We use a genetically sensitive design to examine the relationship between language and nonverbal ability at 4 and a half and reading skills at 7 years of age in a sample of more than 1,000 children participating in the Twins Early Development Study. We find that nonphonological as well as phonological measures of early language make significant…

An important purpose of higher social work education is to guide students to acquire and develop social-communicative competencies. The purpose of this study was to investigate the role students' personality characteristics, self-perceived communicative competence and learning conceptions play in the acquisition and development of…

The Stroop Color-Word Test was administered to 1,856 cognitively screened, healthy Dutch-speaking participants aged 24 to 81 years. The effects of age, gender, and education on Stroop test performance were investigated to adequately stratify the normative data. The results showed that especially the speed-dependent Stroop scores (time to complete…

Individual (e.g., depression, learning styles) and familial (e.g., social support) factors affecting the psychosocial well-being of bilingual, rural Nebraska, paraprofessional educators were examined. Of 26 participants, 15 were first and 5 were second generation Hispanic immigrants. All were currently (n= 20) or formerly (n= 6) involved in an…

The No Child Left Behind Act requires school districts to communicate with parents in an "understandable and uniform format ... in a language that parents can understand." But with a student population representing 131 countries and speaking 81 major languages, the Cobb County, Ga., Public School District was finding it difficult to meet…

Language teachers need to provide students with a context for genuine communication (Sullivan, 2000). Project-oriented computer-assisted language learning (PrOCALL) attempts to achieve this by orienting learners towards tasks, which encourages them to communicate in the target language while working towards completion of a project (Debski, 2000).…

With increased emphasis on test-based accountability measures has come increased interest in examining the impact of technology use on students' academic performance. However, few empirical investigations exist that address this issue. This paper (1) examines previous research on the relationship between student achievement and technology use, (2)…

This article articulates the results of an ongoing study in an urban school in New York City in which student and teacher researchers engage in practices that support the science success of the schools' predominantly Latino/a and African American population. By situating the study in the nature of corporate and communal practices, the article…

In this paper, experiments on the automatic discrimination of basic emotions from spoken Finnish are described. For the purpose of the study, a large emotional speech corpus of Finnish was collected; 14 professional actors acted as speakers, and simulated four primary emotions when reading out a semantically neutral text. More than 40 prosodic…

The issue of parental choice of school for their child has been a topical one in many contexts worldwide, and work has been undertaken in a number of national contexts to investigate the many factors at work in influencing such choice. This article considers parental choice within the specific context of bilingual (Spanish/English) schools in…

Factors related to students' selection of Internet-assisted vs. traditional distance learning environments (IDL vs. TDL) at the Open University of Israel were investigated. The two groups differed in their demographic variables, academic achievements and value priorities. The IDL group had a higher percentage of males, and a different age…

Although feeding difficulties in infants with Down syndrome are described in the literature, the experiences of parents regarding the feeding problems of their infants are largely omitted. In order to promote closer collaboration with families and speech-language therapists in early communication intervention, the study investigated some…

The challenge of the semantic web is the provision of distributed information with well-defined meaning, understandable for different parties. Particularly, applications should be able to provide individually optimized access to information by taking the individual needs and requirements of the users into account. In this paper we propose a…

Nine-ten-and twelve-year-old children (N = 75) read aloud dominant, subordinate or ambiguous bias sentences (N = 120) that ended in a homonym (BALL). After the sentence (1,000 ms), children read aloud targets that were related to the dominant (BAT) or subordinate (DANCE) meaning of the homonym or control targets. Participants were also divided…

This paper presents the multimedia product for teaching Natural Sciences to 10-12 years old children. In this product three pedagogical agents, Teacher and two pupils guide the learner through the virtual environment. The inclusion of a team of pedagogical agents permits us to create a micro-model of lesson activity and gives a reliable support of…