Native English speakers experience difficulty acquiring Arabic emphatic consonants. Arabic language textbooks have suggested that learners focus on adjacent vowels for cues to these consonants; however, the utility of such a strategy has not been empirically tested. This study investigated the perception of Arabic emphatic-plain contrasts by means…

In this article, we present investigative tasks that concern loci, which integrate the use of dynamic geometry software (DGS) with mathematics for proving the obtained figures. Additional conditions were added to the loci: ellipse, parabola and circle, which result in the emergence of new loci, similar in form to the original loci. The…

Comparisons of literary experts and novices indicate that experts engage in interpretive processes to "get the point" during their reading of literary texts but novices do not. In two studies the reading and interpretive processes of literary novices (undergraduates with no formal training in literature study) were elicited through…

We addressed Deville and Chalhoub-Deville's (2006), Schoonen's (2012), and Xi and Mollaun's (2006) call for research into the contextual features that are considered related to person-by-task interactions in the framework of generalizability theory in two ways. First, we quantitatively synthesized the generalizability studies to determine the…

Tone languages such as Mandarin use voice pitch to signal lexical contrasts, presenting a challenge for second/foreign language (L2) learners whose native languages do not use pitch in this manner. The present study examined components of an aptitude for mastering L2 lexical tone. Native English speakers with no previous tone language experience…

Bilinguals have been shown to perform worse than monolinguals in a variety of verbal tasks. This study investigated this bilingual verbal cost in a large-scale picture-naming study conducted in Spanish. We explored how individual characteristics of the participants and the linguistic properties of the words being spoken influence this performance…

Using a Chinese Word Associates Test (WAT-C), this study examined the vocabulary depth of second language learners of Chinese and its contribution to the learners' reading comprehension. Results showed no significant effects of word frequency, word class (i.e., adjectives vs. verbs), and type of association relationships (i.e., paradigmatic vs.…

This study investigated the effects of task analytic instruction, systematic prompting and graphic organizers on two students' ability to compose informational text. Participants were provided with information articles from which they identified the key ideas and supporting details. Participants transferred this information to a graphic organizer…

Proving that a given set is indeed a subgroup, one needs to show that it is non-empty, and closed under operation and inverses. This study focuses on the first condition, analysing students' responses to this task. Results suggest that there are three distinct problematic responses: the total absence of proving this condition, the problematic…

Many educational data mining studies have explored methods for discovering cognitive models and have emphasized improving prediction accuracy. Too few studies have "closed the loop" by applying discovered models toward improving instruction and testing whether proposed improvements achieve higher student outcomes. We claim that such…

As someone who values collaboration with her students, supports students' ownership of their own learning, and looks for opportunities to increase their critical learning skills, Ce Rosenow finds many benefits to using task-specific rubrics that evolve from class discussion. She explains that this process is ideal for honors students because of…

Background: Considerable evidence suggests that performance across a variety of cognitive tasks is effectively supported by the use of verbal and nonverbal strategies. Studies exploring the usefulness of such strategies in children with specific language impairment (SLI) are scarce and report inconsistent findings. Aims: To examine the effects of…

Following the proposal that consonants are more involved than vowels in coding the lexicon (Nespor, Peña & Mehler, 2003), an early lexical consonant bias was found from age 1;2 in French but an equal sensitivity to consonants and vowels from 1;0 to 2;0 in English. As different tasks were used in French and English, we sought to clarify this…

This study examined the effects of communication mode ("i.e.", face to face versus computer mediated communication) on the instances of negotiation of meaning (NofM) and its level of noticing by learners. Sixty-four participants (32 dyads) completed two jigsaw tasks in two different mediums (one in each) and four days after the tasks…

Episodic foresight (EpF) or, the ability to imagine the future and use such imagination to guide our actions, is an important aspect of cognition that has not yet been explored in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). This is despite its proposed links with theory of mind (ToM) and executive function (EF), two areas found to be impaired in…