recently tasks, as the basic units of syllabi, and the cognitive complexity, as the criterion for sequencing them, have caught many second language researchers’ attention. this study sought to explore the effect of utilizing the cognitively simple and complex tasks on high- and low-proficient efl iranian writers’ linguistic performance, i.e., fluency, accuracy, lexical complexity, and structura...

1. introduction language teachers frequently observe a gap between their students' potential competence and their performance in the class. anderson (1993) attributes this to the fact that human has a limited processing capacity and is not able to attend to various aspects of a task simultaneously. this limitation causes l2 learners not to be able to focus on both meaning and form at the same t...

The study aimed at investigating whether the retention of vocabulary acquired incidentally is dependent upon the amount of task-induced involvement. Immediate and delayed retention of twenty unfamiliar words was examined in three learning tasks( listening comprehension + group discussion, listening comprehension + dictionary checking + summary writing in L1, and listening comprehension + dictio...

The representation within which attention operates was investigated in 3 experiments. The task was similar to that of R. Egly, J. Driver, and R. D. Rafal (1994). Participants had to detect the presence of a target at 1 of 4 ends of 2 shapes, differing in color and form. A precue appeared at 1 of the 4 possible corners. The 2 shapes occupied either the same or different locations in the cuing an...

The social transmission of food preference task (STFP) is based on the principle that dietary information can be communicated between rodents during social interaction (Galef and Kennett, 1987). Briefly, a demonstrator mouse consumes a novel flavor, and then freely interacts with an observer mouse. The observer mouse is now " socially cued " toward that flavor, and will prefer it in a choice pa...

Six experiments were conducted to separate cue encoding from target processing in explicitly cued task switching to determine whether task switch effects could be separated from cue encoding effects and to determine the nature of the representations produced by cue encoding. Subjects were required to respond to the cue, indicating which cue was presented (Experiments 1, 3a, and 4a) or which tas...

BACKGROUND/AIMS Our aim was to identify cognitive factors affecting free recall, cued recall, and recognition tasks in patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD). SUBJECTS We recruited 349 consecutive AD patients who attended a memory clinic. METHODS Each patient was assessed using the Alzheimer's Disease Assessment Scale (ADAS) and the extended 3-word recall test. In this task, each patient wa...

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...