This article explores the styles of word reading and word spelling used by beginning readers in the French language. The aim of the study was to find out whether "sub-lexical" and "lexical" styles of reliance, which has been observed in children learning to read and spell in English, exists in French, a language with a more transparent…

The authors investigated age-related changes in executive control using an Internet-based task-switching experiment with 5,271 participants between the ages of 10 and 66 years. Speeded face categorization was required on the basis of gender (G) or emotion (E) in single task blocks (GGG... and EEE...) or switching blocks (GGEEGGEE...). General…

This study investigated subtypes of developmental dyslexia in Chinese by assessing three cases of Chinese dyslexic children. A battery of screening measures, a character naming and meaning task, and metalinguistic awareness tasks were administered to each child. One of the three children demonstrated characteristics of developmental surface…

This paper explores "fast mapping", one of several processes that have been proposed to be involved in the rapid vocabulary expansion observed in the preschool years. An adaptation of a receptive word matching task examined how well children retained a just-mapped relation between word and referent when some information was later missing.…

Comprehension of relative clauses was assessed in 10 Hebrew-speaking school-age children with syntactic SLI and in two groups of younger children with normal language development. Comprehension of subject- and object-relatives was assessed using a binary sentence-picture matching task. The findings were that while Hebrew-speaking children with…

Pinker and Prince (1988) argued that two dissociable systems underlie the development of linguistic representations: one rule governed and the other associative. These two dissociable systems of representation and processing are claimed to be a linguistic universal (Pinker, 1999). Therefore, one should expect that nonnative speakers of a language…

Recently, tasks have been advocated for their role in promoting participation in L2 interaction and the provision and use of feedback by language learners (Bygate, M., Skehan, P., Swain, M. (Eds.), 2001. "Researching Pedagogical Tasks: Second Language Learning, Teaching and Testing." Pearson Education, Harlow). The relationship between various…

Speech directed towards young children ("motherese") is subject to consistent systematic modifications. Recent research suggests that gesture directed towards young children is similarly modified (gesturese). It has been suggested that gesturese supports speech, therefore scaffolding communicative development (the facilitative…

The present study investigated the influence of sex, handedness, level in second language (L2) and Faculty choice on the performance of phonological, syntactical and semantic tasks in L2. Level in L2 and sex were the most affecting factors. Subjects who achieved higher scores on L2 tasks had strong second language aptitude skills since they were…

The acquisition of temporal event referencing, encoded by the temporal connectives: then, before, after, when, while, together, until, and since in English, Thai and Lisu was investigated using two acting-out comprehension tasks, a Marble task and a Toy task. Forty children aged 3.6-7.6 years from each language participated. The Marble and Toy…

Previous research on infant swimming has reported contradictory findings. Cross-sectional observations revealed a disorganized phase between about 3 and 12 months, which was attributed to "cortical inhibition" and implied slow learning (McGraw, 1939). However, training with a single infant during this period revealed rapid acquisition (McGraw,…

This study examined the influence of children's emotion situation knowledge (EK) on their autobiographical memory ability at both group and individual levels. Native Chinese, Chinese immigrant, and European American 3-year-old children participated (N = 189). During a home visit, children recounted 2 personal memories of recent, 1-time events with…

Anderson & Green (2001) have recently shown that using an adaptation of the go-no go task, participants can voluntarily inhibit the retrieval of specific memories. We present three experiments in which we try to determine the degree of automaticity involved, and the role of the previous prime-target relation on the development of this inhibitory…

One of the challenges in content-based instruction in second language classrooms is how to focus on form in a way that is both effective and appropriate. The use of collaborative tasks that push learners to consciously reflect on their own language use (i.e., produce "language-related episodes") while conveying meaning has been proposed as one way…

The use of cognitive flexibility theory as a theoretical framework for designing hypertext has been found to be beneficial for learning in ill-structured domains. However, little is known of what role the learning task plays in the effectiveness of this approach. The present study examined the relationship between task, navigation, and learning…