These experiments examined the relationship between the neurotrophic factor fibroblast growth factor 2 (FGF2) and individual differences in the expression of conditioned fear. Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrated that rats naturally expressing low levels of contextual or cued fear have higher levels of hippocampal FGF2 relative to rats that express…

In this article, Riverdale Country School (New York) learning specialist, Brooke McCaffrey describes teaching methods, motivational techniques, and resources for parents of struggling readers.

The aim of the present study was to analyze the relative influence of age at implantation, parental expansions, and child language internal factors on grammatical progress in children with cochlear implants (CI). Data analyses used two longitudinal corpora of spontaneous speech samples, one with twenty-two and one with twenty-six children,…

Word learning can build the high-quality word representations that support skilled reading and language comprehension. According to the partial knowledge hypothesis, words that are partially known, also known as "frontier words" (Durso & Shore, 1991), may be good targets for instruction precisely because they are already familiar.…

This article introduces two sophisticated statistical modeling techniques that allow researchers to analyze systematicity, individual variation, and nonlinearity in second language (L2) development. Generalized linear mixed-effects models can be used to quantify individual variation and examine systematic effects simultaneously, and generalized…

Recent research has provided evidence that the information provided before a story--a spoiler--may increase the enjoyment of that story, perhaps by increasing the processing fluency experienced during reading. In one experiment, we tested the reliability of these findings by closely replicating existing methods and the generality of these findings…

Individuals with agrammatic Broca's aphasia experience difficulty when processing reversible non-canonical sentences. Different accounts have been proposed to explain this phenomenon. The Trace Deletion account (Grodzinsky, 1995, 2000, 2006) attributes this deficit to an impairment in syntactic representations, whereas others (e.g., Caplan,…

Purpose: The intersection of treatment intensity and communication intervention is an emerging area of investigation. Milieu teaching (MT) approaches for teaching communication skills to children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have a substantial evidence base (see Goldstein, 2002). However, a relatively small percentage (37.8%) of MT studies…

Learning of fractions is difficult for children in general and especially difficult for children with mathematics difficulties (MD). Recent research on developmental and individual differences in fraction knowledge of MD and typically achieving (TA) children has demonstrated that U.S. children with MD start middle school behind TA peers in…

According to some accounts, the bilingual advantage is most pronounced in the domain of executive attention rather than inhibition and should therefore be more easily detected in conflict adaptation paradigms than in simple interference paradigms. We tested this idea using two conflict adaptation paradigms, one that elicits a list-wide…

Schools in Western cultures, including Israel, have been transformed from closed to open systems. This change is especially important to the principal's role and leadership style. This article seeks to investigate the cultural-religious differences in Israeli Jewish principals' leadership styles. Data were collected from 1,859 teachers, 34% from…

Purpose: The goal was to determine whether interactive book reading outcomes for children with developmental language disorder (DLD) were affected by manipulation of dose (i.e., the number of exposures to the target word during a book reading session) and dose frequency (i.e., the number of repeated book reading sessions) and whether pretreatment…

Acknowledging the distinction between two types of form-focused instruction (FFI) on grammar, this study investigated learners and teachers' stated beliefs about isolated and integrated FFI. Placed in two major groups (ESL and EFL), 120 teachers and 280 learners were recruited from college-wide Intensive English Programs in Iran and USA. The…

This study took a dynamic approach to second language (L2) comprehensibility, examining how listeners construct comprehensibility profiles for L2 Spanish speakers during the listening task and what features enhance or diminish comprehensibility. Listeners were 24 native Spanish speakers who evaluated 2-5 minute audio clips recorded by three…

A number of longitudinal studies of L2 production have reported frequency effects wherein learners' produce more frequent words as a function of time. The current study investigated the spoken output of English L2 learners over a four-month period of time using both native and non-native English speaker frequency norms for both word types and word…