Most learning in the workplace occurs while pursuing working rather than learning goals. The studies at hand aimed to identify task characteristics that foster learning in the workplace. Task characteristics are supposed to exert a major effect on the learning potential. However, the fact that learning is more often than not a rather unconscious…

Endophenotypes or intermediate phenotypes are of great interest in neuropsychiatric genetics because of their potential for facilitating gene discovery. We evaluated response inhibition, latency and variability measures derived from the stop task as endophenotypes of ADHD by testing whether they were related to ADHD traits in the general…

This study determines whether breadth and depth of vocabulary knowledge are related to L2 ease and success in lexical inferencing. To this end, two tests measuring vocabulary breadth and depth were administered to 50 participants. Two weeks later, all participants received an inferencing task and rated the degree of perceived ease in inferencing…

Very high-level, functional ability in foreign languages is increasingly important in many walks of life. It is also very rare, and likely requires an early start and/or a special aptitude. This study investigated the extent to which aptitude for explicit learning, defined as "analytic ability" and aptitude for implicit learning, defined…

Emotions play an important part in learning and are known to influence human development. The positive emotions of enjoyment and interest are thought to contribute to learning in distinctive ways, yet this distinction tends to be blurred in some learning research. This paper explores the role these two emotions play in the development of…

This article addresses how low-income urban adolescents view the fairness of different aspects of American society, including how wealth is distributed, the nature of legal constraints, and overall social opportunities and legitimacy. This research emerged from efforts to understand the moral and emotional nature of some adolescents' aggressive…

Recent studies on the acquisition of semantics have argued that knowledge of the universal quantifier is adult-like throughout development. However, there are domains where children still exhibit non-adult-like universal quantification, and arguments for the early mastery of relevant semantic knowledge do not explain what causes such…

Performance on integrated tasks requires candidates to engage skills and strategies beyond language proficiency alone, in ways that can be difficult to define and measure for testing purposes. While it has been widely recognized that stimulus materials impact test performance, our understanding of the way in which test takers make use of these…

Individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) report difficulty integrating simultaneously presented visual and auditory stimuli (Iarocci & McDonald, 2006), albeit showing enhanced perceptual processing of unisensory stimuli, as well as an enhanced role of perception in higher-order cognitive tasks (Enhanced Perceptual Functioning (EPF) model;…

Until recently, the challenges inherent in measuring comprehension have impeded our ability to predict the course of language acquisition. The present research reports on a longitudinal assessment of the convergent and predictive validity of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories: Words and Gestures (CDI: WG; Fenson et al.,…

The present study proposes and examines the multidimensional vector (MDV) model framework as a modeling schema for choice response times. MDV extends the Thurstonian model, as well as signal detection theory, to classification tasks by taking into account the influence of response properties on stimulus discrimination. It is capable of accounting…

The developmental progression hypothesis for phonological awareness states that children perform better on lower level tasks and has been addressed mainly in the literature with children beginning at age 5. In addition, there has been a limited amount of research done regarding the performance of dual-language learners younger than age 5 on…

Computer modeling has been widely promoted as a means to attain higher order learning outcomes. Substantiating these benefits, however, has been problematic due to a lack of proper assessment tools. In this study, we compared computer modeling with expository instruction, using a tailored assessment designed to reveal the benefits of either mode…

Although all bilinguals encounter cross-language interference (CLI), some bilinguals are more susceptible to interference than others. Here, we report on language performance of late bilinguals (Russian/German) on two bilingual tasks (interview, verbal fluency), their language use and switching habits. The only between-group difference was CLI:…

The aim of this study was to investigate the impact of Socio-Economic Status (SES) on Hebrew-speaking children's developing ability to pluralize nouns and mark adjectives in agreement with them. Participants were 180 gradeschool children from mid-high SES and 180 peers from low SES, in six consecutive grade levels. The task consisted of 32…