Color has been investigated as a signaling cue in multimedia learning environments, guiding the learner's attention and as an emotional design element, increasing the learner's motivation and, thus, improving learning outcomes. Retrieval cues (e.g., visual cues, odor, sound) facilitating memory retrieval have been primarily investigated in…

Second language (L2) learners often speak with a strong accent, which can make them difficult to understand. However, familiarity with an accent enhances intelligibility. We propose that L2 learners are even more familiar with their own accented speech patterns and may thus understand self-produced L2 words better than others' accented…

Aggregating snippets from the semantic memories of many individuals may not yield a good map of an individual's semantic memory. The authors analyze the structure of semantic networks that they sampled from individuals through a new snowball sampling paradigm during approximately 6 weeks of 1-hr daily sessions. The semantic networks of individuals…

Two comprehension experiments were conducted to investigate whether German children are able to use the grammatical cues of word order and word endings (case markers) to identify agents and patients in a causative sentence and whether they weigh these two cues differently across development. Two-year-olds correctly understood only sentences with…

People can intuitively detect whether a word triad has a common remote associate (coherent) or does not have one (incoherent) before and independently of actually retrieving the common associate. The authors argue that semantic coherence increases the processing fluency for coherent triads and that this increased fluency triggers a brief and…