The purpose of this study was to examine the role of the causal connectivity of the statements ("low-medium-high"), elaboration question condition ("focused on the identification of main ideas-focused on the identification of speakers' emotions") and the modality of presentation of discourse ("oral-written") in the…

Verbal working memory resources may impact syntax comprehension. Thirteen Italian children with cochlear implants (CIs) were assessed in relative clause (RC) comprehension, digit span and nonword repetition and compared to 13 chronological age peers (CA) and 13 younger controls (LA) with normal hearing (NH). The RC comprehension task tested…

The perspective-adjustment model of language interpretation assumes an initial egocentric stage in comprehension that is only later adjusted to the interlocutor's perspective. Moreover, substantial processing resources are involved in perspective-taking. However, many experiments in the perspective-adjustment framework do not control for visual…

This article reports results from a longitudinal study from age 4 to 7 of comprehension and production of narrative macrostructure in Swedish monolingual children (N = 17). "Baby Birds/Baby Goats" from the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (LITMUS-MAIN) were used to elicit narratives and ask comprehension questions at age…

This article is part of a larger project focusing upon explanatory illustrations that children encounter in pre- and primary school education. The research questions concerned (a) how preschool children make sense of iconic symbols when placing items of refuse on illustrations of refuse bins in a sorting task and (b) what stumbling blocks they…

Psychology undergraduates can benefit from direct experiences with laboratory procedures of psychological phenomena. However, they are not always available for students within a distance education program. The present study included students from the Spanish National Distance Education University (UNED) that were to take part in a Basic Psychology…

This study investigates 3- to 5-year-old children's sensitivity to lexical, intonational and gestural information in the comprehension of speaker uncertainty. Most previous studies on children's understanding of speaker certainty and uncertainty across languages have focused on the comprehension of lexical markers, and little is known about the…

The evolution of technologies and the development of new tools with educational purposes are growing up. This work presents the experience of a new tool based on augmented reality (AR) focusing on the anatomy of the lower limb. ARBOOK was constructed and developed based on TC and MRN images, dissections and drawings. For ARBOOK evaluation, a…

Across languages, children do not comprehend 3SG/3PL subject-verb agreement before age five, despite early mastery in spontaneous speech. This study investigates subject-verb agreement in a language hitherto not studied in this respect, namely Dutch. The authors examine if (1) Dutch two- and three-year-olds comprehend subject-verb agreement and…

The study explored the awareness of morphemic knowledge among young adult learners in the ESL context. Morphological Relatedness Test and Morphological Structure Test (adapted from Curinga, 2014) were two important tools used to assess the students' morphemic knowledge in this study. The tests measured the students' ability to reflect and…

The current paper describes a first experiment in the use of TED talks and open tagging exercises to train higher-level comprehension skills, and of automatic logging of the student's actions to investigate the student choices while performing analytical tasks. The experiment took advantage of an interactive learning platform--LearnWeb--that…

The use of diagrams in learning and communication is generally considered efficacious and an important skill to cultivate, especially among science students. At the same time, previous research has revealed many problems in student diagram use, including a lack of spontaneity in such use, but the extent to which these problems persist into the…

A question commonly raised by teachers is the extent to which task-based language teaching (TBLT) is suitable for young beginners, but to date, very little research has examined how TBLT can be implemented with complete beginners. The purpose of this article is to document my attempt to introduce a task-based approach in order to see if such an…

Crosslinguistic influence has been seen in bilingual adult and child learners when compared to monolingual learners. For speakers of Light Warlpiri and Gurindji Kriol there is no monolingual group for comparison, yet crosslinguistic influence can be seen in how the speakers resolve competition between case-marking and word order systems in each…

The purpose of the present study was to explore children's understanding of external symbols by examining the relationship between children's production and comprehension of graphic notations and verbal messages. Fifty-six children between the ages of 5 and 7 years were asked to produce both notations and a spoken message relaying to their…