Causal statements from adults with learning disabilities and normally achieving adults were analyzed and organized within a linguistic taxonomy of causal semantic relations, and a relationship between Piagetian cognitive stages and verbal expressions of causality were identified. Piagetian principles were used to design assessment and intervention…

Research on AAC symbols has focused almost exclusively on iconicity and complexity, and thus has not established whether additional visual features are necessary for conveying meaning in graphic representations. Despite variations in individual depictions of an "apple," we understand the underlying concept due to shared consensus on the set of…

Whilst findings from experimental studies suggest that perceptual mechanisms underpinning musical cognition are preserved or enhanced in autism, little is known about how higher-level, structural aspects of music are processed. Twenty participants with autism, together with age and intelligence matched controls, completed a musical priming task in…

Limited research has been conducted on the structure of the pars triangularis (PT) in dyslexia despite functional neuroimaging research finding it may play a role in phonological processing. Furthermore, research to date has not examined PT size in ADHD even though the right inferior frontal region has been implicated in the disorder. Hence, one…

Metalinguistic awareness (an awareness about the structure of orthography) had been considered vital for reading acquisition. The awareness of phonological regularity and consistency had been found in advanced readers in recent research. Evidence based on simplified Chinese suggested the effect of semantic transparency on reading in school…

This study investigated the relationship between semantic and episodic memory as they support lexical access by healthy younger and older adults and individuals with Alzheimer's disease (AD). In particular, we were interested in examining the pattern of semantic and episodic memory declines in AD (i.e., word-finding difficulty and impaired recent…

The present study is based on the theoretical assumptions that frequency of characters and their structural components, as well as the frequency types of structural components, are important to enable learners of Chinese as a foreign language (CFL) to discover the underlying structure of Chinese characters. In the CFL context, since reliable…

Briefly describes the results of six studies comparing English-language homonyms and heteronyms in earlier dictionaries and their survival rates in later dictionaries, concluding that, in each of the studies, as many or more, not fewer, of the homonyms survived. (14 references) (CB)

Presents a novel formalism for representing the notion of approximation to the truth, and analyzes the meanings of these expressions in terms of this formalism. Pragmatic looseness of this kind should be distinguished from authentic truth-conditional vagueness. (Author/VWL)

English sentences containing the universal quantifiers "each", "every", and "all" are highly complex structures in view of the subtleties of their scope properties and resulting ambiguities. This study explored the acquisition of universal quantifier sentences as reflected in the performance of three diverse college-level student groups on a…

It has been hypothesized that nouns and verbs are processed within relatively separable semantic memory networks. Although abnormal semantic processing is a common feature of schizophrenia-spectrum disorders, no prior studies have specifically examined the comparability of noun and verb generation deficits in schizophrenia. In the current study,…

How does one know whether traditional or innovative staff development is working? This study compared the effects of professors' attitudes toward learning through traditional staff development versus alternative instructional strategies for teaching community college students. Eight-four professors participated in this study. The average…

Patterns of development of ToM belief abilities in intellectually disabled (ID) children and typically developing (TD) children matched on their developmental age were investigated. The links between cognition, language, social understanding and ToM belief abilities were examined. EDEI-R [Perron-Borelli M. (1996). "Echelles Differentielles…

Historical time and chronological sequence are usually conveyed to pupils via the presentation of semantic information on printed worksheets, events being rote-memorised according to date. We explored the use of virtual environments in which successive historical events were depicted as "places" in time-space, encountered sequentially in…

Twenty-nine grade-matched 4th-8th-grade males, 12 with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) (age M = 12.2 years, SD = 1.48), and 17 without (age M = 11.5, SD = 1.59), completed two working memory tasks (digit span and the Simon game) and three long-term episodic memory tasks (a personal event memory task, story memory task, and picture…