Pauses when reading aloud play an essential role in reading and listening comprehension (for a review: Godde et al., 2020). Among the various types of pauses, breathing pauses during oral reading are particularly important. Their placement, frequency and duration tell us about breath and voice coordination as well as articulatory planning. These…

Past research has highlighted some differences in how sarcasm is interpreted by different groups of individuals as well as biases in individuals' expectations regarding who is more likely to use it (e.g., occupation, gender). However, examinations of patterns of sarcasm production have been much less frequent. The current research extends past…

Grapheme and syllable units have been shown to influence the dynamics of handwriting in adults and children, but the influence of morphemes remains to be clarified. We tested the ability of French-speaking adults and fourth and sixth grade children to process the morphological structure of words during writing. They were asked to copy three types…

Analogy is a powerful learning mechanism for children to learn novel, abstract concepts from only limited input, yet also requires cognitive supports. My dissertation sought to propose and examine number lines as a mathematical schema of the number system to facilitate both the development of rational number understanding and analogical reasoning.…

Growth in working memory capacity, the number of items kept active in mind, is thought to be an important aspect of childhood cognitive development. Here, we focused on participants' awareness of the contents of their working memory, or "meta-working memory," which seems important because people can put cognitive abilities to best use…

This study examined the effect of a physical education teacher's apparent age on middle school students' learning and perceptions of the teacher. Two hundred seventy-three middle school students were randomly assigned to view one of two virtually identical films of swimming lessons taught by the same teacher. During the young appearance lesson…

Through the provision of different types of social support, significant nonparental youth--adult relationships can facilitate youth's positive development across adolescence. However, despite the potential benefits of these relationships, there has been little consideration of how the relational process may vary across different adolescent stages.…

Monitoring the Future (MTF) is a long-term study of substance use and related factors among U.S. adolescents, college students, and adult high school graduates through age 60. It is conducted annually and supported by the National Institute on Drug Abuse. MTF findings identify emerging substance use problems, track substance use trends, and inform…

Aim: This study gathered views of 10 to 12-years-old pupils about their play experiences before and after transition to secondary school, comparing access to their right to play. Method: A multiple-case study design was used to gather views of six Year 6 primary pupils and six Year 7 secondary pupils living in the same community in the United…

Monitoring the Future (MTF) is designed to give such attention to substance use among the nation's youth and adults. It is an investigator-initiated study that originated with, and is conducted by, a team of research professors at the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research. Since its onset in 1975, MTF has been funded continuously…

Support for sex education in middle and high school and for the inclusion of a variety of topics in sex education programmes is strong among likely voters in the USA. This survey was conducted with a diverse sample of 965 adults who were invited from the largest probability-based panel in the USA. In addition to supporting sex education in…

In everyday life, we use folk theories about the mind and behavior to understand ourselves and others. An important part of our folk theory of mind is our intuitions about the role of the self in mental functioning--namely, whether the self is able to control each mental operation. The current study explored beliefs about the nature of control…

Monitoring the Future (MTF) is designed to give attention to substance use among the nation's youth and adults. It is an investigator-initiated study that originated with, and is conducted by, a team of research professors at the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research. Since its onset in 1975, MTF has been funded continuously by…

The developmental trajectory of the use of morphemes is still unclear. We investigated the emergence of morphological effects on visual word recognition in German in a large sample across the complete course of reading acquisition in elementary school. To this end, we analyzed lexical decision data on a total of 1,152 words and pseudowords from a…

Two experiments investigated 1st-, 3rd-, and 5th-grade children's and adults' judgments related to the controllability of cognitive activities, including object recognition, inferential reasoning, counting, and pretending. In Experiment 1, fifth-grade children and adults rated transitive inference and interpretation of ambiguous pictures as more…