Although it is commonly believed that language and culture are inexorably linked, the precise nature of this relationship remains elusive. This study investigated the hypothesis that a loss in language signals a loss in culture if language is considered a central value. This hypothesis was investigated by rating the Hindi and English proficiency…

The data are clear: Too many students are not doing well in school. Too many are experiencing interfering barriers, most of which are not internal dysfunctions but are associated with neighborhood, family, school, and peer factors. If the situation is to change, schools must play a greater role in providing supports for students experiencing…

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between working memory and text coherence in Chinese text comprehension. Eighty-six participants completed an operation-character working memory span task to be classified into low-span and high-span readers and a reading task to measure the time to detect inconsistency as well as the…

As engineers contribute to solving the increasingly complex problems facing our society, there is a growing need for the engineers graduating from undergraduate programs to deeply understand the context within which they are solving problems. There is a particular need for engineers who recognize the complexities of global and societal issues and…

Claude Steele's stereotype threat hypothesis has attracted significant attention in recent years. This study tested one of the main tenets of his theory--that stereotype threat serves to increase individual anxiety levels, thus hurting performance--using real-time measures of physiological arousal. Subjects were randomly assigned to either high or…

Background: Measuring the self-perceptions, thoughts, hopes and inner lives of persons with intellectual disabilities (ID) has long been a research challenge. Unlike objective or projective tests, semi-projective tasks may provide persons with ID with just enough structure or cues to convey their self-perceptions in a spontaneous and unbiased…

We examined the development of phonological processing, naming speed, and visual attention in kindergarten and addressed the question of their contribution to reading and spelling in grade 1. Seventy five French-speaking children were administered seven tasks at the two phases of the study, and reading and spelling were assessed in grade 1. The…

This study reports the results of a picture verification task assessing the interpretation of intra-sentential anaphora and cataphora in Italian by a group of English-Italian bilingual eight-year-olds, a group of age-matched Italian monolinguals, and a group of Italian monolingual adults. No significant differences between the groups were observed…

One of the major findings in previous research on reflexive coreference in a second language is that learners of English violate the locality requirement of the reflexive form "x-self" more readily when it appears in the subordinate infinitival clause than when included in the subordinate tensed clause (a phenomenon called the…

Parent-child "everyday" conversations have been suggested as a source of children's early science learning. If such conversations are important, then it would be pertinent to know whether children from different family backgrounds have different experiences talking about science in informal settings. We focus on the relation between…

The aim of the study was to examine reading and writing tasks as learning tools in higher education in Spain. The participants were 171 undergraduates from three different university degree courses. The data were gathered through a questionnaire that explored the kind of tasks carried out by the students, their perception of different aspects of…

A review of the literature reveals that obstacles to the successful transfer of basic skills, knowledge, and thinking skills during classroom instructional time differ depending on which of three components of expertise is entailed: conceptual understanding, domain-specific basic skills, or domain-specific strategies. This article, accordingly,…

Less is known about the effects of normal aging on speech output than other motor actions, because studies of communication integrity have focused on voice production and linguistic parameters rather than speech production characteristics. Studies investigating speech production in older adults have reported increased syllable duration (Slawinski,…

Studies of how children who are blind acquire and use language have focused less on cognitive compensations and more on delays in development. Vision is important in the establishment of early communicative patterns, and sighted children regularly use contextual visual information, such as a speaker's gestures and eye gaze, to make sense of speech…

Theory of mind (ToM)--our ability to predict behaviors of others in terms of their underlying intentions--has been thought to be universal and invariant across different cultures. However, several ToM studies conducted outside the Anglo-American cultural or linguistic boundaries have obtained mixed results. To examine the influence of…