This study examines how topic familiarity and working memory capacity affect beginning Spanish learners' reading comprehension and their processing of future tense morphology. Participants included 94 adult learners from an accelerated, beginning Spanish course. In addition to completing a computerized version of a reading span test as a measure…

This study addresses managers' awareness and familiarity with Total Quality Management (TQM). Eighteen (18) semi-structured, in-depth interviews were conducted with managers working in a variety of service organizations in Greece. The major argument of the study is that although the acronym TQM and some of its concepts and practices are known by a…

Recently, infant researchers have reported sex differences in infants' capacity to map their representation of an occlusion sequence onto a subsequent no-occlusion display. The research reported here sought to identify the extent to which these sex differences are observed in event-mapping tasks and to identify the underlying basis for these…

The gulf between educational leadership theory and contemporary curriculum scholarship is becoming increasingly problematic now that principals have been legally mandated to add curriculum monitoring to their duties as instructional leaders. Lacking familiarity with curriculum theory and practice, many overburdened administrators are turning to…

One of the challenges of providing students with disabilities access to the general education curriculum is their skill in using grade-level materials. Due to their expository nature and specialized vocabulary, textbooks in particular pose challenges for students. This article presents an activity that promotes familiarity with textbook structures…

We performed an event-related potential study to investigate the self-relevance effect in object recognition. Three stimulus categories were prepared: SELF (participant's own objects), FAMILIAR (disposable and public objects, defined as objects with less-self-relevant familiarity), and UNFAMILIAR (others' objects). The participants' task was to…

Previous laterality studies have implicated the right hemisphere in the processing of metaphors, however it is not clear if this result is due to metaphoricity per se or another aspect of semantic processing. Three divided visual field experiments varied metaphorical and literal sentence familiarity. We found a right hemisphere advantage for…

The high school to college transition is a difficult time for most first-time, traditional-aged students. Students experience changes in interpersonal and social adjustment, academic and career concerns, and personal adjustment (Bishop, Gallagher, & Cohen, 2000). Failure to successfully adjust and acclimate into their new college community can…

For a variety of reasons, U.S. higher education has employed an increasing number of international teaching assistants (ITAs) to teach undergraduate courses in science, engineering, and humanities departments. Often, ITAs arrive on campus and are placed in undergraduate classrooms without having previous training or teaching experience; they are…

Talking with friend about personal photographs is a recognizable as an activity in which people participate in the modern world. This dissertation presents three studies examining the locally initial person reference formulations used to refer to people in the photographs in such an activity. The first study shows how the speakers narrating the…

Background: Schools are key social contexts for shaping development and behavior in youths; yet, little is known of their influence on adolescent personality disturbance. Method: A community-based sample of 592 adolescents was assessed for family and school experiences, Axis I psychiatric disorders, and Axis II personality disorder (PD) symptoms,…

In this study we report the results of survey research that collected responses of an identical sample (31 beginning mathematics and science teachers, elementary and middle school level) that graduated from a reform-based mathematics and science teacher preparation program, the Maryland Collaborative for Teacher Preparation (MCTP). Our aim was to…

Children tend to infer that when a speaker uses a new label, the label refers to an unlabeled object rather than one they already know the label for. Does this inference reflect a default assumption that words are mutually exclusive? Or does it instead reflect the result of a pragmatic reasoning process about what the speaker intended? In two…

Previous research suggests that infants can calculate simple arithmetic (Wynn, 1992). This study sought to replicate this finding and examine how familiarization may influence response. Experiment 1 confirmed that 3- to 5-month-old infants looked longer at an incorrect outcome (1 + 1 = 1) when no familiarization trials were presented. Experiment 2…

Four experiments are reported that reevaluate P. M. Merikle and E. M. Reingold's (1991) demonstration of unconscious memory: the greater sensitivity to familiarity (repetition) of an indirect (implicit) memory task than of a comparable direct (explicit) task. At study, participants named the cued member of a pair of visually presented words. At…