Listeners rapidly adjust to talkers' pronunciations, accommodating those pronunciations into the relevant phonemic category to improve subsequent perception. Previous work has suggested that such learning is restricted to pronunciations that are representative of how the speaker talks (Kraljic, Samuel, & Brennan, 2008). If an ambiguous…

The iambic-trochaic law has been proposed to account for the grouping of auditory stimuli: Sequences of sounds that differ only in duration are grouped as iambs (i.e., the most prominent element marks the end of a sequence of sounds), and sequences that differ only in pitch or intensity are grouped as trochees (i.e., the most prominent element…

Observers pointing to a target viewed directly may elevate their fingertip close to the line of sight. However, pointing blindfolded, after viewing the target, they may pivot lower, from the shoulder, aligning the arm with the target as if reaching to the target. Indeed, in Experiment 1 participants elevated their arms more in visually monitored…

The authors assessed the extent to which multielement designs produced false positives using continuous duration recording (CDR) and interval recording with 10-s and 1-min interval sizes. Specifically, they created 6,000 graphs with multielement designs that varied in the number of data paths, and the number of data points per data path, using a…

Previous studies (Case, 1985; Siegler, 1981) have shown that children under the age of 5 years have little understanding of balance scales when required to encode the influence of weight or distance from the fulcrum. More recently, however, Halford, Andrews, Dalton, Boag, and Zielinski (2002) noted that an understanding based on weight alone is…

This study examines how and when small networks of self-interested agents generate a group tie or affiliation at the network level. A group affiliation is formed when actors (a) perceive themselves as members of a group and (b) share resources with each other despite an underlying competitive structure. We apply a concept of structural cohesion to…

Contrasting results have been reported regarding the phonetic acquisition of bilinguals. A lack of discrimination has been observed for certain native contrasts in 8-month-old Catalan-Spanish bilingual infants (Bosch & Sebastian-Galles, 2003a), though not in French-English bilingual infants (Burns, Yoshida, Hill & Werker, 2007; Sundara, Polka &…

An indispensable principle of rational thought is that positive evidence should increase belief. In this paper, we demonstrate that people routinely violate this principle when predicting an outcome from a weak cause. In Experiment 1 participants given weak positive evidence judged outcomes of public policy initiatives to be less likely than…

Rule finding is an important aspect of human reasoning and flexibility. Previous studies associated rule finding "failure" with past experience with the test stimuli and stable personality traits. We additionally show that rule finding performance is severely impaired by a mindset associated with applying an instructed rule. The mindset was…

Two experiments investigated the way acoustic markers of prominence influence the grouping of speech sequences by adults and 7-month-old infants. In the first experiment, adults were familiarized with and asked to memorize sequences of adjacent syllables that alternated in either pitch or duration. During the test phase, participants heard pairs…

This study investigated the "knew it all along" explanation of the hypercorrection effect. The hypercorrection effect refers to the finding that when people are given corrective feedback, errors that are committed with high confidence are easier to correct than low-confidence errors. Experiment 1 showed that people were more likely to…

The Republic of Turkey has developed democratic support for equity in education for groups who have various learning needs (Levent, 2011, p. 89-91). In connection with Turkey's central policy of education, current educational applications have addressed these diverse needs to a certain extent. Sak (2011) drew our attention to the insufficiency of…

Advocates of modality preference posit that individuals have a dominant sense and that when new material is presented in this preferred modality, learning is enhanced. Despite the widespread belief in this position, there is little supporting evidence. In the present study, the authors implemented a Morse code-like recall task to examine whether…

Developing nations are poised to spend billions on information and communication technology (ICT) innovation in 2020. A study of the historical adoption of ICT in developing nations has indicated that their adoption patterns do not follow typical technology innovation adoption models. This study addressed the weaknesses found in existing…

This dissertation studies how people describe emotions with language and how computers can simulate this descriptive behavior. Although many non-human animals can express their current emotions as social signals, only humans can communicate about emotions symbolically. This symbolic communication of emotion allows us to talk about emotions that we…