We assessed the reading and reading-related skills (phonemic awareness and phonological short-term memory) of deaf children fitted with cochlear implants (CI), either exposed to cued speech early (before 2 years old) (CS+) or never (CS-). Their performance was compared to that of 2 hearing control groups, 1 matched for reading level (RL), and 1 matched for chronological age (CA). Phonemic aware...

the difficulty of assessing the writing skill is well known. different testing facets seem to affect the result of assessing the writing skill. in addition to the writer’s ability, the topic of the writing task, and methods of rating may contribute to the writer’s score. in this study, 50 efl learners wrote four different types of writing tasks (convincing, describing, instructing, and explaini...

In simple rule-switching tests, 3and 4-yearolds can follow each of two sorting rules, but sometimes make perseverative errors when switching. Older children make few errors, but respond slowly when switching. These age-related changes might reflect the maturation of executive functions (e.g. inhibition). However, they might also reflect children’s ability to use task cues. Cue processing diffic...

Impairment of movement execution in Parkinson's disease could be due to disorders of cognition and/or of activation. These two factors are hard to separate by measuring response times only. Therefore, in this study response force and event-related EEG potentials were measured continuously during tasks in which subjects had to respond to cued signals. Fifteen patients with Parkinson's disease an...

We investigated the role of muscarinic acetylcholine receptors (mAChRs) in eyeblink serial feature-positive discrimination learning in mice using the mAChR antagonist. A 2-s light cue was delivered 5 or 6 s before the presentation of a 350-ms tone paired with a 100-ms periorbital electrical shock (cued trial) but not before the tone-alone presentation (non-cued trial). Mice received 30 cued and...

The centre médian-parafascicular (CM-Pf) complex is located at the posterior intralaminar nuclei of the thalamus and forms part of the nonspecific thalamocortical projection system and the internal circuit of the basal ganglia. However, the functional roles of this complex remain to be fully elucidated. Here we have examined whether the CM-Pf complex is involved in the process of covert attenti...

This study examined the effects of aural and written prompts under two planning conditions (i.e. pre-task planning and no planning) on complexity, accuracy, and fluency of test takers' writing production. Forty learners in an English institute, who had already been classified as intermediate according to the Oxford Placement Test, were assigned to two planning conditions (i.e. no planning and p...

Recall recognition Writing title No interruption 108.10(27.79) 118.88(48.78) 22.50(8.19) 24.00(8.10) Related Interruption 99.00(38.19) 93.33(61.97) 24.25(14.56) 20.00(5.09) Not related interruption 101.25(45.06) 103.50 (60.10) 44.40(45.52) 24.00(9.84) Interruption task. We also analyzed if there were differences on time performance of the interruption task (TOI) in the related and not related c...

In five experiments, we extended the production effect-better memory for items said aloud than for items read silently-to paired-associate learning, the goal being to explore whether production enhances associative information in addition to enhancing item information. In Experiments 1 and 2, we used a semantic-relatedness task in addition to the production manipulation and found no evidence of...