This study explores how student-generated questions can support argumentation in science. Students were asked to discuss which of two graphs showing the change in temperature with time when ice is heated to steam was correct. Four classes of students, aged 12-14 years, from two countries, first wrote questions about the phenomenon. Then, working…

The purpose of this study was to determine if event-related potential (ERP) data collected during three reading-related tasks (Letter Sound Matching, Nonword Rhyming, and Nonword Reading) could be used to predict short-term reading growth on a curriculum-based measure of word identification fluency over 19 weeks in a sample of 29 first-grade…

This study investigated identification of fragmented Mandarin tones by non-native listeners. Monosyllabic Mandarin words were digitally processed to generate intact, silent-center, center-only, and onset-only syllables. The syllables were recorded with two carrier phrases such that the offset of the carrier tone and the onset of the target tone…

Two experiments and two corpus studies focus on homophone dominance in the spelling of regularly inflected verb forms, the phenomenon that the higher-frequency homophone causes more intrusion errors on the lower-frequency one than vice versa. Experiment 1 was a speeded dictation task focusing on the Dutch imperative, a verb form whose formation…

Previous research has shown that orthography influences the learning and processing of spoken non-native words. In this paper, we examine the effect of L1 orthography on non-native sound perception. In Experiment 1, 204 Spanish learners of Dutch and a control group of 20 native speakers of Dutch were asked to classify Dutch vowel tokens by…

This paper reports on a study that was carried out to investigate the effect of pair work on a word-building task in two EFL classes. Forty Iranian adult students participated in this study. The participants in the experimental group completed the word-building task in pairs following the Think-Pair-Share technique, whereas the participants in the…

Two hypotheses were tested: Similarity between first language (L1) and second language (L2) orthographic processing facilitates L2-decoding efficiency; and L2-decoding efficiency contributes to word-meaning inference to different degrees among L2 learners with diverse L1 orthographic backgrounds. The participants were college-level English as a…

Listening and reading comprehension of paragraph-length material are considered higher-order language skills fundamental to social and academic functioning. Using ecologically relevant language stimuli that were matched for difficulty according to developmental level, we analyze the effects of task, age, neuropsychological skills, and post-task…

Loss of vigilance may lead to impaired performance in various applied settings including military operations, transportation, and industrial inspection. Individuals differ considerably in sustained attention, but individual differences in vigilance have proven to be hard to predict. The dependence of vigilance on workload factors is consistent…

Tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) responses on a picture-naming task were used to test the hypothesis that dyslexia involves phonological, but not semantic, processing deficits. Participants included 16 children with dyslexia and 31 control children between 8 and 10 years of age who did not differ in receptive vocabulary. As hypothesized, children with…

There are two major hypotheses concerning the developmental trends of processing speeds. These hypotheses explore both local and global trends. The study presented here investigates the effects of people's different knowledge on the speed with which they are able to process information. The participants in this study are gifted children aged 9,…

A tight correspondence has been postulated between the representations of number and space. The spatial numerical association of response codes (SNARC) effect, which reflects the observation that people respond faster with the left-hand side to small numbers and with the right-hand side to large numbers, is regarded as strong evidence for this…

It is broadly agreed that the processing of a word triad with a common remote associate (coherent triad) leads to its partial activation, which is the process underlying intuitive coherence judgments. The present studies demonstrate that this process not only is independent of the intention to find the common associate (CA), but rather may be…

Veridical and false pictorial recognition were assessed in individuals with mental retardation; groups were matched for MA and CA. Pictures were viewed in either a generative or static format at acquisition. The individuals with mental retardation and those in the MA-matched group had higher rates of false memories for critical items and lower hit…

Children's understanding of the way objects balance has provided important insights about cognitive development [e.g., Karmiloff-Smith, A. (1992). "Beyond modularity: A developmental perspective on cognitive science." Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; Siegler, R. S. (1976). Three aspects of cognitive development. "Cognitive Psychology," 8, 481-520]. We…