There is mounting evidence that language comprehension involves the activation of mental imagery of the content of utterances (Barsalou, 1999; Bergen, Chang, & Narayan, 2004; Bergen, Narayan, & Feldman, 2003; Narayan, Bergen, & Weinberg, 2004; Richardson, Spivey, McRae, & Barsalou, 2003; Stanfield & Zwaan, 2001; Zwaan, Stanfield, & Yaxley, 2002).…

Adults can often improve their perception of novel phoneme contrasts with exposure to a second language, but there is yet little understanding of how they accomplish this. The primary aim of this study was to compare two types of evidence that learners might use to learn the phonemes of second language: minimal pairs, or the lexicon, and…

Purpose: To compare speech intelligibility in the presence of a 10-Hz square-wave noise masker in younger and older listeners and to relate performance to recovery from forward masking. Method: The signal-to-noise ratio required to achieve 50% sentence identification in the presence of a 10-Hz square-wave noise masker was obtained for each of the…

Are speakers equipped with preferences concerning grammatical structures that are absent in their language? We examine this question by investigating the sensitivity of English speakers to the sonority of onset clusters. Linguistic research suggests that certain onset clusters are universally preferred (e.g., "bd" is greater than "lb"). We…

This study examined college students' awareness of difficulties in learning class content and selection of study strategies to address the perceived challenges. Data consisted of responses by 94 students to two survey questions on 11 weekly monitoring worksheets. Data analyses, using the constant comparative method and Chi-Square tests, revealed…

Our theoretical orientation as educators is to teach with a spiritual foundation. Central to our perspective is that the classroom as an academic space is poised to facilitate profound spiritual evolution for students. A graduate course in psychotherapy using a Spiritual Awareness Pedagogy (SAP) offers students an opportunity to understand…

Responds to comments made by Rhemtulla and Xu on the current authors' original paper Concepts of individual objects (e.g., a favorite chair or pet) include knowledge that allows people to identify these objects, sometimes after long stretches of time. In an earlier article, the authors set out experimental findings and mathematical modeling to…

Proponents of a self-identified "relativist" view of cross-language color naming have confounded two questions: (1) Is color naming largely subject to local linguistic convention? and (2) Are cross-language color naming differences reflected in comparable differences in color cognition by their speakers? The "relativist"…

Four experiments examined transfer of noncorresponding spatial stimulus-response associations to an auditory Simon task for which stimulus location was irrelevant. Experiment 1 established that, for a horizontal auditory Simon task, transfer of spatial associations occurs after 300 trials of practice with an incompatible mapping of auditory …

Two same/different discrimination tasks were performed by amateur-musician subjects in this functional magnetic resonance imaging study: Melody Discrimination and Harmony Discrimination. Both tasks led to activations not only in classic working memory areas--such as the cingulate gyrus and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex--but in a series of…

In Robbins, R. & McKone, E. (2006). No face-like processing for object-of-expertise in three behavioural tasks. "Cognition" this issue, we showed face-like holistic/configural processing does not occur for objects-of-expertise on standard paradigms including inversion, part-whole, part-in-configurally-transformed-whole, and the standard composite…

This study was designed to explore how adults with autism and Asperger syndrome (ASD) would visually process compound figures. They were tested in two tasks, one involving hierarchical global/local stimuli, the other involving face-like or geometrical stimuli where the processing of the inter-elemental spatial relationships was emphasized. Adults…

Purpose: It has been reported that children and adults weight differently the various acoustic properties of the speech signal that support phonetic decisions. This finding is generally attributed to the fact that the amount of weight assigned to various acoustic properties by adults varies across languages, and that children have not yet…

Previous studies indicate that the benefits of dividing an information processing load across both cerebral hemispheres outweigh the costs of interhemispheric transfer as tasks become more difficult or cognitively complex. This is demonstrated as better performance when two stimuli to be compared are presented one to each visual field and…

Previous laterality studies have implicated the right hemisphere in the processing of metaphors, however it is not clear if this result is due to metaphoricity per se or another aspect of semantic processing. Three divided visual field experiments varied metaphorical and literal sentence familiarity. We found a right hemisphere advantage for…