We tested the theoretically driven hypotheses that children's orthographic and semantic learning are associated with their word reading and reading comprehension skills, even when orthographic and semantic knowledge are taken into account. A sample of 139 English-speaking Grade 3 children completed a learning task in which they read stories about…

Developing news media literacy skills is recognized as an important part of becoming an informed citizen, but not enough research examines how growth in media literacy differs by individual characteristics. Using a panel study of undergraduate students, we examine which predispositions predict growth in news media literacy beliefs over the…

Inhibition is often conceptualized as a unitary construct reflecting the ability to ignore and suppress irrelevant information. At the same time, it has been subdivided into inhibition of prepotent responses (i.e., the ability to stop dominant responses) and resistance to distracter interference (i.e., the ability to ignore distracting…

Individual differences are theorised as being key predictors of students' lecture attendance. Understanding students' (lack of) motivation for studying is an essential first step in supporting these individual differences and potentially increasing class/lecture attendance. The current study explored the role of students' deficits in motivations…

School systems that use a one-size-fits-all model continue to under-serve nearly all of their students. These schools prepare young people for an industrial world that no longer exists. Rigid class structures are the norm. Little, if any, attention is given to the social and emotional skills that even the business community has listed as top…

The standard model of the role of early experience in human development assumes that children's environments in their first years of life are dominant influences on who they become as adults. The standard model favors interventions to improve children's long-term outcomes that start early in life and are intensive in time and attention from…

Many children fail to master fraction arithmetic even after years of instruction. A recent theory of fraction arithmetic (Braithwaite, Pyke, & Siegler, in press) hypothesized that this poor learning of fraction arithmetic procedures reflects poor conceptual understanding of them. To test this hypothesis, we performed three experiments…

Although most second language learning studies involve high-educated participants, addressing low-educated participants seems important as research suggests that education background impacts second language (L2) learning efficiency. A controversial point in the L2 learning literature is the role of corrective feedback (CF). Research on CF in…

Research on sources of individual difference in parental Infant-Directed Speech (IDS) is limited and there is a particular lack of research on fathers' compared to mothers' speech. This study examined the predictive relations between infant characteristics and variability in paternal lexical diversity (LD) in dyadic free play with two-year-olds (M…

This book examines the role of interlocutors and their individual differences (IDs) in second language (L2) development from four theoretical lenses: the cognitive-interactionist approach, sociocultural theory, the variationist approach, and complex dynamic systems theory. A theoretical overview to each approach is written by a preeminent scholar…

Willingness to Communicate (WTC) is among the concepts that has received considerable attention in EFL/ESL research in recent years as it brings together a myriad of factors that explain why L2 learners do or do not engage in L2 communication. An EFL classroom provides an environment that promotes use of the target language, yet Thai learners are…

A PhD combines experiential learning of the research process with socialisation into the research community. Studying a PhD is a highly individual experience with each student seeking and receiving different types of support from different agents. In this paper we investigate the experiences of four PhD students at a Humanities faculty at a Thai…

We report four experiments that explored the cognitive bases of vocal imitation. Specifically, we investigated the accuracy with which normal individuals vocally imitated the pitch-time trajectories of spoken sentences and sung melodies, presented in their original form and with phonetic information removed. Overall, participants imitated melodies…

The present study investigated the development of global and domain-specific self-representations in the transition from late childhood to early adolescence and tested whether gender, puberty, and school transition help explain individual differences in change. The study was based on three measurement occasions over 2 years and included 248…

Peer influence has a profound impact on decision-making in typically developing adolescents. In this study, we examined to what extent adolescent males (age 11-17 years; N = 144) with and without autism (ASD) were influenced by peer feedback on prosocial behavior, and which factors were related to individual differences in peer feedback…