Classroom communication is increasingly accepted as multimodal, through the orchestrated use of different semiotic modes, resources, and systems. There is growing interest in examining the meaning-making potential of other modes (e.g., gestural, visual, kinesthetic) beyond the semiotic mode of language, in classroom communication and in student…

Background: To be successful, students must learn to deal with socially and cognitively demanding tasks. Much remains unknown about the effects of previous classroom experiences and of students' emotional appraisal of a task on their physiological adaptive responses to it. Aims: To investigate how children's physiological response to a social and…

This study investigated developmental differences in metacognitive monitoring and control in younger (5- to 6-year-old) and older (8- to 10-year-old) children's prospective memory (PM). Metacognitive monitoring was assessed by asking the children to judge their performance before (prediction) and after (postdiction) performing a resource-demanding…

Individual differences in reading skill have frequently been related to variability in working memory capacity; however, it is unclear what drives this relation. The present study investigated two attentional control mechanisms that may contribute to this relation: proactive control and online filtering. To examine how the neural mechanisms of…

Language production ultimately aims to convey meaning. Yet words differ widely in the richness and density of their semantic representations, and these differences impact conceptual and lexical processes during speech planning. Here, we replicated the recent finding that semantic richness, measured as the number of associated semantic features…

Experimental studies show that children have greater difficulty with "wh"-extraction from object position than subject position, arguably an intervention effect (e.g., Relativized Minimality). In this study we provide additional evidence of a S/O asymmetry in A'-dependencies from a novel source--sluicing. The results of our first…

Fine motor skills develop in childhood. In this study, we evaluate motor planning in 6- to 11-year-old children using a pegboard and midline crossing task. The results of the pegboard task showed that children modified their strategies of hand use and space use as a function of age, albeit with a transition in the 8- to 9-year-old children. The…

This dissertation centers on the study of Kaqchikel word associations and the social variation that exists within them. Theoretical and methodological considerations for this project stem from the fields of psycholinguistics, variationist sociolinguistics, and cognitive linguistics. Together, these form an approach that fits within a blossoming…

Research on the acquisition order of inflectional morphemes in English has shown that third-person singular "-s" (3SG"-s") is challenging to acquire and acquired later than "be" copula by both L1 and L2 learners of English. In a departure from the usual practice of controlled elicitation, the current study…

For more than a decade, research on heritage speakers' (HSs') mood selection has documented a high degree of variability in their interpretation and use of mood morphology in variable contexts. Most of the previous literature, however, has focused on late-acquired alternations, and often limited analyses to one form (i.e., subjunctive), making it…

Research shows that epistemic cognition can support reasoning about the inclusion of diverse children. We argue that, to engage in such reasoning, children need the capacity to consider and evaluate competing knowledge perspectives (epistemic cognition) and to be cognitively flexible. Cognitive flexibility involves a subset of skills within the…

Communication is an important part of our life. The realization of the communication and the achievement of its purpose is possible by understanding the function of the linguistic units used by the speaker or the text producer. In this case, the communication functions of the language, which is an important part of communication, must be…

Introduction: The purpose of the study was to investigate the effect of task format on pre-service mathematics teachers' creative problem-posing performance. Methods: In this quantitative study, a figural and a written pattern related to daily life with the same mathematical structure were presented to participants and they were asked to write as…

In the online processing of long-distance wh-dependencies, native speakers have been found to make use of intermediate syntactic gaps, which has the effect of facilitating dependency resolution. This strategy has also been observed in second language (L2) speakers living in an L2 immersion context, but not in classroom L2 learners. This research…

Essentialism is the intuition that category membership relies on an invisible essence. Essentialist thinking about social categories is most evident in young children, while comparable methods do not reveal essentialist thinking about social groups in adult participants. However, previous work has found that essentialist thinking about gender was…