Background: Schizophrenia (SZ) and schizoaffective disorders (SA) are associated with cognitive deficits. Generally, a schizoaffective diagnosis is associated with better prognosis on the level of social integration. It is also well established that cognition is an important factor for good social outcome in schizophrenia. We hypothesized that,…

Neurologically normal individuals exhibit strong leftward response biases during free-viewing perceptual judgments of brightness, quantity, and size. When participants view two mirror-reversed objects and they are forced to choose which object appears darker, more numerous, or larger, the stimulus with the relevant feature on the left side is…

Individuals with Alzheimer's disease (AD) often have problems in recognizing common objects. This visual agnosia may stem from difficulties in establishing appropriate visual boundaries between visually similar objects. In support of this hypothesis, Saumier, Arguin, Chertkow, and Renfrew (2001) showed that AD subjects have difficulties in…

People presume that the light source in pictures comes from above, and there is some evidence that this phenomenon also demonstrates lateral biases. When investigators present multiple ambiguous stimuli or visually complex objects, people assume that the source of light is from above, and to the left. However, when single relatively simple stimuli…

Alzheimer's disease (AD) subjects, healthy elderly, and young adults interpreted a series of novel noun-noun expressions composed of familiar object words. Subjects interpreted each item by selecting one of three possible definitions: a definition in which the referents of each noun were associated together in a particular context (e.g., rabbit…

Musically tone-deaf individuals have psychophysical deficits in detecting pitch changes, yet their discrimination of intonation contours in speech appears to be normal. One hypothesis for this dissociation is that intonation contours use coarse pitch contrasts which exceed the pitch-change detection thresholds of tone-deaf individuals (Peretz &…

In this study, we investigated the fluency with which first graders of different mathematical achievement levels applied multiple, school-taught strategies for finding arithmetic sums over 10. We characterized children's strategies with the 4 parameters of Lemaire and Siegler's (1995) model of strategy change (strategy repertoire, distribution,…

Drawing on sociological and philosophical studies of science, science educators have begun to view argumentation as a central scientific practice that students should learn. In this article, we extend recent work to understand the structure of students' arguments to include judgments about their quality through content analyses of high school…

Previous research (e.g., De Bock, 2002) has shown that--due to the extensive attention paid to proportional reasoning in elementary and secondary mathematics education--many students tend to overrely on proportional methods in diverse domains of mathematics (e.g., geometry, probability). We investigated the development of misapplication of…

In this article, we analyze the complexity of using instructional dialogues in the teaching of mathematics. We trace a 10-lesson unit on functions and their graphs taught by Magdalene Lampert to a 5th-grade classroom. We use this trace to help analyze and systematize the complexity of the classroom discourse. Analysis shows that Lampert's…

Recent research has revealed the existence of intuitive representations strongly rooted in diverse knowledge domains and the difficulties of modifying those representations through instruction by means of conceptual change processes (Carey, 1995; Gopnik & Meltzoff, 1997; Vosniadou, 1994). According to some interpretations, these representations…

In this article, I propose that at the juncture of disciplines, the mind is involved in at least 3 cognitive activities: overcoming internal monologism or monodisciplinarity, attaining provisional integration, and questioning the integration as necessarily partial. This claim is supported by interview data I collected primarily from faculty…

Bare forms (or [slashed O] forms), uninflected lexical L2 insertions in contexts where the matrix language expects morphological marking, have been recognized as an anomaly in different approaches to code-switching. Myers-Scotton (1997, 2002) has explained their existence in terms of structural incongruity between the matrix and embedded…

This paper compares the initial state of second language acquisition (L2A) and third language acquisition (L3A) from the generative linguistics perspective. We examine the acquisition of the Determiner Phrase (DP) by two groups of beginning French learners: an L2 group (native speakers of Vietnamese who do not speak any English) and an L3 group…

This article presents an empirical and theoretical critique of the Matrix Language Frame (MLF) model (Myers-Scotton, 1993; Myers-Scotton and Jake, 2001), and includes a response to Jake, Myers-Scotton and Gross's (2002) (JMSG) critique of MacSwan (1999, 2000) and reactions to their revision of the MLF model as a "modified minimalist approach." The…