We examined the controlling factors that allow a prompted skill to become autonomous in a discrete-trials implementation of Touchette's (1971) progressively delayed prompting procedure, but our subjects were rats rather than children with disabilities. Our prompted skill was a left-right lever-press sequence guided by two panel lights. We manipulated (a) the effectiveness of the guiding lights ...

Why are performance trade-offs so rarely detected in animals when their underlying physiological basis seems so intuitive? One possibility is that individual variation in health, fitness, nutrition, development or genetics, or 'individual quality', makes some individuals better or worse performers across all motor tasks. If this is the case, then correcting for individual quality should reveal ...

Transfer (i.e., the application of a learned skill in a novel context) is an important and desirable outcome of motor skill learning. While much research has been devoted to understanding transfer of explicit skills the mechanisms of skill transfer after incidental learning remain poorly understood. The aim of this study was to (1) examine the effect of practice schedule on transfer and (2) inv...

OBJECTIVE This study investigated the relationships between specific performance components, eye-hand coordination, visuomotor integration, in-hand manipulation, and handwriting skill. METHOD A sample of 48 typical first grade students were identified as good and poor handwriters by their teachers. Each child completed the Motor Accuracy Test; the Developmental Test of Visual-Motor Integratio...

Translation research has been of interest to both practitioners and theoreticians in the field. As far as the practical side of the coin is concerned, translation problems have been studied with an eye to the role of inter-lingual and intra-lingual transfer. The research reported here was an attempt to understand the nature of translation problems of Iranian EFL learners. For this purpose, thre...

We present a new method for task-based speechto-speech machine translation evaluation, in which tasks are defined and assessed according to independent published standards, both for the military tasks performed and for the foreign language skill levels used. We analyze task success rates and automatic MT evaluation scores for 220 role-play dialogs. Each role-play team consisted of one native En...

Many new skills are acquired during early childhood. Typical laboratory skill learning tasks are not applicable for developmental studies that involve children younger than 8 years of age. It is not clear whether young children and adults share a basic underlying skill learning mechanism. In the present study, the learning and retention of a simple grapho-motor pattern were studied in three age...