Purpose: The Vocal Tract Discomfort Scale (VTD Scale) is a self-rating questionnaire investigating physical symptoms in the larynx associated with vocal pathology. The aim of this work was to investigate the reliability, validity, sensitivity, and specificity of the first German version and to provide normative data with thresholds for pathology…

This study aimed at examining the suitability of questionnaire instruments commonly used in large-scale assessments for measuring non-cognitive school effectiveness criteria. It focused on questions of reliability and validity for capturing changes in students within schools across time and the instruments' sensitivity to school effects. The aim…

The present study sought to examine the psychometric properties of the French and German versions of the Physical Self-Concept Questionnaire for Elementary School Children-Revised (PSCQ-C-R). A sample of 519 children participated in this study. Of those, 197 were French-Canadian and 322 were German. Results support the factor validity and…

The number of foreign languages spoken in Germany is rising, and as a result German is increasingly being learned as a second language (L2). This is a challenge for many secondary-school students, especially those who have learning disabilities (LD) and behavioral difficulties, which are often accompanied by reduced motivation to learn, in this…

The research in the field of positive psychology is alive for children and adolescents, and especially the effects of intervention studies are promising. While a large number of instruments exist for adults, there is a need for greater attention to basic measurement work of constructs for children. The Satisfaction With Life Scale is one of the…

Non-native speakers' sensitivity to discourse-level cues in pronoun interpretation has not been widely researched. We carried out three antecedent-choice questionnaire experiments which investigate the impact of focus on within-sentence pronoun resolution in native and non-native speakers of German and native speakers of Russian. Focus was…

A recent surge of findings on bilingual cognitive advantage has attracted attention from both researchers and the media. An advantage has been demonstrated with regard to, inter alia, inhibiting, switching, monitoring and updating. However, Paap et al. argue that the advantage does not exist or is only limited to executive functioning. Both sides…

The conveyance of knowledge of the life cycles performed by fungi and plants with spores is a challenge for teaching in university education. The life cycles of fungi, in particular, can be very complex and difficult to understand. This paper presents the development and implementation of a German and English educational software program,…

Research has shown that observing iconic gestures helps typically developing children (TD) and children with specific language impairment (SLI) learn new words. So far, studies mostly compared word learning with and without gestures. The present study investigated word learning under two gesture conditions in children with and without language…

Establishing local coherence relations is central to text comprehension. Positive-causal coherence relations link a cause and its consequence, whereas negative-causal coherence relations add a contrastive meaning (negation) to the causal link. According to the cumulative cognitive complexity approach, negative-causal coherence relations are…

The perceptual fluency hypothesis claims that items that are easy to perceive at encoding induce an illusion that they will be easier to remember, despite the finding that perception does not generally affect recall. The current set of studies tested the predictions of the perceptual fluency hypothesis with a picture generation manipulation.…

Dyslexia in consistent orthographies like German is characterized by dysfluent reading, which is often assumed to result from failure to build up an orthographic lexicon and overreliance on decoding. However, earlier evidence indicates effects of lexical processing at least in some German dyslexic readers. We investigated variations in reading…

What are the perceived effects of Telecollaboration (TC), compared to other types of communication-scenarios with peers (i.e. local peers in small groups and Erasmus students abroad)? This is the question this exploratory study tackles within a blended language learning course. The analysis of students' perceptions paints a rather contrastive…

The majority of the world speaks more than one language, yet the impact of learning a second language has rarely been studied from a child's perspective. This paper describes monolingual children's insights into becoming bilingual at four time points: 2 months before moving to another country (while living in Australia), as well as 1, 6, and…

Purpose: Our purpose was to explore the validity and reliability of the German Focus on the Outcomes of Communication Under Six (FOCUS-G; Thomas-Stonell, Oddson, Robertson, & Rosenbaum, 2010, 2012), which is an authorized adaptation of the Focus on the Outcomes of Communication Under Six (Thomas-Stonell et al., 2010) tool, which measures…