Instruction of Research-Based Comprehension Strategies in Basal Reading Programs

Research supports using research-based comprehension strategies; however, comprehension strategy instruction is not highly visible in basal reading programs or classroom instruction, resulting in many students who struggle with comprehension. A content analysis examined which research-based comprehension strategies were presented in five elementary school basal readers and how the basals suggest that the strategies be taught. The analysis found that two thirds of instructional recommendations were research-based strategies; several strategies did not appear in basals, and others received minimal attention. Findings suggest that though the state of comprehension instruction in basals is not as dire as previous research suggests, improvements can be made.     

Husserl's Theory of Language as Calculus Ratiocinator

This paper defends an interpretation of Husserl's theory of language, specifically as it appears in the Logical Investigations, as an example of a larger body of theories dubbed 'language as calculus'. Although this particular interpretation has been previously defended by other authors, such as Hintikka and Kusch, this paper proposes to contribute to the discussion by arguing that what makes this interpretation plausible are Husserl's distinction between the notions of meaning-intention and meaning-fulfillment, his view that meaning is instantiated through meaning-intending acts of transcendental consciousness, and his view that the content of meaning-intending acts is ideal meaning simpliciter. As well, the paper argues that the phenomenological method of reduction itself presupposes the notion that reality as such can be reached by subtracting the influence of the language of the natural attitude and its ontological commitments and it, thus, presupposes the conception of language as a reinterpretable calculus.     

Understanding indirect requests for information in high-functioning autism

Cognitive Processing - Few works have addressed the processing of indirect requests in High-Functioning Autism (HFA), and results are conflicting. Some studies report HFA individuals’...     

Precursors of a theory of mind: A longitudinal study

The study examined whether the pointing gesture and intentional understanding abilities at 12 and 15 months of age predict the later understanding of perception and intention, as well as the ability to explain others' actions in a psychological way at 39 months of age. Thirty‐five infants (18 girls) were administered pointing and intention‐understanding tasks at the age of 12 and 15 months. Children were again evaluated at the age of 39 months with perception and intention tasks, and a psychological explanation task. Results showed that only 12‐month‐olds' comprehension of the pointing gesture with an imperative motive contributed to the prediction of later understanding of perception and mentalistic explanations of actions. Moreover, the ability of 12‐ and 15‐month‐olds to understand intentions contributed to the prediction of later preschool understanding of perceptions and intentions. These results indicate that a developmental trajectory in children's understanding of mental states from infancy to childhood is present, but depends on the level of engagement and communication that are required to perform these tasks.     

Genetic Counseling Dilemmas for a Patient with Sporadic Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis,Frontotemporal Degeneration & Parkinson’s Disease

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), frontotemporal degeneration and Parkinson’s disease may be different expressions of the same neurodegenerative disease. However, association between ALS and parkinsonism-dementia complex (ALS-PDC) has only rarely been reported apart from the cluster detected in Guam. We report a patient presenting with ALS-PDC in whom pathological mutations/expansions were investigated. No other family members were reported to have any symptoms of a neurological condition. Our case demonstrates that ALS-PDC can occur as a sporadic disorder, even though the coexistence of the three clinical features in one patient suggests a single underlying genetic cause. It is known that genetic testing should be preferentially offered to patients with ALS who have affected first or second-degree relatives. However, this case illustrates the importance of genetic counseling for family members of patients with sporadic ALC-PDC in order to provide education on the low recurrence risk. Here, we dicuss the ethical, psychological and practical consequences for patients and their relatives.     

A corpus-based analysis of verb continuation frequencies for syntactic processing

In the experimental study of how much verb guidance occurs in parsing syntactic ambiguity, the preference of an ambiguously subcategorized verb for its continuations is a relevant factor in the choice of the stimuli and in the interpretation of the results. Many methods have been used to measure this bias, ranging from experimenter's intuitions to sentence completion studies. In this paper, I assume that an acceptable definition of frequency is the count of the occurrences in a corpus, and I provide some cooccurrence counts calculated on a set of verbs and their syntactic siblings in a subset of the Penn Treebank (Marcus, Santorini, & Marcinkiewicz, 1993). Second, I perform some correlations with sentence completion and sentence production studies, which show that the two data collection methods are not strongly correlated with the corpus counts. Finally, I analyze the stimuli of some experiments which have shown evidence both in favor of the garden path theory of sentence processing and the lexical guidance theory. I argue that all the stimuli were balanced, and that a minimal attachment effect is not a consequence of the overall NP-bias of the stimuli. Moreover, evidence from the relation between processing times and verb completions with declarative and interrogative complementizers is used to argue that the parser is sensitive to the lexical content of the complementizers.     

Content-context binding in verbal working memory updating: on-line and off-line effects

The role of content–context binding in working memory updating has received only marginal interest, despite its undoubted relevance for the updating process. In the classical updating paradigm, the main focus has been on the process of discarding information when new information is presented. Its efficacy has been determined by measurement of the accuracy of recalled, updated information. In the current study we measured the working memory updating process directly, employing a dynamic memory task composed of alternating sequences of learning, active maintenance and updating phases. Binding was manipulated by changing the type of updating (total or partial) and the strength of the perceptual connection between items. The on-line updating process and the off-line efficacy were separately analysed. Both on-line and off-line measures indicated that partial updating conditions, where the operation of updating content–context binding was required, were more demanding than both total updating conditions and memory and maintenance phases. Our results suggest that working memory updating can be identified not only as a process of substitution of information, but also as inhibition of no longer relevant information and, above all, as a binding updating.     

What happens to information to be suppressed in working-memory tasks? Short and long term effects

The study explored, from an individual differences point of view, what happens to information to be suppressed in a working-memory task at short and long term. In particular, it was examined whether control mechanisms of irrelevant information in working memory imply their complete elimination from working memory or just the modulation of their activation. To this end, we compared the fate of irrelevant information in groups of subjects with high and low reading comprehension (Experiments 1 and 2) and subjects with high and low working memory (Experiments 1, 2, 3, and 4). All the experiments presented a working-memory task devised by De Beni, Palladino, Pazzaglia, and Cornoldi (1998), which required participants to process lists of words, to tap when a word from a particular category was presented, and then to recall only the last items in each list. Results confirmed that participants with high reading comprehension also have higher working memory and make less intrusion errors due to irrelevant items that have to be processed but then discarded. Furthermore, it was found that participants with low working memory have slightly better implicit (Experiment 1) and explicit memory (Experiments 3 and 4) of highly activated irrelevant information. Nevertheless, in a long-term recognition test, participants with high and low reading comprehension/working memory presented a similar pattern of memory for different types of irrelevant information (Experiment 2), whereas in a short-term memory recognition test, low-span participants presented a facilitation effect in the time required for the recognition of highly activated irrelevant information (Experiment 4). It was concluded that efficient working-memory performance is related to the temporary reduction of activation of irrelevant information but does not imply its elimination from memory.