Children who were 4 to 8 years of age were asked to perform a sort-recall task where only half of the items had to be studied and remembered. Following a baseline trial, children were assigned to 1 of 3 groups and were prompted to use either a sorting or a clustering strategy (experimental groups) or were not prompted at all (control group).…

The fundamental difference hypothesis (FDH; Bley-Vroman, 1989, 1990) contends that the nature of language in natives is fundamentally different from the nature of language in adult nonnatives. This study tests the FDH in two ways: (a) via second language (L2) poverty-of-the-stimulus (POS) problems (e.g., Schwartz & Sprouse, 2000) and (b) via a…

Preschool teachers working in blended classrooms are faced with identifying which children need intensive instruction as well as being responsible for directly linking individualized learning outcomes with state or federal early learning standards. The series of studies presented were designed to illustrate how teachers working in blended…

This study examined writers' use of their first language (L1) while writing in their second language (L2). Twenty students each wrote four short argumentative essays in their L1 (Dutch) and four in their L2 (English) under think-aloud conditions. We analysed whether L1 use varied between writers and tasks, and whether it was related to general…

Cognitive neuroscientific research proposes complementary hemispheric asymmetries in naming and recognising visual objects, with a left temporal lobe advantage for object naming and a right temporal lobe advantage for object recognition. Specifically, it has been proposed that the left inferior temporal lobe plays a mediational role linking…

We report the results from two experiments investigating proficient Japanese-speaking learners' processing of reflexive object pronouns in English as a second language (L2). Experiment 1 used a timed grammaticality judgement task to assess learners' sensitivity to binding Principle A under processing pressure, and Experiment 2 investigated the…

The present study tested the hypothesis of the cognitively competent but morally insensitive bully. On the basis of teacher and peer ratings, 212 young elementary school children were selected and categorized as bullies, bully-victims, victims, and prosocial children. Children's perspective-taking skills were assessed using theory-of-mind tasks,…

Many comprehension studies have shown that children as late as age 6 ; 6 misinterpret object pronouns as co-referring with the referential subject about half the time. A recent review of earlier experiments testing children's interpretation of object pronouns in sentences with quantified subjects (Elbourne, 2005) also suggests that there is a…

The consistency of assessment demands is important to validity. This research investigated the comparability of the demands of college-assessed units within a vocationally related qualification, drawing on methodological approaches that have previously been used to compare assessments. Assessment materials from five colleges were obtained. After…

Previous studies have found that proficiency in a second language affects how the meanings of words are accessed. Support for this hypothesis is based on data from explicit memory tasks with bilingual participants who know two languages that are relatively similar phonologically and orthographically (e.g., Dutch-English, French-English). The…

Dutch-English participants named words and nonwords with a between-language phonologically inconsistent rime, e.g., GREED and PREED, and control words with a language-typical rime, e.g., GROAN, in a monolingual stimulus list or in a mixed list containing Dutch words. Inconsistent items had longer latencies and more errors than typical items in the…

The present study examined lexical representation in early Spanish-English bilinguals using an unmasked semantic and translation priming paradigm. In Experiment 1, participants were divided into two groups based on performance (more-balanced bilinguals, MB and less-balanced bilinguals, LB) on the experimental task. In Experiment 2, four patients…

In this study, the spatial limits of referred touch to a rubber hand were investigated. Participants rated the strength of the perceived illusion when the rubber hand was placed in one of six different spatial positions (at a distance of 17.5-67.5 cm horizontal from the participant's own hand). The results revealed a significant nonlinear…

The Information Packaging Hypothesis (Kita, 2000) holds that gestures play a role in conceptualising information for speaking. According to this view, speakers will gesture more when describing difficult-to-conceptualise information than when describing easy-to-conceptualise information. In the present study, 24 participants described ambiguous…

Speaking a word can be started faster when all the words in a given block share the initial portion (e.g., syllable) than when they do not (known as the form preparation effect). Two experiments employed the task to examine the role of morphemes in Chinese word production. In Experiment 1, the disyllabic target words were monomorphemic or…