It is well established that the comprehension of spoken words referring to object concepts relies on high-level visual areas in the ventral stream that build increasingly abstract representations. It is much less clear whether basic low-level visual representations are also involved. Here we asked in what task situations low-level visual…

Purpose: Developmental language disorder (DLD) is defined by persistent difficulties with language, but a growing body of evidence suggests that it is also associated with domain-general and nonverbal information-processing deficits. However, the interconnections between cognitive functions, both nonverbal and language related, are still unclear.…

This study aims to investigate the effect of suprasegmental phonological training on connected-text reading comprehension of Chinese university students with different English reading proficiency levels. A sample of 160 freshmen was recruited and randomly divided into experimental and control groups, and the experimental group was given a 12-week…

Error patterns in vocabulary learning data were used as a window into the mechanisms that underlie vocabulary learning performance in bilinguals vs. monolinguals. English--Spanish bilinguals (n = 18) and English-speaking monolinguals (n = 18) were taught novel vocabulary items in association with English translations. At testing, participants…

Prospective memory (PM) refers to memory for future intentions (e.g. remembering to press a button when you see an animal word). Researchers classify PM intentions in the laboratory as focal or nonfocal primarily in two ways. One way, task-appropriateness, refers to how the processing for the intention relates to the processing required for an…

Gestures are associated with powerful forms of understanding; however, their causative role in mathematics reasoning is less clear. We inhibit college students' gestures by restraining their hands, and examine the impact on language, recall, intuition, and mathematical justifications of geometric conjectures. We test four mutually exclusive…

Previous event-related potential (ERP) work has indicated that the neural processing of action sequences develops with age. Although adults and 9-month-olds use a semantic processing system, perceiving actions activates attentional processes in 7-month-olds. However, presenting a sequence of action context, action execution and action conclusion…

We used event-related potentials (ERP) to investigate whether Spanish-English bilinguals preactivate form and meaning of predictable words. Participants read high-cloze sentence contexts (e.g., "The student is going to the library to borrow a..."), followed by the predictable word ("book"), a word that was form-related…

Developmental theory has long emphasized the importance of linking perception, cognition, and action. Techniques designed to record the spatial and temporal characteristics of hand movements (i.e., "manual dynamics") present new opportunities to study the nature of these links across development by providing a window into how perceptual,…

Recent research has shown that leet words (i.e., words in which some of the letters are replaced by visually similar digits; e.g., VIRTU4L) can be processed as their base words without much cost. However, it remains unclear whether the digits inserted in leet words are simply processed as letters or whether they are simultaneously processed as…

Purpose: The study examined whether semantic and phonological encoding processes were capacity demanding, involving the central cognitive mechanism, in adults who do and do not stutter (AWS and NS) to better understand the role of cognitive demand in linguistic processing and stuttering. We asked (a) whether the two linguistic processes in AWS are…

Adult second language (L2) learning often exhibits great variability in its rate and outcome. Although research shows that learning trajectories are partly shaped by social and contextual factors (e.g. Larson-Hall, 2008), certain learner factors play an important role in enhancing L2 pronunciation learning by helping L2 learners notice and process…

Many studies have demonstrated that testing students on to-be-learned materials can be an effective learning activity. However, past studies have also shown that some practice test formats are more effective than others. Open-ended recall or short answer practice tests may be effective because the questions prompt deeper processing as students…

Reconstructing memory for sequences is a complex process, likely involving multiple sources of information. In 3 experiments, we examined the source(s) of information that might underlie the ability to accurately place an event within a temporal context. The task was to estimate, after studying each list, the temporal position of a single test…

Background: The gender gap in reading literacy is repeatedly found in large-scale assessments. This study compared girls' and boys' text responses in a reading test applying natural language processing. For this, a theoretical framework was compiled that allows mapping of response features to the preceding cognitive components such as micro- and…