The Encouraging Persistence Maintaining Challenge (EMPC) Project has been working with secondary teachers in Melbourne as they seek to build persistence in students, during work on challenging mathematics tasks. The authors have developed sequences of tasks in various topic areas for Years 7 and 8, which require students to connect different…

The present study addressed whether developmental improvement in working memory span task performance relies upon a growing ability to proactively plan response sequences during childhood. Two hundred thirteen children completed a working memory span task in which they used a touchscreen to reproduce orally presented sequences of animal names.…

Task-Based Language Teaching (TBLT) has become increasingly recognized as an effective pedagogy, but its location in generalized sociocultural theories of learning has led to misunderstandings and criticism. The purpose of this article is to explain the congruence between TBLT and Expansive Learning Theory and the benefits of doing so. The merit…

Standards for literacy in the twenty-first century raise the bar on the complexity of texts and the tasks for which they are used. The strengths and limitations of contemporary approaches to text complexity are discussed with respect to major points raised in the six articles in this special issue. In addition, four features of text that are of…

The purpose of this research was to understand better how morphemic units are encoded and auto-organised in memory and how they are accessed during writing. We hypothesised that the activation of morphemic units would not depend on rule-based learning during primary school but would be determined by frequency-based learning, which is a process…

In this study, segmental and prosodic aspects of word repetition and non-word repetition in typically developing children aged four to six years were investigated. Focus was on developmental differences, and on how tonal word accent and word length affect segment production accuracy. Prosodically controlled words and non-words were repeated by 44…

This variational pragmatics (VP) study investigates the similarities and differences of compliment responses (CR) between Thai and Punjabi speakers of English in Thailand, focusing on the strategies used in CR when the microsociolinguistic variables are integrated into the Discourse Completion Task (DCT). The participants were 20 Thai and 20…

The present study investigates the influence of word category on naming performance in two populations: bilingual and monolingual children. The question is whether and, if so, to what extent monolingual and bilingual children differ with respect to noun and verb naming and whether a noun bias exists in the lexical abilities of bilingual children.…

We investigated whether individual differences in inhibitory control relate to bilingual spoken word recognition. While their eye movements were monitored, native English and native French English-French bilinguals listened to English words (e.g., "field") and looked at pictures corresponding to the target, a within-language competitor…

"Game-Based Assessments: A Promising Way to Create Idiographic Perspectives" (Adrienne Walker and George Englehard) comments on: "How Task Features Impact Evidence from Assessments Embedded in Simulations and Games" by Russell G. Almond, Yoon Jeon Kim, Gertrudes Velasquez, and Valerie J. Shute. Here, Walker and Englehard write…

In order to comprehend speech, listeners have to combine low-level phonetic information about the incoming auditory signal with higher-order contextual information to make a lexical selection. This requires stable phonological categories and unambiguous representations of words in the mental lexicon. Unlike native speakers, second language (L2)…

The processing difficulty of nested grammatical structure has been explained by different psycholinguistic theories. Here I provide corpus and behavioral evidence in favor of usage-based models, focusing on the case of object relative clauses in Spanish as a first language. A corpus analysis of spoken Spanish reveals that, as in English, the…

A growing research line documents significant bivariate correlations between individual measures of speech perception gathered in infancy and concurrent or later vocabulary size. One interpretation of this correlation is that it reflects language specificity: Both speech perception tasks and the development of the vocabulary recruit the…

Updating and maintenance of information are 2 conflicting demands on working memory (WM). We examined the time required to update WM (updating latency) as a function of the sequence of updated and not-updated items within a list. Participants held a list of items in WM and updated a variable subset of them in each trial. Four experiments that vary…

Computer-based assessment can provide new insights into behavioral processes of task completion that cannot be uncovered by paper-based instruments. Time presents a major characteristic of the task completion process. Psychologically, time on task has 2 different interpretations, suggesting opposing associations with task outcome: Spending more…