This article undermines the actuality of a strict boundary between language and materiality by presenting verbal charms ("puheged," "vajhed"/"pakitas" in Vepsian) among Veps, an Indigenous minority group of Northwest Russia. Vepsian verbal charms are ritualized ways of speaking that are customarily used to prompt a…

While separate pieces of research found parents offer toddlers cues to express that they are (1) joking and (2) pretending, and that toddlers and preschoolers understand intentions to (1) joke and (2) pretend, it is not yet clear whether parents and toddlers consider joking and pretending to be distinct concepts. This is important as…

English learners have long been defined as faulty linguistic beings, liabilities in a school system that values immediate academic readiness to perform like those in the mainstream. With a need to look at the many other facets that constitute who English learners are and what they are capable of in their academic pursuits, this case study looked…

The present study examined whether and to what degree empathy increased in adolescents who participated in a high-intensity writing program over the course of a year. Data for this study came from writing samples of a randomly selected group of middle-grade students (n = 61) collected at three different time points to answer whether: (1) it was…

Recollection is constructive and prone to distortion, but the mechanisms through which recollections can become embellished with rich yet illusory details are still debated. According to the conceptual fluency hypothesis, abstract semantic or conceptual activation increases the familiarity of a nonstudied event, causing one to falsely attribute…

In this article, we present one fourth grader's unaided and illustration-aided retellings of "The Other Side." Using a qualitative clinical case study approach, we examine comprehending activity in these retellings using microethnographic discourse analysis in conjunction with dialogic self theory and a transactional model of reading.…

Several recent studies have explored the effect of contextual familiarity on remembered and imagined events. The aim of this study was to examine the extent of this effect by comparing the effect of cuing spatial memories, episodic memories, and imagined future events with spatial contextual cues of varying levels of familiarity. We used…

Asking students to imagine the spatial arrangement of the elements in a scientific text constitutes a learning strategy intended to foster deep processing of the instructional material. Two experiments investigated the effects of mental imagery prompts on learning from scientific text. Students read a computer-based text on the human respiratory…

The Vygotsky Blocks Test assesses problem-solving styles within a theoretical framework for the development of higher mental processes devised by Vygotsky. Because both the theory and the associated test situate cognitive development within the child's social and linguistic context, they address conceptual issues around the developmental relation…

How can we explain children's understanding of the unseen world? Young children are generally able to distinguish between real unobservable entities and fantastical ones, but they attribute different characteristics to and show less confidence in their decisions about fantastical entities generally endorsed by adults, such as Santa Claus. One…

The experience of daydreaming is familiar to all, yet daydreaming and its correlates in an educational context have yet to be adequately explored. This study investigated academic and other potential correlates of task-unrelated images and thoughts (TUITs) during lectures. 463 undergraduate psychology students participated across three lecture…

People's memories must be able to represent experiences with multiple types of origins--including the real world and our own imaginations, but also printed texts (prose-based media), movies, and television (screen-based media). This study was intended to identify cues that distinguish prose- and screen-based media memories from each other, as well…

The use of drawings as representations of personal mental models or images is one method of analyzing personal beliefs. This article discusses the development of the Draw-An-Environment Test and Rubric (DAET-R) for assessing the mental models or images of the environment held by pre-service teachers. It also provides results of preliminary…

Impairments of pretend play are a diagnostic characteristic of autism. This has been interpreted in terms of a generative impairment. Specifically, children with autism are unable to generate the ideas for pretend play despite an intact underlying ability to understand pretence. The notion of a performance deficit affecting production only has, in…

The specificity of memories has been identified as a factor affecting reality monitoring performance. To examine the reality monitoring model of Johnson and Raye (1981) and to explore the relationship between memory specificity and reality monitoring, the amount of cognitive operations involved in processing information was manipulated for 72…