural nets that can discriminate between students who successfully integrated new knowledge course…

The current study addresses a discrepancy in the psycholinguistic literature about the chronology of information processing during the visual recognition of morphologically complex words. "Form-then-meaning" accounts of complex word recognition claim that morphemes are processed as units of form prior to any influence of their meanings,…

School self-evaluation (SSE), as an important leverage for quality assurance, often relies on surveys among staff members to collect information on the schools' functioning. The extent to which respondents cognitively process items as developers intended them determines the cognitive validity of SSE results. However, it is unclear what problems…

The present study examined the role of language capacities in explaining differences in social information processing (SIP) among three school-age groups: high-functioning children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD, IQ > 75), children with specific learning disorder (SLD), and children with typical development (TD). Participants were 96 boys…

A familiar assumption in much linguistic semantics is that meanings are to be identified conceptually as, or as subparts of, the conceptual representations deployed in general cognitive processes. However, this assumption has increasingly come into question as a result of developments in the study of cognition both within and outside linguistics.…

The present study looks into the largely unexplored territory of the cognitive underpinnings of semantic approximations in child language. The analysis of a corpus of 233 semantic approximations produced by 101 monolingual French-speaking children from 1;8 to 4;2 years of age leads to a classification of a significant number of them as instances…

How is semantic memory influenced by individual differences under conditions of distraction? This question was addressed by observing how participants recalled visual target words-drawn from a single category-while ignoring spoken distractor words that were members of either the same or a different (single) category. Working memory capacity (WMC)…

Computer simulations are often considered effective educational tools, since their visual and communicative power enable students to better understand physical systems and phenomena. However, previous studies have found that when students read visual representations some reading difficulties can arise, especially when these are complex or dynamic…

The paper aims to demonstrate the value of cognitive interviewing (CI) as a survey pretesting method in comparative education research. Although rarely used by education researchers, CI has been successfully applied in different disciplines to evaluate and improve question performance. The method assumes that observing people's thought processes…

This study investigates the relationship between three linguistic functions: thetics, miratives and exclamatives. Thetics are an information structure configuration that conveys that the information is new to the addressee. The thetic subtypes selected for this study are the following: existentials (e.g. "There are apples in the…

Because many words of a language have more than one meaning, readers regularly need to disambiguate words during sentence comprehension. Using priming, eye-tracking, and event-related brain potentials, this thesis tested whether readers differently disambiguate words with semantically related meanings like "wire" and "cone,"…

This dissertation focuses on when and how children learn about the meanings of the propositional attitude" verbs know" and "think". "Know" and "think" both express belief. But they differ in their veridicality: "think" is non-veridical and can report a false belief; but "know" can only…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to characterize the verbal memory limitations of young adults with language learning disability (LLD). Method: Sixteen young adults with LLD and 34 age- and education-matched controls with typical language participated in a Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM; Deese, 1959; Roediger & McDermott, 1995) list…

Some aspects of Chinese literacy development do not conform to patterns of literacy development in alphabetic orthographies. Four are highlighted here. First, semantic radicals are one aspect of Chinese characters that have no analogy to alphabetic orthographies. Second, the unreliability of phonological cues in Chinese along with the fact that…