This study examined the role of relevance determinations within the context of undergraduates' multiple text reading and writing. In this study, undergraduate students were randomly assigned to one of two experimental conditions (i.e., to compose a research report about either the causes of or the solutions to the urban housing crisis), using a…

In this quasi-experimental study, the effects of lexical coverage through pseudo word manipulation in dialogue comprehension are investigated. Forty-four first-year students in a Japanese university listened to five dialogues at different lexical coverage levels: 98%, 95%, 90%, 85%, and 83%. The results of the comprehension tests confirm the…

Previous research indicates that imagining contact with someone who is an immigrant can reduce prejudice and promote positive friendship intentions. Much less is known about the optimal ways of effecting imagined contact. The reported research used an experimental design, where the status of a target-child toy puppet (immigrant versus refugee…

Native speakers understand familiar idioms (e.g., "over the moon") and conventional metaphors (e.g., describing time as a doctor) quickly and easily. In two eye-tracking studies we considered how native speakers are able to make sense of fundamentally "unfamiliar" figurative expressions. In Experiment 1 compared with literal…

Previous work has provided evidence that both merit and social relationships guide resource distribution in children. However, no prior studies have addressed the question of how children as third-party distributors balance the 2 factors when they are in conflict with one another. Two studies tested 7-year-old Chinese children's allocation of 3…

Opportunities for inclusive postsecondary education for students with intellectual and developmental disabilities are becoming increasingly common at institutions of higher education in the United States. Although inclusive postsecondary opportunities benefit the entire campus, this may be especially true for students enrolled in teacher education…

Purpose: This preliminary research examined (a) the perception of two common sources of indexical variability in speech--regional dialects and foreign accents, and (b) the relation between indexical processing and sentence recognition among prelingually deaf, long-term cochlear implant (CI) users and normal-hearing (NH) peers. Method: Forty-three…

This longitudinal, quasi-experimental field study investigated affective forecasting as a moderator of positive intergroup contact effects among adolescents. We also examined a novel mediating mechanism that underlies this effect, namely accuracy of perceived outgroup willingness for intergroup contact. Three annual waves of survey data were used…

Two studies were conducted to examine calibration, comprehension, and students' familiarity with digital reading technologies. The first study investigated whether there were media-related differences in comprehension and calibration while studying narrative and expository texts. The participants (N = 38) were high school students from a…

Meaningfulness and prior knowledge can have differing effects on both metamemory and memory performance. Personally relevant information may be deemed more meaningful, which often can serve as a mediating factor in memory performance. Additionally, information that is congruent with prior knowledge has been shown to be judged as easier to remember…

Rebranding is a widely utilized practice to change the image of a brand in the minds of the consumer through major or minor changes in both its positioning and aesthetics. Yet, evidence suggests it is not meaningfully covered in many marketing classes. This project provides an innovative, engaging, experiential learning opportunity that can be…

Purpose: Public interests and concerns often create dilemmas for school principals. As such moral dilemmas are the case for schools as places marked by social, economic, cultural and political diversity. The purpose of this paper is to look at how Appalachian school leaders use moral literacy to make decisions when facing ethical issues?…

With the emergence of different varieties of English in the world, the issue of intelligibility has attracted many researchers' attention. While a large number of studies have focused on the intelligibility of different English varieties for native speakers, few of them have involved Chinese learners of English as participants; yet, they…

This study aimed to investigate concerns of validity and reliability in subjective ratings of age-of-acquisition (AoA), through exploring characteristics of the individual rater. An additional aim was to validate the obtained AoA ratings against two corpora -- one of child speech and one of adult speech -- specifically exploring whether words…

Purpose: Previous studies with children and adults have demonstrated a "familiar talker advantage"--better word recognition for familiar talkers. The goal of the current study was to test whether this phenomenon is modulated by a child's language ability. Method: Sixty children with a range of language ability were trained to learn the…