Two brief intervention studies tested whether teaching students to mentally contrast a desired future with its present reality resulted in better academic performance than teaching students to only think about the desired future. German elementary school children (N = 49; Study 1) and US middle school children (N = 63; Study 2) from low-income neighborhoods who were taught mental contrasting ac...

E-mail has become a key mechanism of electronic communication. This is true for professional organizations that like to communicate with their subjects online and are slowly shifting to paper-less office. The current paper focuses specifically on academic institutions offering Engineering course in Gujarat state and attempts for textual analysis of the usernames of the institutional e-mail addr...

A randomized control trial compared the effects of two kinds of vocabulary instruction on component reading skills of adult struggling readers. Participants seeking alternative high school diplomas received 8 h of scripted tutoring to learn forty academic vocabulary words embedded within a civics curriculum. They were matched for language background and reading levels, then randomly assigned to...

Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded from 13 scalp electrodes while subjects read sentences containing syntactic ambiguities. Words which were inconsistent with the "preferred" sentence structure elicited a brain potential (P600) quite distinct from the potential previously observed following contextually inappropriate words (N400). Furthermore, final words in sentences typically...

Optimality Theory (OT) (Prince & Smolensky, 1993) characterizes linguistic knowledge as a ranked set of constraints that select the best possible output form of a word given a particular input. OT assumes that constraints are ordered transitively with respect to their violability. An artificial language learning paradigm was used to test this assumption by teaching participants to pronounce wor...

The present investigation evaluated language-disordered children's metalinguistic awareness of words, syllables, and sounds. Subjects were 15 language-disordered children matched for mental age to 15 normally developing children and for language age to another 15 normally developing children. In the first task, children were asked to divide sentences, bisyllabic words, and monosyllabic words in...

A series of progressive demasking and lexical decision experiments investigated how the recognition of target words exclusively belonging to one language is affected by the existence of orthographic neighbors from the same or the other language of bilingual participants. Increasing the number of orthographic neighbors in Dutch systematically slowed response times to English target words in Dutc...