For over 20 years, SLA research has been investigating the role of negotiation in second language acquisition. While much attention has been given to an examination of the conditions that are necessary for acquisition and the factors that can facilitate opportunities for negotiation, limited attention has been given to a longitudinal study of the…

College students' strategies to discriminate relevant from irrelevant information in algebra story problems were identified and compared to strategies used by younger students in previous studies. College students identified numbers relevant for solution (Experiment 1) or provided verbal reports as they computed answers (Experiment 2). Type of…

Research on graphing presents its results as if knowing and understanding were something stored in peoples' minds independent of the situation that they find themselves in. Thus, there are no models that situate interview responses to graphing tasks. How, then, we question, are the interview texts produced? How do respondents begin and end…

The present study used a mediated priming paradigm to examine whether developmental differences exist in the integration of semantic information with orthographic and phonological information during visual word recognition. In Experiment 1, we found that the integration of semantics with phonology and orthography differed among third-grade,…

A current area of controversy within the literature on visual word recognition concerns the extent to which semantic information influences the computation of phonology. Experiment 1 revealed that both the imageability effect and the ambiguity advantage seen in the speeded naming task are confined to words with atypical mappings between spelling…

When speakers repair speech errors, they plan the repair in the context of an abandoned word (the error) that is usually similar in meaning or form. Two picture-naming experiments tested whether the error's lexical representations influence repair planning. Context pictures were sometimes replaced with target pictures; the picture names were…

The authors investigated whether emotional pictorial stimuli are especially likely to be processed in parafoveal vision. Pairs of emotional and neutral visual scenes were presented parafoveally (2.1[degrees] or 2.5[degrees] of visual angle from a central fixation point) for 150-3,000 ms, followed by an immediate recognition test (500-ms delay).…

People categorized pairs of perceptual stimuli that varied in both category membership and pairwise similarity. Experiments 1 and 2 showed categorization of 1 color of a pair to be reliably contrasted from that of the other. This similarity-based contrast effect occurred only when the context stimulus was relevant for the categorization of the…

Four experiments are reported exploring whether distractor pictures activate their phonological properties in the course of speech production. In Experiment 1, participants were presented with two pictures and were asked to name one while ignoring the other. Distractor pictures were phonologically related, semantically related or unrelated to the…

People learning a new language have problems with various aspects of the language they want to learn--with its grammar, with its pronunciation, with its morphology... CALL tools have been provided for most of these linguistic levels, but comparatively little has been done about helping students with problems of meaning. We will argue that language…

Computer science provides with virtual laboratories, places where one can merge real experiments with the formalism of algorithms and mathematics and where, with the advent of multimedia, sounds and movies can also be added. In this paper we present a method, based on principles of formal ontology, allowing one to develop interactive educational…

It has been suggested that tense and aspect distributions are very difficult to learn in a second language (L2), they are prone to fossilize universally, and their interpretive properties are subject to a critical period (Coppieters, 1987). This study focuses on the acquisition of the semantic implications of the preterite-imperfect contrast in…

One of the tasks of language learning is the discovery of the intricate division of labour between the lexical-semantic content of an expression and the pragmatic inferences the expression can be used to convey. Here we investigate experimentally the development of the semantics-pragmatics interface, focusing on Greek-speaking five-year-olds'…

Concepts of containment, support, and degree of fit were investigated using nonverbal, preferential-looking tasks with 9- to 14-month-old infants and adults who were fluent in either English or Korean. Two contrasts were tested: tight containment vs. loose support (grammaticized as "in" and "on" in English by spatial prepositions and "kkita" and…

The mother tongue of the absolute majority of native Arabic speakers is Spoken Arabic (SA), which is a local dialect that does not have a written form. For reading and writing, as well as for formal communication Literary Arabic (LA) is used. For the literate Arabs, these two languages are extensively inter-twined in every day life. Consequently,…