This article examines current research on the role and importance of lower-level processes in second language (L2) reading. The focus is on word recognition and its subcomponent processes, including various phonological and orthographic processes. Issues related to syntactic and semantic processes and their relationship with word recognition are…

The provision of visual support to individuals with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is widely recommended. We explored one mechanism underlying the use of visual supports: efficiency of language processing. Two groups of children, one with and one without an ASD, participated. The groups had comparable oral and written language skills and…

Educational reform is rarely considered from the point of view of conceptual change. Typically, reform starts at the policy document level by introducing criteria intended to lead to the adoption of new practices. This study offers a case study of how legal national educational reforms can be localized. The case in focus is the recent legislative…

To understand how children develop adult argument structure, we must understand the nature of syntactic and semantic representations during development. The present studies compare the performance of children aged 2;6 on the two intransitive alternations in English: patient ("Daddy is cooking the food"/"The food is cooking")…

One important purpose of a definition is to explain the meaning of a word. Any problems associated with a definition may impede students' learning. However, research studies on the definitional problems from the perspective of physics education are limited. Physics educators may not be aware of the nature and extent of definitional problems.…

Our aim in this article is to elaborate the role of training in representational change theory (RCT), particularly in terms of Ohlsson's (2011) spread of activation explanation (named "redistribution theory"), and to develop novel training manipulations that effect the re-encoding mechanism proposed by RCT (Ohlsson, 1992). Two…

Whether information is routinely and nonstrategically evaluated for truth during comprehension is still a point of contention. Previous studies supporting the assumption of nonstrategic validation have used a Stroop-like paradigm in which participants provided yes/no judgments in tasks unrelated to the truth or plausibility of the experimental…

The purpose of the current study was to explore the influence of language experience on the presence of the receptive-expressive gap. Each of 778 Spanish-English bilingual children screened pre-kindergarten in Utah and Texas were assigned to one of five language experience groups, ranging from functionally monolingual to balanced bilingual.…

This study intends to shed light on the inconclusive argument pertaining to children's acquisition of logical form (LF) operation. Specifically, we examined children's interpretations of sentences with the ambiguous modal verb "yinggai" "should," like "Xiaohua yinggai shangchuang shuijiao le", whose meanings…

The Preservation Health Check (PHC) project, undertaken as a joint effort by Open Planets Foundation (OPF) and OCLC Research, aims to evaluate the usefulness of the preservation metadata created and maintained by operational repositories for assessing basic preservation properties. The PHC project seeks to develop an implementable logic to support…

The present study examines whether bilectal Greek Cypriot educators are able to identify dialectal (Cypriot Greek) elements superimposed on the standard language (Standard Modern Greek) in a written variety-judgment task. By doing so, (meta)linguistic skills of bilectal teachers from Cyprus were put to the test and later compared to the results of…

Using a self-paced reading task, the study aimed to investigate (a) whether English learners in Taiwan immediately resolve main verb versus reduced relative clause ambiguities in a similar way as native English speakers and (b) whether the learners at various English proficiency levels show diverse profiles. With analyses and syntheses of reading…

In this study, we report the results of two self-paced reading experiments that investigated working memory capacity effects on the processing of globally ambiguous relative clauses by advanced Korean second language (L2) learners of English. Consistent with previous monolingual literature on the processing of temporary ambiguity, we found that…

Given the importance of the phonological and lexical components of the language in L2 learning, this article discusses an innovative, holistic approach to learning these two components of the language based on the existence of "sound symbolism"--the interrelation between sound and meaning--in English. In particular, it describes how and…

Anaphoric expressions are among the most frequent language forms which depend on context for their resolution. Among efforts made in theorizing referential choice, distance approaches take into account how accessibility/continuity is reflected by choice of referring expressions. The thing is that individual's choices are made under major and minor…