Leadership is a versatile process that requires working with others in personal and professional relationships to accomplish a goal. Cultivating leadership skills is important for students who are developing professional competencies. Leadership characteristics and abilities should be evaluated to assist in learning student traits to better…

This study focuses on third grade pupils' (9 to 10 years old) ability to predict their performance in a given task and on the correspondence between the accuracy and adequacy of the predictions on the one hand, and the academic achievement on the other. The study involved 713 pupils from 29 Estonian schools. The pupils' performance predictions…

Indirect metaphors are pervasive in everyday language: People talk about "long" vacations, "short" tempers, and "colorful" language. But, why do we use concrete lexical items that are associated with the physical world when we talk about abstract, or non-physical, concepts? A potential answer is provided by proponents…

Background: Research on retelling ability and cognition is limited in children with cerebral palsy (CP) and speech impairment. Aims: To explore the impact of expressive and receptive language, narrative discourse dimensions (Narrative Assessment Profile measures), auditory and visual memory, theory of mind (ToM) and non-verbal cognition on the…

Background: Temporal information processing (TIP) underlies many aspects of cognitive functions like language, motor control, learning, memory, attention, etc. Millisecond timing may be assessed by sequencing abilities, e.g. the perception of event order. It may be measured with auditory temporal-order-threshold (TOT), i.e. a minimum time gap…

The acquisition of linguistic structures that require "perspective-taking" at the level of "message generation" is challenging. We investigate use of "progressive aspect" in L2 event encoding, using a sentence priming paradigm. We focus on Dutch, in which use of progressive aspect is optional. The progressive consists…

The goals of this study were to evaluate (1) how specific aspects of executive control, briefly assessed, predict social competence and classroom adjustment during preschool and (2) differences between two aspects of executive control, according to child's age, socioeconomic risk status, and gender. The facets of executive control were defined as…

Words differ considerably in the amount of associated semantic information. Despite the crucial role of meaning in language, it is still unclear whether and how this variability modulates language learning. Here, we provide initial evidence demonstrating that implicit learning in repetition priming is influenced by the amount of semantic features…

Cognitive flexibility has been measured with inductive reasoning or explicit rule tasks in individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). The "Flexible Item Selection Task" (FIST) differs from previous cognitive flexibility tasks in ASD research by giving children an abstract, ambiguous rule to switch. The ASD group (N = 22; Mean age = 8.28…

The aim of this study was to test the hypothesis that conversational perspective-taking is a determinant of unfamiliar ambiguous idiom comprehension. We investigated two types of ambiguous idiom, decomposable and nondecomposable expressions, which differ in the degree to which the literal meanings of the individual words contribute to the overall…

Many studies have shown that the visual cortex of blind humans is activated in non-visual tasks. However, the electrophysiological signals underlying this cross-modal plasticity are largely unknown. Here, we characterize the neuronal population activity in the visual and auditory cortex of congenitally blind humans and sighted controls in a…

Understanding the functional neuroanatomy of planning and problem solving may substantially benefit from better insight into the chronology of the cognitive processes involved. Based on the assumption that regularities in cognitive processing are reflected in overtly observable eye-movement patterns, here we recorded eye movements while…

Category training can induce category effects, whereby color discrimination of stimuli spanning a newly learned category boundary is enhanced relative to equivalently spaced stimuli from within the newly learned category (e.g., categorical perception). However, the underlying mechanisms of these acquired category effects are not fully understood.…

Previous research has argued that fundamental frequency is a critical component of phonetic accommodation. We tested this hypothesis in an auditory naming task with two conditions. Participants in an Unfiltered Condition completed an auditory naming task with a single male model talker. A second group of participants was assigned to a Filtered…

The neural basis of syntax is a matter of substantial debate. In particular, the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), or Broca's area, has been prominently linked to syntactic processing, but the anterior temporal lobe has been reported to be activated instead of IFG when manipulating the presence of syntactic structure. These findings are difficult to…