This paper presents a study that looked into the structuring of tasks that may foster oral fluency in an intensive eight-week course with 25 young adult and adult learners of English as a foreign language in a format of tutoring sessions for conversation. The action research involved two teachers and a research advisor, coauthors of this paper.…

The main goal of this study was to investigate the influence of an established school programme with a high amount of physical education on visual-spatial ability in a secondary school. One hundred and forty-four adolescents, 69 from sport classes and 75 from regular classes, solved a cognitive processing speed task and a mental rotation task. The…

As children transition from the early to later grades of elementary school, they become increasingly skilled at employing a variety of techniques -- such as rehearsal and organizational strategies -- for remembering information. Developmental changes in strategy use have been well documented, but little is known about the extent to which these…

Research has indicated age-related improvements in relational binding, an important process of episodic memory, across development. However, little research has focused on individual differences in relational binding and factors contributing to this variation. Although differences may arise from various sources, early caregiving has been shown to…

Previous research has shown that people make systematically different decisions when faced with a moral dilemma in a native than in a foreign language [e.g. Costa, A., A. Foucart, S. Hayakawa, M. Aparici, J. Apesteguia, J. Heafner, and B. Keysar. 2014. "Your Morals Depend on Language." PLoS One 9 (4): e94842]. The aim of the current…

Stimulus-response (S-R) episodes are formed whenever a response is executed in close temporal proximity to a stimulus. Subsequent stimulus repetition will retrieve the episode from memory, reactivating the previous response. Whereas many research findings attest to the flexibility of representing stimulus features, only little is known about the…

Three hundred and forty-one children (M[subscript age] = 9,0 years) engaged in a series of science tasks in collaborative, same-sex pairs or did not interact. All children who collaborated on the science tasks advanced in basic-level understanding of the relevant task (motion down an incline). However, only boys advanced in their conceptual…

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…

Willingness to communicate (WTC) has recently been researched as a dynamic variable, with some investigations viewing it as a complex dynamic system (CDS). One important property associated with CDS is the notion of attractor states, which are characterized by stable patterns of behavior. The present study employed an idiodynamic method to monitor…

Expectancy-value theory (EVT) proposes that students' appraisals of success expectancy and task value are the main drivers of their study and career choices. Dimensional comparison theory proposes that these beliefs are themselves affected by students comparing their ability across different domains. However, only a few studies have aimed to…

The aim of this mixed methods study is to identify the underlying structure of the construct of Foreign Language Anxiety in integrated listening-to-speak tasks. First, the analysis of the qualitative interviews with six postsecondary ESL learners reveals that anxiety for integrated speaking stems from four different factors: "listening,"…

The measurement of self-regulation in young children has been a topic of great interest as researchers and practitioners work to help ensure that children have the skills they need to succeed as they start school. The present study examined how a revised version of a commonly used measure of behavioral self-regulation, the…

A large body of literature has characterized unimodal monolingual and bilingual lexicons and how neighborhood density affects lexical access; however there have been relatively fewer studies that generalize these findings to bimodal (M2) second language (L2) learners of sign languages. The goal of the current study was to investigate parallel…

Long-term memory (LTM) has been shown to bias attention to a previously learned visual target location. Here, we examined whether memory-predicted spatial location can facilitate the detection of a faint pure tone target embedded in real world audio clips (e.g., soundtrack of a restaurant). During an initial familiarization task, participants…

The present study investigated the interface between explicit instruction and computer-assisted language learning (CALL) in an effort to reduce plural marking errors among Japanese EFL learners. The instruction involved raising contrastive awareness of cross-linguistic and conceptual features, and was delivered via an online medium. A total of 180…