Background music is often used in ads as a means of persuasion. Previous research has studied the effect of music in advertising using neutral or uncontroversial products. The aim of the studies reported here was to examine the effect of music on the perception of products promoting unethical behavior. Each of the series of three studies described…

Drawing on social cognition frameworks, we experimentally examined preservice teachers' implicit attitudes toward students with special educational needs (SEN) from different ethnic backgrounds and preservice teachers' explicit attitudes toward inclusive education. Preservice teachers (N = 46) completed an evaluative priming task and…

With the present research, the authors examined whether reminders could maintain 18-month-olds' memories generated from picture books and videos. Infants (N = 98) were shown a series of target actions in a picture book or on video. Either 24 hr or 2 weeks prior to a 4-week deferred imitation test, they were exposed to a reminder, a partial…

Additive and interactive effects of word frequency, stimulus quality, and semantic priming have been used to test theoretical claims about the cognitive architecture of word-reading processes. Additive effects among these factors have been taken as evidence for discrete-stage models of word reading. We present evidence from linear mixed-model…

In this plenary paper, we present a review of language research in children with cochlear implants along with an outline of a 5-year project designed to examine the lexical access for production and recognition. The project will use auditory priming, picture naming with auditory or visual interfering stimuli (Picture-Word Interference and…

In 2 main experiments, the mediated priming effect was used to determine whether retrieval continues to be mediated after repeated testing. In each experiment, participants used the keyword method to learn French vocabulary, then completed a modified lexical decision task in which they first translated a French word, and then made a lexical…

Interaction between second language (L2) learners in which the primary goal is the communication of meaning rather than the manipulation of language forms is widely regarded as beneficial for L2 learning from a variety of theoretical and pedagogical perspectives. Besides learning opportunities created through interactional feedback, modified…

Negative priming (NP) refers to the finding that people's responses to probe targets previously presented as prime distractors are usually slower and more error prone than to unrepeated stimuli. In a typical NP experiment, each probe target is accompanied by a distractor. It is an accepted, albeit puzzling, finding that the NP effect depends on…

Cognitive control resolves conflicts between appropriate and inappropriate response tendencies. Is this achieved by a unitary all-purpose conflict control system, or do independent subsystems deal with different aspects of conflicting information? In a fully factorial hybrid prime-Simon task, participants responded to the identity of targets…

Can false memories have a positive consequence on human cognition? In two experiments, we investigated whether false memories could prime insight problem-solving tasks. Children and adults were asked to solve compound remote associate task (CRAT) problems, half of which had been primed by the presentation of Deese/Roediger-McDermott (DRM) lists…

Individual differences in inhibitory control have been shown to relate to general mathematics achievement, but whether this relation varies for specific areas within mathematics is a question that remains open. Here, we evaluate if inhibitory processes play a specific role in the particular case of fraction comparison, where learners must ignore…

Studies consistently show that Catholic schools produce positive impacts on educational outcomes. Many charter school networks in the United States now provide, what are essentially, secularized versions of the Catholic education model. However, charter schools cannot legally replicate the overt religious curriculum and mission of Catholic…

In most current models of word recognition, the word recognition process is assumed to be driven by the activation of letter units (i.e., that letters are the perceptual units in reading). An alternative possibility is that the word recognition process is driven by the activation of grapheme units, that is, that graphemes, rather than letters, are…

Theories of how people construct linguistic form during production are largely based on English and closely related languages. We report three experiments that used a structural priming paradigm to investigate grammatical encoding in Mandarin Chinese, in particular the way conceptual information is mapped onto grammatical structure. The results…

The aim of this study was to investigate the role of the syllable in visual recognition of French words in Grade 6. To do so, the syllabic congruency effect was examined in the lexical decision task combined with masked priming. Target words were preceded by pseudoword primes sharing the first letters that either corresponded to the syllable…