Using the speeded-grammaticality judgment task, shows that factors that regulate garden path strength in ambiguous sentences also have an influence on processing of corresponding ungrammatical sentences in that they determine how reliably the ungrammaticality is detected. Argues that this processing correlation provides evidence for serial parsing…

Two experiments investigated why preschool children sometimes produce multiple words of a referent, but other times allow only on word. In the first experiment, 3- and 4-year-old children completed a naming task. Children produced on average more than two words per object. In the second, 3- and 4-year-olds learned new words for nameable objects.…

Four experiments examined whether studying a single Deese/Roediger-McDermott (DRM) list produces semantic priming for nonstudied critical items (CIs) and semantic + repetition priming for studied associates. After 30 s of mental arithmetic that followed the study of a DRM list, priming was assessed in a lexical decision task when the nonwords were…

The disadvantage in producing the past tense of regular relative to irregular verbs shown by some patients with non-fluent aphasia has been alternatively attributed (a) to the failure of a specific rule-based morphological mechanism, or (b) to a more generalised phonological impairment that penalises regular verbs more than irregular owing to the…

Three experiments document that conceptual knowledge influences lexical acquisition in infancy. A novel target object was initially labeled with a novel word. In both yes-no (Experiment 1) and forced-choice (Experiment 2) tasks, 2-year-olds' subsequent extensions were mediated by the conceptual description of the targets. When targets were…

This study examined judgments of learning and the long-term retention of a discrete motor task (golf putting) as a function of practice distribution. The results indicated that participants in the distributed practice group performed more proficiently than those in the massed practice group during both acquisition and retention phases. No…

Two experiments investigated choice in adult humans on a simulated cooperation task to evaluate a risk-reduction account of sharing based on the energy-budget rule. The energy-budget rule is an optimal foraging model that predicts risk-averse choices when net energy gains exceed energy requirements (positive energy budget) and risk-prone choices…

According to researchers, the ability to engage teachers and students in the data analysis process helps them to understand the complexities involved in the task. The flexibility of the strategies used in the process are examined by analyzing the experience of student researchers and teacher researchers.

The authors tested source memory across three conditions, one in which 3 strongly associated primes of a target word were presented in the same source as the target, one in which primes were presented in a different source than the target, and one in which no associates of targets were encoded. In the first 2 experiments, target source memory…

In this article, the authors discuss and examine how to develop time sharing using a dual motor task and its effects. They state that when one is required to perform two tasks at the same time (time sharing), an individual may experience difficulty in expressing one or both of the tasks. This phenomenon, known as interference, has been studied…

Five individuals participated in an extensive practice study (10 1-hr sessions, 11,000 trials total) on a self-paced identity-judgment ?n-back task (n ranging from 1 to 5). Within Session 1, response time increased abruptly by about 300 ms in passing from n = 1 to n > 1, suggesting that the focus of attention can accommodate only a single item (H.…

The relation between reflexive and voluntary orienting of visual attention was investigated with 4 experiments: a simple detection task, a localization task, a saccade toward the target task, and a target identification task in which discrimination difficulty was manipulated. Endogenous and exogenous orienting cues were presented in each trial and…

Young children are often thought to confuse fantasy and reality. This study took a second look at preschoolers' fantasy/reality differentiation. We employed a new measure of fantasy/reality differentiation--a property attribution task--in which children were questioned regarding the properties of both real and fantastical entities. We also…

In the present research, 6-month-old infants consistently searched for a tall toy behind a tall as opposed to a short occluder. However, when the same toy was hidden inside a tall or a short container, only older, 7.5-month-old infants searched for the tall toy inside the tall container. These and control results (1) confirm previous…

Analysis of binary choice behavior in iterated tasks with immediate feedback reveals robust deviations from maximization that can be described as indications of 3 effects: (a) a payoff variability effect, in which high payoff variability seems to move choice behavior toward random choice; (b) underweighting of rare events, in which alternatives…