There exists an increasing body of research demonstrating that language processing is aided by context-based predictions. Recent findings suggest that the brain generates estimates about the likely physical appearance of upcoming words based on syntactic predictions: words that do not physically look like the expected syntactic category show…

Mental chronometry (MC) studies cognitive processes measured by time. It provides an absolute, ratio scale. The limitations of instrumentation and statistical analysis caused the early studies in MC to be eclipsed by the "paper-and-pencil" psychometric tests started by Binet. However, they use an age-normed, rather than a ratio scale, which…

E. Dhooge and R. J. Hartsuiker (2010) reported experiments showing that picture naming takes longer with low- than high-frequency distractor words, replicating M. Miozzo and A. Caramazza (2003). In addition, they showed that this distractor-frequency effect disappears when distractors are masked or preexposed. These findings were taken to refute…

This article investigates assessor decision making when using and applying a marking guide for a note-taking task in a specific purpose English language listening test. In contexts where note-taking items are used, a marking guide is intended to stipulate what kind of response should be accepted as evidence of the ability under test. However,…

Two experiments examined 4- to 11-year-olds' and adults' performance (N = 350) on two variants of a Stroop-like card task: the "day-night task" (say "day" when shown a moon and "night" when shown a sun) and a new "happy-sad task" (say "happy" for a sad face and "sad" for a happy face). Experiment 1 featured colored cartoon drawings. In Experiment…

The ability to learn temporal patterns in sequenced actions was investigated in elementary-school age children. Temporal learning depends upon a process of integrating timing patterns with action sequences. Children ages 6-13 and young adults performed a serial response time task in which a response and a timing sequence were presented repeatedly…

This article examines the use and role of the term "experiment" in science teacher education as described by teacher students. Data were collected through focus group interviews conducted at seven occasions with 32 students from six well-known Swedish universities. The theoretical framework is a sociocultural and pragmatist perspective…

Objective: To explore whether adults possess implicit attitudes toward children and whether those attitudes are especially negative among respondents who are high in child physical abuse (CPA) risk. Methods: The present study used an implicit evaluative priming procedure. In this procedure, participants were instructed to make decisions about the…

Major depressive disorder aggregates within families, although the mechanisms of transfer across generations are not well understood. In light of converging biological and behavioral evidence that depressive symptoms are associated with impaired reward processing, we examined whether adolescent girls with a parental history of depression would…

The quasi-experimental field study with 174 advanced engineering students analysed the possibilities to assist the requirement analysis when solving design problems. Technical check lists are in common practice for assisting the requirement analysis. We wondered if a generic question answering system (GQAS) aiming at the "semantic relationships"…

Poor performance on the antisaccade task has been proposed as a candidate endophenotype in schizophrenia. Caveats to this proposal, however, include inconsistent findings in first-degree relatives of individuals with schizophrenia, and substantial heterogeneity in individuals with the disorder. In this study, we examined antisaccade performance in…

Study of the developmental relationship between language and working memory skills has only just begun, despite the prominent role of their interdependency in some theoretical accounts of developmental language impairments. Recently, Archibald and Joanisse (2009) identified children with specific language impairment (SLI), or specific working…

Two groups of Mandarin-English bilingual children (3-5-year-olds, 6-8-year-olds) participated in a picture identification task and a picture naming task in both languages. Results revealed age-related growth in English, but not Mandarin vocabulary. Composite vocabulary was larger than either single-language vocabulary in the younger children but…

Normal language acquisition is a process that unfolds with amazing speed primarily in the first years of life. However, the refinement of linguistic proficiency is an ongoing process, extending well into childhood and adolescence. An increase in lateralization and a more focussed productive language network have been suggested to be the neural…

In response to new theoretical claims and inconclusive empirical findings regarding relative clauses in East Asian languages, this study examined the factors relevant to relative clause production by Korean heritage speakers. Gap position (subject vs. object), animacy (plus or minus animate), and the topicality of head nouns (plus or minus…