objectives: the role of cognitive process for postural control was shown in dual task studies. however, there was no definite evidence how verbal instructions influence the allocation of attention to postural control. this study determined whether young and elderly adult are able to deliberately control the resource allocation when performing a sensorimotor and cognitive task simultaneously and...

In this paper we explore to what extent the difficulty of listening items in an English language proficiency test can be predicted by the textual properties of the item text. We show that a system based on multiple text complexity features can predict item difficulty for several different item types and for some items achieves higher accuracy than human estimates of item difficulty.

This study examines the factors that influence Mandarin and Korean speakers’ understanding of English pitch accent placement. The results show that both groups have difficulty determining whether a native English speaker is using the correct prosody for a particular discourse context. Participants’ ability to do this task improved with greater English proficiency, as measured by the Versant Eng...

Objective: The objective was to investigate the interaction between the mode of performance outcome feedback and task difficulty on timing decisions (i.e., when to act). Background: Feedback is widely acknowledged to affect task performance. However, the extent to which feedback display mode and its impact on timing decisions is moderated by task difficulty remains largely unknown. Method: Part...

This study investigates whether working memory capacity (WMC) varies across languages and in the course of L2 speech proficiency levels. Following suggestions in Finardi and Weissheimer (2009) and Prebianca (2010), who found that WMC varied as a function of L2 speech proficiency, the present study assessed three proficiency levels (elementary, intermediate and advanced) and two languages (L1-Po...

The current pretest-posttest quasi-experimental study sought, firstly, to examine the effect of employing flipped language teaching techniques on EFL learners' text comprehension and, secondly, to explore whether there was any significant interaction between the flipped classroom approach and EFL learners’ proficiency level. To this end, 65 male and female EFL learners were conveniently selecte...

Abstract Research in second language (L2) learning often considers one modality only during task completion. It is unclear if L2 performance as accurate whatever the modality. at school characterized by a predominance of written materials. One might expect word recognition to be more than spoken one. This effect could also depend on proficiency and presence cognate items, closer orthographicall...

Objective: The present study was aimed to correlate the clinical tests with the laboratory measures under dual task conditions in Parkinson's disease (PD). Materials and Methods: Eleven people with idiopathic PD (Modified Hoehn and Yahr scores 1-3) were selected by simple non-probability sampling. Center of pressure (COP) data obtained by force platform was used to calculate mean total velocity...

BACKGROUND This research investigated the proposal that children with autism are impaired in processing information in its context. To date, this proposal rests almost exclusively on evidence from verbal tasks. Given evidence of visuo-spatial proficiency in autism in other areas of functioning, it is possible that the ability to use context is spared in the visual domain but impaired in the ver...