Multiple graphical representations can significantly improve learning, provided that students make connections between them. In doing so, they need to engage in sense-making processes to build up conceptual understanding of the connections, and in fluency-building processes to fast and effortlessly use perceptual properties to make connections. We investigate how these learning processes intera...

Processing fluency, or the subjective experience of ease with which people process information, reliably influences people's judgments across a broad range of social dimensions. Experimenters have manipulated processing fluency using a vast array of techniques, which, despite their diversity, produce remarkably similar judgmental consequences. For example, people similarly judge stimuli that ar...

Given the largely prefrontostriatal neuropathogenesis of HIV-associated neurobehavioral deficits, it is often presumed that HIV infection leads to greater impairment on letter versus category fluency. A meta-analysis of the HIV verbal fluency literature was conducted (k = 37, n = 7110) to assess this hypothesis and revealed generally small effect sizes for both letter and category fluency, whic...

BACKGROUND Parkinson's disease (PD) leads to deficits in executive function, including verbal and nonverbal fluency, as a result of compromised frontostriatal circuits. It is unknown whether deficits in verbal and nonverbal fluency in PD are driven by certain subgroups of patients, or how strategy use may facilitate performance. PARTICIPANTS Sixty-five nondemented individuals with PD, includi...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES The study's objective was to determine whether participation in an international health rotation in a Spanish-speaking country (immersion) is associated with improved Spanish fluency compared to participation in domestic medical Spanish coursework alone. METHODS Participants matriculated at one US medical school in the years 2004--2008. At matriculation (baseline), a...

Reading fluency is one of the underlying factors of successful language curricula and it is also one of the defining characteristics of good readers. A lack of fluency is a common characteristic of struggling readers. There is a growing body of research that demonstrates proficiency in reading fluency is important for success in learning to read English. While the role of reading fluency is inc...

Oral fluency and foreign accent distinguish L2 from L1 speech production. In language testing practices, both fluency and accent are usually assessed by raters. This study investigates what exactly native raters of fluency and accent take into account when judging L2. Our aim is to explore the relationship between objectively measured temporal, segmental and suprasegmental properties of speech ...

OBJECTIVE While Parkinson's disease (PD) has traditionally been defined by motor symptoms, many researches have indicated that mild cognitive impairment is common in non-demented PD patients. The purpose of this study was to compare verbal fluency performance in non-demented Parkinson's disease patients with healthy controls. METHOD In this cross-sectional study thirty non-demented Parkinson'...

The verbal fluency task is a widely used neuropsychological test of word retrieval efficiency. Both category fluency (e.g., list animals) and letter fluency (e.g., list words that begin with F) place demands on semantic memory and executive control functions. However letter fluency places greater demands on executive control than category fluency, making this task well-suited to investigating p...

According to the processing fluency theory, higher ease of processing a stimulus leads to higher feelings of fluency and more positive evaluations. However, it is unclear whether feelings of fluency are positive or an unspecific activation and whether feelings of fluency are directly attributed to the stimulus even without much positive feelings. In two experiments, we tested how variations in ...