This study set out to examine the range of legibility demonstrated by Western Australian students required to handwrite tasks of increasing intrinsic cognitive load. A representative sample of students in Years 1, 2 and 3 (N=437) was recruited for a cross sectional study and teachers administered handwriting tasks. Year 1 students were…

Cross-situational word learning (XSWL) tasks present multiple words and candidate referents within a learning trial such that word-referent pairings can be inferred only across trials. Adults encode fine phonological detail when two words and candidate referents are presented in each learning trial (2 × 2 scenario; Escudero, Mulak, & Vlach,…

Background: Analogical mapping is a domain-general cognitive process used notably in language development, and particularly in the abstraction of construction schemas. Children with developmental language disorders (DLD) display an impairment in linguistic productivity and creativity, which can be linked to a lack of generalization of construction…

This study examined facial expressions produced during a British Sign Language (BSL) narrative task (Herman et al., International Journal of Language and Communication Disorders 49(3):343-353, 2014) by typically developing deaf children and deaf children with autism spectrum disorder. The children produced BSL versions of a video story in which…

The present study addresses the scope of the writing difficulties observed in patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) and mild cognitive impairment (MCI). Patients with AD, patients with MCI and healthy controls performed a written picture-naming task and a direct copy transcoding task in which phonology-to-orthography (P-O) consistency was…

In this study we applied a discursive perspective of learning (Sfard, 2008) to a sequence of 21 geometry mini-lessons taught in a fourth grade classroom. From this perspective, learning is defined as changes in mathematical discourse. We first characterize and then compare discourse from the beginning and the end of the mini-lesson sequence. We…

Background: Dutch is a West-Germanic language spoken natively by around 24 million speakers. Although studies on typical Dutch speech sound development have been conducted, norms for phonetic and phonological characteristics of typical development in a large sample with a sufficient age range are lacking. Aim: To give a detailed description of the…

This project examines whether second-language (L2) learners can converge on a native-like pattern at the interface between syntax and discourse under low and high processing pressure, using Spanish clitic-doubled left dislocation (CLLD) as a test case. The original version of the Interface Hypothesis (IH) predicts that L2 competence on…

Mathematical knowledge for teaching is a complex web of knowledge domains. In this article, we share findings from an 18-month professional development project that aimed to improve middle school mathematics teachers' mathematical knowledge for teaching (MKT) of proportional reasoning by focusing on the critical analysis of mathematical tasks and…

Motivation has been widely considered one of the most influential variables in the field of second language learning. Motivation may vary throughout the years, even within the duration of a single language class, and this might occur due to different factors, such as the choice of tasks or the activity type (i.e., collaborative or individual).…

Previous work suggests that adolescents are still refining acoustic-phonetic cue use in clear-speech perception. This study shows adolescents' immature perception of reduced speech, in which speech sounds are naturally deleted and merged within and across words. German adults and 16-year-olds listened to either German reduced or unreduced (few or…

The present study investigated how response mode (oral vs. manual) modulates the Stroop effect using a picture variant of the Stroop task in which participants named orally, or identified with a manual keypress, line drawings of animals (e.g., camel). Consistent with previous color-response Stroop studies, relative to the nonlinguistic neutral…

We explored whether performance differences exist between proficient and poor readers on implicit text information. Next, we explored whether indices of meta-cognitive monitoring predicted reading performance. Finally, we examined whether poor and proficient readers exhibited distinct meta-cognitive profiles with respect to reading comprehension…

To isolate cross-lingual phonological effects during visual-word recognition, Arabic-Hebrew bilinguals who are native speakers of Spoken Arabic (SA) and proficient readers of both Literary Arabic (LA) and Hebrew, were asked to perform a visual lexical-decision task (LDT) in either LA (Experiment 1) or Hebrew (Experiments 2 and 3). The critical…

We tested sarcasm production and identification across original communicators in a spontaneously produced conversational setting, including testing the role of synchronous movement on sarcasm production and identification. Before communicating, stranger dyads participated in either a synchronous or nonsynchronous movement task. They then completed…