Play is a powerful influence on children's learning and parents can provide opportunities to learn specific content by scaffolding children's play. Parent-child synchrony (i.e., harmony, reciprocity and responsiveness in interactions) is a component of parent-child interactions that is not well characterized in studies of play. We tested whether…

There has been considerable debate in the literature about the relative merits of information processing versus dynamical approaches to understanding cognitive processes. In this article, we explore the relationship between these two styles of explanation using a model agent evolved to solve a relational categorization task. Specifically, we…

Is consolidation needed to account for retroactive interference in free recall? Interfering mental activity during the retention interval of a memory task impairs performance, in particular if the interference occurs in temporal proximity to the encoding of the to-be-remembered (TBR) information. There are at least two rival theoretical accounts…

Drawing on a review of recent work conducted in the area of pattern generalization (PG), this paper makes a case for a distributed view of PG, which basically situates processing ability in terms of convergences among several different factors that influence PG. Consequently, the distributed nature leads to different types of PG that depend on the…

The authors who are mathematics teacher educators, have found that classifying, composing, and transforming shapes (in particular, rotations and reflections) are areas of difficulty for adults as well as for children. However, these are also some of the most important geometric ideas. They are fundamental topics in the K-8 Geometry and Measurement…

Orthographic forms (spellings) can affect pronunciation in a second language (L2); however, it is not known whether the same orthographic form can affect both L2 pronunciation and metalinguistic awareness. To test this, we asked 260 speakers of English--first-language (L1) English speakers, L1 Italian and L2 English sequential bilinguals, and L1…

Verbal working memory resources may impact syntax comprehension. Thirteen Italian children with cochlear implants (CIs) were assessed in relative clause (RC) comprehension, digit span and nonword repetition and compared to 13 chronological age peers (CA) and 13 younger controls (LA) with normal hearing (NH). The RC comprehension task tested…

Collaborative dialogue has been seen as an important aspect of L2 learning. However, the extent to which collaborative dialogue contributes to learning depends very much on the context in which it takes place. Informed by a sociocultural perspective of learning, this study investigated the nature of the collaborative dialogue between complete…

Following the call in Sandlund, Sundqvist, and Nyroos (2016) for incorporating discursive approaches into the field of oral second language (L2) testing, this paper proposes an interactional usage-based approach to the analysis of oral L2 performance. Based on Eskildsen (2018a), we combine analytic tools from usage-based linguistics and…

The morphological structure of the word has a central function in the organization of the mental lexicon and word recognition. Polymorphemic words in Arabic are composed of two non-concatenated morphemes: root and word-pattern. This study is the first to address the issue of nominal-pattern priming among young developing Arabic speakers. I…

Given that words from the academic layer of English typically carry bound roots ("min" in "diminish") rather than free-standing base words ("small" in "smaller"), there is a need to understand the factors that make bound roots more or less accessible for morphological problem-solving unfamiliar words. We…

With the increasing recognition of the importance of developing intercultural competence in foreign language education, there is now much discussion amongst scholars and teachers as to how to move beyond fact-based approaches to teaching culture by promoting more interpretive and reflective learning within a critical frame. Whilst study abroad is…

Usage-based approaches to language acquisition explain language development as a gradual process of generalizing constructions through language experience. This study investigated second language learners' development of constructional knowledge from the perspective of usage-based language development. A total of 169 Korean EFL students at five…

The differences and similarities in the word recognition and reading comprehension skills of monoliterate Albanian-Greek (ML2), biliterate Albanian-Greek (BL2) and monolingual (L1) children in grades 3-6 were examined in two cross-sectional studies. Participants completed standardized and experimental tasks measuring cognitive, oral language and…

In conversational speech, it is very common for words' segments to be reduced or deleted. However, previous research has consistently shown that during spoken word recognition, listeners prefer words' canonical pronunciation over their reduced pronunciations (e.g., pretty pronounced [word omitted] vs. [word omitted]), even when the latter are far…