The minimalist hypothesis of inference processing is proposed. According to this hypothesis, the only inferences coded automatically during reading are those based on easily available information and those required to make statements in a text locally coherent. Five experiments with 249 college students support the hypothesis. (SLD)

Ten cerebellar patients were compared to 10 control subjects on a verbal working memory task in which the phonological similarity of the words to be remembered and their modality of presentation were manipulated. Cerebellar patients demonstrated a reduction of the phonological similarity effect relative to controls. Further, this reduction did not…

When people engage in conversation, they tailor their utterances to their conversational partners, whether these partners are other humans or computational systems. This tailoring, or adaptation to the partner takes place in all facets of human language use, and is based on a "mental model" or a "user model" of the conversational partner. Such…

Interactions among the imagination, expertise reversal, and element interactivity effects were investigated in 2 experiments. In Experiment 1, less knowledgeable primary school students learning to use a bus timetable produced better performance under study than imagination conditions, but an increase in their experience reversed the result,…

Interest regarding neural information processing in autism is growing because atypical perceptual abilities are a characteristic feature of persons with autism. Central to our review is how characteristic perceptual abilities, referred to as "perceptual signatures," can be used to suggest a neural etiology that is specific to autism. We review…

Eighty-one university students were given a battery of reaction time tests and a group test of intelligence which yielded timed and untimed scores. Multiple regression analyses indicated that speed of information-processing was an equally good predictor of timed and untimed intelligence test performance. (Author/LMO)

Conjunctive item response models are introduced such that: (1) sufficient statistics for latent traits are not necessarily additive in item scores; (2) items are not necessarily locally independent; and (3) existing compensatory (additive) item response models including the binomial, Rasch, logistic, and general locally independent model are…

Applies to the inclined-plane task Siegler's (1981) observation that performance on Piagetian tasks is governed by similar rule structures. Also replicates Siegler's original observations about the development on the balance-scale task and determines the consistency in children's rule usage across tasks. (Author/AS)

It was suggested that thought changes cognitions to be more consistent with one's initial attitude direction and, therefore, results in attitude polarization. Specifically, it was predicted that polarization would be highest under thought with reality constraints absent, followed by thought with reality constraints present, followed by…

In the context of the well-known fact that the higher stages of Kohlberg's sequence are less well-established than the lower, an exploratory investigation was carried out in a New Zealand teachers' college into the development of principled thinking in young adults and its association with various real-life experiences. (Editor)

Evaluates arguments advanced in favor of special nativism in second-language acquisition (SLA). The article considers the following claims: Universal Grammar (UG) is the null hypothesis; any theory of SLA needs a theory of grammar; and showing that interlanguage grammars are underdetermined by the available input implies that UG must be accessible…

Observed a high rate of congruence between a hypothesized theoretical model of cognitive, motivational, and volitional dimensions of learning and empirical data from 614 college students. Analysis of effects between the model variables reveals some interesting effects with implications for student academic achievement. (SLD)