Concepts are represented in the mind through knowledge of their extensions (the class of items to which the concept applies) and intensions (features that distinguish that class of items). A common assumption among theories of concepts is that the 2 aspects are intimately related. Hence if there is systematic individual variation in concept…

The present study evaluated: (1) the effects of two training programs designed for promoting Theory of Mind (ToM) skills in children aged 7/8; and (2) the relations between second-order recursive thinking (II-order-RT), advanced-ToM (Adv_ToM) and metacognition. Ninety-one 7- to 8-year-old children were assigned to one of three training conditions:…

We endeavor through this work to demonstrate the effects of the introduction of neuroeducation data in schools and their application, via an experiment of neuropedagogical methods, to respond to the hypothesis that the contribution of neuroeducation may be beneficial for learning. During this study we designed four neuropedagogical methods and to…

Purpose: Over the last decades, many studies have documented the clinical potential of nonword repetition (NWR) tasks for detecting developmental language disorder in mono- (MON) and bilingual (BIL) children by unveiling their difficulties in short-term memory and phonological accuracy. However, the precise nature of the nonwords to be used and…

Most research reporting that bilingual children exhibit enhanced cognitive skills and social awareness relative to their monolingual peers focusses on children raised and educated bilingually, making it difficult to pinpoint the degree of second language exposure necessary for such advantages to materialise. The current study measures the social…

Purpose: The first goal of this research was to compare verbal and nonverbal executive function abilities between preschoolers with and without specific language impairment (SLI). The second goal was to assess the group differences on 4 executive function components in order to determine if the components may be hierarchically related as suggested…

Phosphorylation of CaMKII and AMPA receptor GluA1 subunit has been shown to play a major role in hippocampal-dependent long-term/reference memory (RM) and in the expression of long-term synaptic potentiation (LTP). In contrast, it has been proposed that dephosphorylation of these proteins could be involved in the opposite phenomenon of hippocampal…

Second language (L2) writing has been determined to be influenced by what is read, with language learners tending to borrow words and short phrases from input texts while writing (e.g., Wang & Wang, 2015). This phenomenon is referred to as lexical alignment. Only one empirical study has investigated the influence that the linguistic complexity…

There have been many studies exploring the advantages that bilingualism confers to individuals' working memory and metacognition (see Ransdell, 2006; Del Missier et al., 2010). The hypothesis of language critical period states that if no language learning and teaching happen during the critical period, an individual will never be able to fully…

Working memory has been proposed to account for the differential rates in progress young children make in writing. One crucial aspect of learning to write is the encoding (i.e., integration) and retrieval of the correct phoneme-grapheme pairings, known as binding. In addition to executive functions, binding is regarded as central to the concept of…

Children start preschool with large individual differences in their early numerical abilities. Little is known about the importance of heterogeneous patterns that exist within these individual differences. A person-centered analytic approach might be helpful to unravel these patterns and the cognitive and environmental factors that are associated…

Among the various systems taught in the preclinical phases, the nervous system is more challenging to learn than other systems. In this report, a novel teaching methodology, "real-life scenario (RLS) blended teaching," is described and its effectiveness in facilitating inquisitive learning in undergraduate medical students is evaluated.…

We investigated age-related differences in syntactic comprehension in young and older adults. Most previous research found no evidence of age-related decline in syntactic processing. We investigated elementary syntactic comprehension of minimal sentences (e.g., I cook), minimizing the influence of working memory. We also investigated the…

The aim of this study was to compare linguistic and narrative skills of monolingual and bilingual preschoolers and to estimate linguistic predictors of the macro-structural level of narratives. A battery of linguistic measures in Italian was administered to sixty-four Monolinguals and sixty-four Early Bilinguals; it included Vocabulary,…

Prospective memory (PM) refers to memory for future intentions (e.g. remembering to press a button when you see an animal word). Researchers classify PM intentions in the laboratory as focal or nonfocal primarily in two ways. One way, task-appropriateness, refers to how the processing for the intention relates to the processing required for an…