This study investigated whether cultural familiarity influences comprehension of short stories and whether nativizing the story or using reading activities can compensate for the lack of such familiarity. The study was conducted with 44 advanced-level students of English at a state university in Turkey. In a 2 x 2 experimental research design, the…

Practitioner-members of the National Association of School Psychologists (N = 162) completed questionnaires regarding their suicide prevention and postvention roles, training, preparedness, and knowledge. Most were crisis team members, yet less than one-half reported graduate training in suicide risk assessment and less than one-fourth in…

Adults recognize familiar faces better by their internal than external face parts. It is not clear when children achieve this internal face part advantage, however, previous research has suggested that it emerges after the age of seven years. The present study was the first study to show personally familiar adult faces (school staff) to children…

Children rely extensively on others' testimony to learn about the world. However, they are not uniformly credulous toward other people. From an early age, children's reliance on testimony is tempered by selective trust in particular informants. Three- and 4-year-olds monitor the accuracy or knowledge of informants, including those that are…

Do video games and simulations really belong in the classroom? A growing body of evidence--from education conference sessions to ramped-up gaming research and university pilot programs--all point to the affirmative. However, sensationalized press accounts, a personal lack of familiarity with games, and other factors still contribute to a broad…

Concepts and findings from research on identity development are employed to better understand why current science teacher preparation programs are failing to prepare teachers who are able and choose to implement the vision for science education articulated in professional standards. Identity theory is used as a theoretical lens to make sense of…

This investigation examined whether infants display "boundary extension"--a tendency to remember more of a visual scene than was presented. Three- to 7-month-olds were familiarized with a photograph of a visual scene, and tested with wide-angle versus close-up views of the scene. Infants preferred the close-up, indicating that they perceived the…

Repeated reference creates strong expectations in addressees that a speaker will continue to use the same expression for the same object. The authors investigate the root reason for these expectations by comparing a cooperativeness-based account (Grice, 1975) with a simpler consistency-based account. In two eye-tracking experiments, the authors…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine (a) the role of neighborhood density (number of words that are phonologically similar to a target word) and frequency variables on the stuttering-like disfluencies of preschool children who stutter, and (b) whether these variables have an effect on the type of stuttering-like disfluency produced.…

There is a consensus that Alzheimer's disease (AD) impairs semantic information, with one of the first markers being anomia i.e. an impaired ability to name items. Doubts remain, however, about whether this naming impairment differentially affects items from the living and nonliving knowledge domains. Most studies have reported an impairment for…

Human services educators and scholars maintain that they are teaching social change theory and skills that will allow students to engage in large-scale social change. A review of the literature, from a critical theory perspective, offered little evidence that social change is being taught in human services programs. In this collective case study,…

When discussing issues relating to students in General Educational Development (GED) Option and pre-GED programs with educators, the contention exists that it is possible to make reasonably accurate predictions on the success or failure of a student by observing a number of items. Looking at their cumulative records shows their academic and…

The mirror effect refers to a phenomenon where the hit rate is higher for low frequency words while the false alarm rate is higher for high frequency distractors. Using a false memory paradigm (Roediger & McDermott, 1995), we examined whether false memory for non-presented lures would be influenced by the lure's familiarity. The results revealed…

A handful of studies have claimed that error detection is improved by a proofreader's prior encounter with the text to be scanned for errors. In these studies, however, the beneficial effect of text familiarity on proofreading has been obtained via surface encoding tasks (prior reading or proofreading). This raises the question of whether the…

This paper presents the results of a study investigating the impact of interactional feedback on interlanguage variation in terms of accuracy, complexity, and fluency of learners' discourse in performing tasks with familiar vs. unfamiliar topics. The participant of the study who were randomly assigned into an experimental and a control group were…