Background: Three years before the present study, 19 preschool children participated in a phonological and metaphonological intervention programme. The phonological intervention programme was based on non-linear phonological analyses. The metaphonological intervention programme included both rhyming and alliteration tasks and was directly targeted…

The task inventory approach is commonly used in job analysis for establishing content validity evidence supporting the use and interpretation of licensure and certification examinations. Although the results of a task inventory survey provide job task-related information that can be used as a reliable and valid source for test development, it is…

Purpose: Research examining the relationship between spontaneous and imitated productions for phonological analysis has indicated that the inclusion of imitated productions may overestimate children's phonological abilities. Previous research in this area has included only English-speaking children. The purpose of this study was to determine what,…

Three- and 4-year-old children were tested using videos of puppets in various versions of a theory of mind change-of-location situation, in order to answer several questions about what children are doing when they pass false belief tests. To investigate whether children were guessing or confidently choosing their answer to the test question, a…

The role of risk taking in building trust relations has largely been overlooked in the burgeoning literature on trust in the social sciences; yet it is central to understanding how trust develops. We argue that a series of risk-taking behaviors is indispensable to building a trust relation. We conducted experiments in Japan and the United States…

Large and reliable laterality effects have been found using a dichotic target detection task in a recent experiment using word stimuli pronounced with an emotional component. The present study tested the hypothesis that the magnitude and reliability of the laterality effects would increase with the removal of the emotional component and variations…

Low self-efficacy is a key component of depression. Toddlers of depressed mothers may be at risk for impaired development of self-efficacy because of maternal modeling, diminished encouragement of toddlers' efforts, and/or biological contributions. We examined emerging self-efficacy in 70 toddlers of depressed mothers and 62 toddlers of…

Problem solving as a skill is emphasized within the revised Japanese Course of Study for schools. This experimental study, conducted among Japanese high school students, evaluates an effort to develop student ability to identify reasons for "different" points of view, not just personally favored views. First, the ability of all students…

Three experiments were undertaken to examine second and fifth grade Telugu-speaking children's awareness of phonological and orthographic properties of familiar Telugu words. Experiment 1 focused on the strategies the children used in completing word fragments. Experiment 2 examined the children's ability to judge and generate rhyming words, and…

The aim of the present study was to examine differences among "regular" and dyslexic adult bilingual readers when processing reading and reading related skills in their first (L1 Hebrew) and second (L2 English) languages. Brain activity during reading Hebrew and English unexpected sentence endings was also studied. Behavioral and…

Multielement visual tracking and visual search are 2 tasks that are held to require visual-spatial attention. The authors used the attentional operating characteristic (AOC) method to determine whether both tasks draw continuously on the same attentional resource (i.e., whether the 2 tasks are mutually exclusive). The authors found that observers…

Words and pictures with earlier learned labels are processed faster than words and pictures with later learned labels. This age-of-acquisition (AoA) effect has been extensively investigated in many different types of tasks. This article provides a review of these studies including picture naming, word naming, speeded word naming, word…

This paper reports on a study that was carried out to determine learners' attitudes to learning grammar through the use of two types of consciousness-raising tasks. A deductive task provided explicit explanations of a grammar structure, while an inductive task required learners to discover the grammar rules for themselves. The study investigated…

This paper describes an action research project undertaken to look into the effectiveness of tasks designed to raise learner awareness of conversational strategies. The goal was to test whether tasks and direct instruction aimed at promoting learner awareness of conversational language at the discourse-level had any impact on the students'…

This exploratory study was conducted in an introductory biology course to determine 1) how students used the large lecture environment to create their own learning tasks during studying and 2) whether meaningful learning resulted from the students' efforts. Academic task research from the K-12 education literature and student approaches to…