Long-term memory (LTM) problems are associated with many psychiatric and neurological illnesses and are commonly measured using free and cued recall tasks. Although LTM has been linked with biologic mechanisms, the etiology of distinct LTM tasks is unknown. We studied LTM in 95 healthy female twin pairs identified through birth records in the state of Missouri. Performance on tasks of free reca...

The nature and generality of the developmental association between phonological short-term memory and vocabulary knowledge was explored in two studies. Study 1 investigated whether the link between vocabulary and verbal memory arises from the requirement to articulate memory items at recall or from earlier processes involved in the encoding and storage of the verbal material. Four-year-old chil...

We investigated the impact of emotions on learning vocabulary in an unfamiliar language to better understand affective influences in foreign language acquisition. Seventy native English speakers learned new vocabulary in either a negative or a neutral emotional state. Participants also completed two sets of working memory tasks to examine the potential mediating role of working memory. Results ...

We consider the problem of assigning level numbers (weights) to hierarchically organized categories during the process of text categorization. These levels control the ability of the categories to attract documents during the categorization process. The levels are adjusted in order to obtain a balance between recall and precision for each category. If a category's recall exceeds its precision, ...

We assessed the language, cognitive, and socioemotional abilities of 27 internationally adopted children from China, adopted by French-speaking parents, 12 of whom had been assessed previously by Gauthier and Genesee. The children were on average 7 years, 10 months old and were matched to nonadopted monolingual French-speaking children on age, gender, and socioeconomic status. Although there we...

The specificity of the bilingual advantage in memory was examined by testing groups of monolingual, bilingual, and trilingual 24-month-olds on tasks tapping cued recall, memory generalization and working memory. For the cued recall and memory generalization conditions, there was a 24-h delay between time of encoding and time of retrieval. In addition to the memory tasks, parent-toddler dyads co...

In this paper, we explore the effects of objective task difficulty and domain knowledge on users’ query formulation behaviors. The dataset from a user experiment was used in this research, which focused on the medical domain. The objective difficulty was measured by the precision level of search topics (as queries) in the search system, and searchers’ domain knowledge was assessed by a self-rep...

This paper reviews software design guidelines from the field of Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) and empirical results from the field of vocabulary acquisition. We categorize the empirical evidence in terms of three key aspects of instructional software for vocabulary teaching: task type, media and scheduling. We describe how design of an online adaptive vocabulary teaching system inc...

The present study investigated the relative contributions of experiential and ability factors to second language (L2) passage comprehension and L2 vocabulary retention. Participants included a cross section of 99 adult learners of Spanish as a foreign language enrolled in beginning through advanced level university Spanish courses. Participants completed a standardized reading proficiency test ...