This investigation was undertaken to address questions about topic familiarity and disfluencies during oral descriptive discourse of adult speakers. Participants expressed more attributes when the topic was familiar than when it was unfamiliar. Fillers and lexical pauses were the most frequent disfluencies. The mean duration of each hesitation…

By integrating previous computational models of corticohippocampal function, the authors develop and test a unified theory of the neural substrates of familiarity, recollection, and classical conditioning. This approach integrates models from 2 traditions of hippocampal modeling, those of episodic memory and incremental learning, by drawing on an…

Author presents observations related to college students' informal manner of addressing authors when writing critically about literary works composed in the first person. Topics analyzed include students' relationship with the author depending on the literary work, and students' familiarity when addressing their elders and authority figures in the…

As countries continue to invest in information and communication technologies (ICT) and they become even more common in the workplace, there is an increasing demand for schools to produce technologically literate students. This report presents results from the "Programme for International Student Assessment" (PISA) 2003, and examines how…

Like all probabilistic decisions, recognition memory judgments are based on inferences about the strength and quality of stimulus familiarity. In recent articles, B. W. A. Whittlesea and J. Leboe (2000; J. Leboe & B. W. A. Whittlesea, 2002) proposed that such memory decisions entail various heuristics, similar to well-known heuristics in overt…

In this study, we developed and validated a questionnaire to assess teachers' perceptions of their actual and preferred school-level environment, investigated whether teachers involved with Outcomes-Based Education (OBE) perceive the school-level environment differently from those who are not, and investigated factors in the school-level…

Readers construct at least 2 interrelated mental representations when they comprehend a text: a textbase and a situation model. Two experiments were conducted with recognition memory to examine how domain knowledge and text coherence influence readers' textbase and situation-model representations. In Experiment 1, participants made remember-know…

In this article second language (L2) knowledge of Dutch grammatical gender is investigated. Adult speakers of German, English and a Romance language (French, Italian or Spanish) were investigated to explore the role of transfer in learning the Dutch grammatical gender system. In the first language (L1) systems, German is the most similar to Dutch…

The main objective of this study was to identify prospective science teachers' conceptions on basic astronomical phenomena. A questionnaire consisting of nine open-ended questions was administered to 327 prospective science teachers. The questionnaire was constructed after extensive review of the literature and took into consideration the reported…

Explored the effect of person familiarity and parental involvement on 3.5-month-old infants' sensitivity to the dynamic emotion expressions of others. Found that infants looked differentially at mothers' expressions but not at those of fathers or unfamiliar adults, and that parent-child involvement significantly influenced infants' developing…

Elicited imitation was used to assess 21-month-olds' recall of familiar-canonical, familiar-reversed, novel-causal, and novel-arbitrary event sequences. Reversed sequences were reproduced in modeled and corrected canonical order; other sequences were reproduced in modeled order. (BC)

Two studies examined the relationship between phonological sensitivity and 5-year-olds' acquisition of new words that systematically differed in the familiarity of their sound structures. Found that phonological sensitivity was related to pair-associated learning of phonologically unfamiliar, but not familiar, words. Following phonological…

Four experiments examined links and differences between children's copying line diagrams and drawing solid objects. Findings suggest that emphasis on order of line copying improves copying performance because line-to-line matching is an important element of the skill, whereas this does not aid drawing of the solid object, in which focus is…

Surveyed the extent to which a sample of academic staff at Monash University in Australia are familiar with general intellectual property concepts and the provisions of their university's intellectual property statute. Found a level of ignorance in this area that may require attention. (EV)

Reviews research that demonstrates that children in the one- to two-year age range are able to remember specific events over weeks and months. Recall is influenced by what young children are asked to remember, the number of times they experience events, and the availability of cues or reminders. (SLD)