Adults can rapidly learn artificial phonotactic constraints such as /"f"/ "occurs only at the beginning of syllables" by producing syllables that contain those constraints. This implicit learning is then reflected in their speech errors. However, second-order constraints in which the placement of a phoneme depends on another…

This dissertation presents a novel effort to develop ITS technologies that adapt by observing student behavior. In particular, we define an evolving expert knowledge base (EEKB) that structures a domain's information as a set of nodes and the relationships that exist between those nodes. The structure of this model is not the particularly novel…

The Project on Incentives in Teaching (POINT) was a three-year study conducted in the Metropolitan Nashville School System from 2006-07 through 2008-09, in which middle school mathematics teachers voluntarily participated in a controlled experiment to assess the effect of financial rewards for teachers whose students showed unusually large gains…

Evolutionary history and structural considerations constrain all aspects of animal physiology. Constraints on invertebrate locomotion are especially straightforward for students to observe and understand. In this exercise, students use spiders to investigate the concepts of adaptation, structure-function relationships, and trade-offs. Students…

Covariate adjustment can increase the precision of estimates by removing unexplained variance from the error in randomized experiments, although chance covariate imbalance tends to counteract the improvement in precision. The author develops an easy measure to examine chance covariate imbalance in randomization by standardizing the average…

Four experiments investigated the effects of transactional content on temporal and probabilistic discounting of costs. Kusev, van Schaik, Ayton, Dent, and Chater (2009) have shown that content other than gambles can alter decision-making behavior even when associated value and probabilities are held constant. Transactions were hypothesized to lead…

The present study focused on children's deductive reasoning when performing the Latin Square Task, an experimental task designed to explore the influence of relational complexity. Building on Birney, Halford, and Andrew's (2006) research, we created a version of the task that minimized nonrelational factors and introduced new categories of items.…

Despite being proficient tool users, young children have surprising difficulty in innovating tools (making novel tools to solve problems). Two experiments found that 4- to 7-year-olds had difficulty on two tool innovation problems and explored reasons for this inflexibility. Experiment 1 (N = 51) showed that children's performance was unaffected…

Stimulus over-selectivity refers to behavior being controlled by one element of the environment at the expense of other equally salient aspects of the environment. Four experiments trained and tested non-clinical participants on a two-component trial-and-error discrimination task to explore the effects of different training regimes on…

In their paper, Meara and Olmos Alcoy (2010) attempted to find a means of estimating productive second language (L2) vocabulary size based on the premise that many known lexical items simply do not appear in learner-produced texts. To do so, they borrowed an ecological model, in which a capture-recapture formula, the Petersen estimate, is used to…

False memories arising from associatively related lists are a robust phenomenon that resists many efforts to prevent it. However, a few variables have been shown to reduce this form of false memory. Explanations for how the reduction is accomplished have focused on either output monitoring processes or constraints on access, but neither idea alone…

Six lexical decision experiments were conducted to examine the influence of complex structure on the processing speed of English compounds. All experiments revealed that semantically transparent compounds (e.g., "rosebud") were processed more quickly than matched monomorphemic words (e.g., "giraffe"). Opaque compounds (e.g., "hogwash") were also…

Speech sounds can be classified on the basis of their underlying articulators or on the basis of the acoustic characteristics resulting from particular articulatory positions. Research in speech perception suggests that distinctive features are based on both articulatory and acoustic information. In recent years, neuroelectric and neuromagnetic…

This classroom experiment introduces students to the notion of credit risk and expected return, by allowing them to trade on comparable corporate bond issues from two types of markets: investment-grade and high-yield markets. Investment-grade issues have a lower probability of default than high-yield issues and thus provide a lower yield.…

In the present study we analyze how the cognitive system deals on-line with number agreement mismatches and whether this on-line process influences the off-line interpretation of the sentence. In two ERP experiments we monitored the on-line processing consequences of subject-verb agreement mismatches, focusing on the integration of a following…