This paper investigates how readers process number ambiguous noun phrases in subject position. A speeded-grammaticality judgment experiment and two self-paced reading experiments were conducted involving number ambiguous subjects in German verb-end clauses. Number preferences for individual nouns were estimated by means of two questionnaire…

Korean writing is a syllabary where spaces occur between phrases rather than between words. This characteristic of Korean allows different types of information in Korean sentences to be dissociated in ways that are not possible in the languages that have been the focus of most psycholinguistic research, thereby providing new opportunities to…

The interaction between length and lexical status is one of the key findings used in support of models of reading aloud that postulate a serial process in the orthography-to-phonology translation (B. S. Weekes, 1997). However, proponents of parallel models argue that this effect arises in peripheral visual or articulatory processes. The authors…

Any individual's response intended to be random should be as probable as any other. However, 3 experiments show that many people's independent responses depart from the expected chance distribution. Participants responding to instructions of chance and related concepts favor the available options unequally in a similar way. Consequently, in…

Comparisons are a ubiquitous process in information processing. Seven studies examine whether, how, and when comparative thinking increases the efficiency of judgment and choice. Studies 1-4 demonstrate that procedurally priming participants to engage in more vs. less comparison influences how they process information about a target. Specifically,…

The main goal of this cross-sectional study was to demonstrate that, in addition to a main change during childhood, the cognitive development of children with Down syndrome (DS) is characterized by interindividual variability in their cognitive functioning. Eighty-eight French children with DS took part in this experiment. They were divided into…

It is generally assumed that slowing after errors is a cognitive control effect reflecting more careful response strategies after errors. However, clinical data are not compatible with this explanation. We therefore consider two alternative explanations, one referring to the possibility of a persisting underlying problem and one on the basis of…

The present research examines how a lineup administrator may influence eyewitness identification decisions through different forms of influence, after providing the witness with standard, unbiased instructions. Participant-witnesses viewed a staged crime and were later shown a target-present or target-absent lineup. The lineup administrators…

Two experiments examined child and adult processing of hierarchical stimuli composed of geometric forms. Adults (ages 18-23 years) and children (ages 7-10 years) performed a forced-choice task gauging similarity between visual stimuli consisting of large geometric objects (global level) composed of small geometric objects (local level). The…

Two experiments explored the ability of 18-month-old infants to form an abstract categorical representation of tight-fit spatial relations in a visual habituation task. In Experiment 1, infants formed an abstract spatial category when hearing a familiar word ("tight") during habituation but not when viewing the events in silence or when hearing a…

In probabilistic categorization, also known as multiple cue probability learning (MCPL), people learn to predict a discrete outcome on the basis of imperfectly valid cues. In MCPL, normatively irrelevant cues are usually ignored, which stands in apparent conflict with recent research in deterministic categorization that has shown that people…

We show that 4-year-olds assign the correct interpretation to antecedent-contained deletion (ACD) sentences because they have the correct representation of these structures. This representation involves Quantifier Raising (QR) of a Quantificational Noun Phrase (QNP) that must move out of the site of the verb phrase in which it is contained to…

The dimensional change card-sorting task (DCCS) is used to assess the executive abilities of young children. Typically, 3-year-olds have difficulty in performing this task. However, the exact nature of this difficulty is still being debated. In the standard DCCS, children need to sort, for example, test cards with a blue flower or a red car into…

Manual responses can be defined by differing response parameters. Any of them may generate a Simon effect. For all those response parameters, the same implementation of the Simon effect (in terms of subserving mechanism) is assumed. In 3 experiments, subjects had to respond with either fingers or sticks. Temporal properties of the Simon effect…

This publication contains 12 (A3 open-out) poster-style reports of teacher experimental research. The style of presentation parallels the type of preliminary reporting common at academic conferences and postgraduate events. At the same time, it aims to act as a form of short primer to introduce teachers to the basic options that there are when…