Learners of a foreign language (FL) typically have to learn to process sounds that do not exist in their first language (L1). As this is known to be difficult for adults, in particular, it is important for FL pedagogy to be informed by phonetic research. This study examined the role of FL learners' previous linguistic experience in the processing…

Consistent with current higher education concerns with student engagement and the student experience, this study explored third-year undergraduate Finance students' experiences of lecture-based active learning tasks. Finance students from the 2012 and 2014 cohorts from a South African university were invited to complete an anonymous questionnaire…

Design activities form an extensive part of design and technology education with a link being posited within the pertinent literature between the cognitive activity of learning and the cognitive activity of design. It is therefore critical that design educators' understand the effects that design constraints can have on the learning process. This…

This paper presents a study that looked into the structuring of tasks that may foster oral fluency in an intensive eight-week course with 25 young adult and adult learners of English as a foreign language in a format of tutoring sessions for conversation. The action research involved two teachers and a research advisor, coauthors of this paper.…

The main goal of this study was to investigate the influence of an established school programme with a high amount of physical education on visual-spatial ability in a secondary school. One hundred and forty-four adolescents, 69 from sport classes and 75 from regular classes, solved a cognitive processing speed task and a mental rotation task. The…

This study examined pinyin (the official phonetic system that transcribes the lexical tones and pronunciation of Chinese characters) invented spelling and English invented spelling in 72 Mandarin-speaking 6th graders who learned English as their second language. The pinyin invented spelling task measured segmental-level awareness including…

A critical component of scientific reasoning is the consideration of alternative explanations. Recognizing that decades of cognitive psychology research have demonstrated that relative cognitive accessibility, or "what comes to mind," strongly affects how people reason in a given context, we articulate a simple "cognitive…

This article aims to investigate how Dutch children may eventually converge on a targetlike distribution of "hoeven" 'need,' a modal verbal NPI (Negative Polarity Item), based on its appearance in the scope of merely some but not all of its possible licensers in the language input (i.e., the induction problem). Imitation performance was…

The paper offers insight into pragmatic aspects of English as a lingua franca (ELF) and potential implications for intercultural communication by presenting the results of research into rapport carried among Czech, English and German university students. The three cultural groups were compared in terms of their cultural independence in rapport…

The current project investigates developmental aspects of acquiring locative verb constructions in English as a second language. Locative verbs, such as "to pour," "to spill," "to spray," and "to sprinkle," constitute a prototypical case of an overgeneralization problem in language learning: Whereas some of…

The purpose of the report is to explore some of the mechanisms involved in the writing process. In particular, we examine students' process data (keystroke log analysis) to uncover how students approach a knowledge-telling task using 2 different task types. In the first task, students were asked to list as many words as possible related to a…

In human children and adults, familiar face types--typically own-age and own-species faces--are discriminated better than other face types; however, human infants do not appear to exhibit an own-age bias but instead better discriminate adult faces, which they see more often. There are two possible explanations for this pattern: Perceptual…

By focusing on a particular alteration of the comparative likelihood task, this study contributes to research on teachers' understanding of probability. Our novel task presented prospective teachers with multinomial, contextualized sequences and asked them to identify which was least likely. Results demonstrate that determinants of…

Here we examine imaginative drawing abilities in children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and learning disabilities (LD) under several conditions: spontaneous production, with use of a template, and combining two real entities to form an "unreal" entity. Sixteen children in each group, matched on mental and chronological age, were…

Theoretical accounts of risky choice framing effects assume that decision makers interpret framing options as extensionally equivalent, such that if 600 lives are at stake, saving 200 implies that 400 die. However, many scholars have argued that framing effects are caused, instead, by filling in pragmatically implied information. This linguistic…