Adopting a cognitive perspective, this study examined roles of working memory capacity (WMC), first language (L1) syllogistic inferencing, and second language (L2) linguistic knowledge on literal and inferential understanding of L2 reading comprehension in adolescent L2 learners. Participants were 193 Korean ninth-grade learners of English. The…

Executive function (EF) skills are a set of attention-regulation skills involved in intentional, goal-directed behavior that include (but are not limited to) the cool EF skills of working memory, cognitive flexibility, and inhibitory control, and also the hot EF skill of intentional reevaluation. These skills are inevitably expressed in goal- and…

While symbolic number processing is an important correlate for typical and low mathematics achievement, it remains to be determined whether children with high mathematics achievement also have excellent symbolic number processing abilities. We investigated this question in 64 children (aged 8 to 10), i.e., 32 children with persistent high…

Executive function (EF) is an early cognitive skill that rapidly develops during the preschool years. One of the common EF issues in young children is inhibitory control. This study investigates the impact of music-movement activities on children's inhibitory control. We designed the music-movement training (MMT) program for preschoolers to…

Working memory allows us to hold specific pieces of information in an active and easily retrieved state, but what happens to that information during an unexpected interruption between study and test? To answer this question, we used a surprise trial paradigm in which an unexpected event precedes a probe of the observer's memory for a search…

Adult second language learners often show considerable individual variability in the ease with which lexical tones are learned. It is known that factors pertaining to a learner's first language (L1; such as L1 tonal status or L1 tone type) as well as extralinguistic factors (such as musical experience and working memory) modulate tone learning…

This study aimed to examine associations between gross motor skills and executive functions (EF) in a large sample of Australian preschool-aged children. Of 566 children (mean age = 3.2 ± 0.4 years, 51.2% girls), locomotor, object control, and total skill competence were significantly associated with visual spatial working memory and inhibition (p…

Purpose: Children with cochlear implants (CIs) have difficulty with literacy, and although it is established that phonological processing underlies literacy skills in children with typical hearing (TH), the relation of phonological processing and literacy in children with CIs is not fully understood. This study evaluated the contributions of…

This study aimed to investigate the effect of visual input enhancement (VIE) on the comprehension of reading texts and the learning of two grammatical forms: English relative clauses and articles. Individual learners' working memory (WM) capacity was also tested to explore its impact on the effectiveness of VIE. A total of 48 Korean college…

The current study investigated the relation between spatial ability and children's math performance, as well as the potential mechanisms underlying this relation including numerical magnitude knowledge, understanding of arithmetic operations, and word-problem representation. A sample of 221 Asian sixth graders (age 11, 129 boys) completed a series…

Background: Phonological working memory is key to vocabulary acquisition, spoken word recognition, real-time language processing, and reading. Transcranial direct current stimulation, when coupled with behavioral training, has been shown to facilitate speech motor output processes, a key component of nonword repetition, the primary task used to…

Prevalent security threats caused by human errors necessitate security education, training, and awareness (SETA) programs in organizations. Despite strong theoretical foundations in behavioral cybersecurity, field evidence on the effectiveness of SETA programs in mitigating actual threats is scarce. Since memory decay will inevitably occur after…

Background: Children's numerical and arithmetic skills differ greatly already at an early age. Although research focusing on accounting for these large individual differences clearly demonstrates that mathematical performance draws upon several cognitive abilities, our knowledge concerning key abilities underlying mathematical skill development is…

Attention-based learning tasks of modern classrooms require processing of information in working memory. Not much is known about the cognitive processes operating during these tasks. To gain an understanding of the processes that support cognitive functions like learning, we have monitored the activity of the brain waves emanating from the frontal…

This paper presents the results of a retrospective study that investigates the cognitive effects of learning a foreign language in late adulthood. The learner group, consisting of 21 L1 Chinese speakers who have been learning to read Arabic for 2 years and 4 months, were compared to the matched group on their performance on a series of cognitive…