This paper describes work with two children, placed for late adoption who have suffered relational trauma. The paper explores the long-term consequences of such trauma, which includes problems with affect regulation, difficulties in generalising from one experience to another and shifts between phantasies of omnipotent control and sudden…

Mothers in Sri Lanka are increasingly seeking overseas employment, resulting in disruption of the childcare environment. The present study was designed to evaluate the effects of maternal migration on executive function (EF) and behavior, thereby also contributing to the scientific understanding of environmental effects--or more specifically…

Early post-natal nutrition influences later development, but there are no studies comparing brain function in healthy infants as a function of dietary intake even though the major infant diets differ significantly in nutrient composition. We studied brain responses (event-related potentials; ERPs) to speech sounds for infants who were fed either…

Reflective practice is held to be a means of practitioner development; however the range of models of reflection do not seem to suit practitioners working in the Post-Compulsory Education and Training (PCET) sector. Current models ignore the contextuality and specificality of PCET practice and do not consider its unique practitioner-student and…

This study explored learners' self-generated noticing of L2 input. It is motivated by previous research on input enhancement which suggested that learners are able to notice certain aspects of input on their own without any external means to direct their attention. Drawing on insights that learner-generated noticing is largely mediated by…

In order to determine the processing stage that is responsible for the effect of mood states on the breadth of attentional focus, we recorded event-related potentials from 18 students who performed a flanker task involving adjacent letters. To induce a specific mood state, positive, neutral, or negative affective pictures were presented repeatedly…

How people describe complex arrangements of objects in a small-scale setting has not been sufficiently investigated to predict when discourse strategies shift versus remain stable. In a study involving 100 native German participants, we investigated speakers' choices of perspective, as well as location and orientation information, when describing…

Contextual stimulus control over instrumental drug-seeking behavior relies on the reconsolidation of context-response-drug associative memories into long-term memory storage following retrieval-induced destabilization. According to previous studies, the basolateral amygdala (BLA) and dorsal hippocampus (DH) regulate cocaine-related memory…

The present study investigated whether children's representations of morphosyntactic information are abstract enough to guide early verb learning. Using an infant-controlled habituation paradigm with a switch design, Japanese-speaking children aged 1 ; 8 were habituated to two different events in which an object was engaging in an action. Each…

Drawing developmental predictions from dual-process theories is more complex than is commonly realized. Overly simplified predictions drawn from such models may lead to premature rejection of the dual process approach as one of many tools for understanding cognitive development. Misleading predictions can be avoided by paying attention to several…

Despite the potential advantages of instructional explanations, evidence indicates that they are usually ineffective. Subsequent work has shown that in order to make instructional explanations effective indeed, one successful strategy is to combine them with indications of the limitations in learners' understanding that they are intended to…

Metonymies are exemplary models for complex semantic association processes at the sentence level. We investigated processing of metonymies using event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). During an 1.5 Tesla fMRI scan, 14 healthy subjects (12 female) read 124 short German sentences with either literal (like "Africa is arid"),…

To further investigate the possible regulatory role of private and inner speech in the context of referential social speech communications, a set of clear and systematically applied measures is needed. This study addresses this need by introducing a rigorous method for identifying private speech and certain sharply defined instances of inaudible…

People with autism show attenuated cerebral lateralisation for emotion processing. Given growing appreciation of the notion that autism represents a continuum, the present study aimed to determine whether atypical hemispheric lateralisation is evident in people with normal but above average levels of autism-like traits. One hundred and…

The present study explored when and how the top-down intention to speak influences the language production process. We did so by comparing the brain's electrical response for a variable known to affect lexical access, namely word frequency, during overt object naming and non-verbal object categorization. We found that during naming, the…