In recent years, there has been increased interest in engagement during learning. This is of particular interest in the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics domains, in which many students struggle and where the United States needs skilled workers. This article lays out some issues important for framing research on this topic and…

The present research examines whether adults who learn a second language (L2) mainly in a classroom setting can develop linguistic representations that are qualitatively similar to those of native speakers for linguistic content that is not explicitly taught in the classroom. It does so by focusing on the domains of speech processing and speech…

This paper reports on students' pair-work interactions to develop their speaking skills in an ELT classroom which consisted of international learners. A number of 16 learners of intermediate proficiency with IELTS score band 5.5 were observed. The teacher had paired those he considered among them to be the more competent ones (hereafter, stronger)…

This study asked whether children's tendency to imitate selectively (ignore causally unnecessary actions) versus faithfully ("overimitate" causally unnecessary actions) varies across ages and social contexts. In the first experiment, 2-year-olds and 4-year-olds were randomly assigned to play 1 of 3 prior games with a demonstrator: a…

Early selective attention skills are a crucial building block for cognitive development, as attention orienting serves as a primary means by which infants interact with and learn from the environment. Although several studies have examined infants' attention orienting using the spatial cueing task, relatively few studies have examined…

In line with the frontal hypothesis of aging, the ability to plan ahead undergoes substantial change during normal aging. Although impairments on the Tower of London planning task were reported earlier, associations between age-related declines and specific cognitive demands on planning have not been studied. Here we investigated the impact of…

Private speech utterances (PS) from 24 preschool children and 24 adults were obtained under (noninteracting) listener present and listener absent conditions using 2 tasks with an identical structure. Children produced significantly more PS in the listener present condition. Similar results were obtained with adults, albeit with a reduced incidence…

The goals of this study were to explore the deficits in working memory associated with literacy disorders (i.e. developmental disorders of reading and/or spelling) and the developmental trajectories of these working memory deficits. The performance of 28 children with literacy disorders was compared to a non-disabled control group with the same…

Developmental differences in dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), and superior parietal cortex (SPC) activation are associated with differences in how children, adolescents, and adults learn from performance feedback in rule-learning tasks (Crone, Zanolie, Leijenhorst, Westenberg, & Rombouts, 2008). Both…

Over the past 15 years, students with disabilities have been included in the general education environment at markedly higher rates; however, their achievement is not increasing at the same pace. One reason for this lack of increased achievement may be that academic standards lay the foundation for instruction in this environment, but standards…

Morphological systems are constrained in how they interact with each other. One case that has been widely studied in the psycholinguistic literature is the avoidance of plurals inside compounds (e.g. *"rats eater" vs. "rat eater") in English and other languages, the so-called "plurals-in-compounds effect." Several…

We examined young adults' essentialist reasoning about gender categories. Previous developmental results suggest that until age 9 or 10, children show marked essentialist reasoning about gender, but this disappears by early adulthood. In contrast, results from social cognition suggest that essentialist thinking about social categories persists…

Although the significance of age in second language acquisition is one of the most hotly debated issues in the field, very few studies have directly addressed age differences in the language learning process. The present study investigated learning in a foreign-word repetition task. Young Finnish adults and 8-year-olds repeated back Korean words.…

This study investigates pronoun reference and verbs with nonactive morphology in high-functioning Greek-speaking children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). It is motivated by problems with reflexive pronouns demonstrated by English-speaking children with ASD and the fact that reflexivity is also expressed via nonactive (reflexive) verbs in…

While preschool-aged children display some skills with quantitative relations, later learning of related fraction concepts is difficult for many students. We present two studies that investigate young children's tendency of Spontaneous Focusing On quantitative Relations (SFOR), which may help explain individual differences in the development of…