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Self-efficacy for writing is an important motivational factor and considered to predict writing performance. Self-efficacy for narrative writing has been sparsely studied, and few studies focus on the effects of writing intervention on self-efficacy. Additionally, there is a lack of validated measures of self-efficacy for elementary school students. In a previous study, we found that a trained panel rated personal narrative text quality higher for girls than for boys, which led to our aim: to investigate boys' and girls' self-efficacy for narrative writing before and after an intervention, and to explore associations between self-efficacy and text quality. An 18-item self-efficacy scale was developed. Fifty-five fifth-grade students (M 11:2 years, SD 3.7 months) filled out the scale before and after a five-lesson observational learning intervention. Self-efficacy was then related to writing performance as measured by holistic text quality ratings. The students demonstrated strong self-efficacy, which increased significantly post-intervention. Girls and boys demonstrated similar self-efficacy, despite girls' higher text quality. There were moderate correlations between self-efficacy and writing performance pre- and post-intervention. The results support previous findings of strong self-efficacy at this age. The interaction between writing self-efficacy and performance is complex. Young students may not be able to differentiate between self-efficacy, general writing skills, task performance, and self-regulation. Self-efficacy scales should thus be carefully constructed with respect to age, genre, instruction, and to students' general educational context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study is concerned with the integration of negation in relation to two models of the processing of negation: (i) the two-step model (Lüdtke et al., 2008), according to which negation involves two representations where negation is ignored in the first representation, and (ii) the pragmatic view (Nieuwland & Kuperberg, 2008), which posits that negation can be integrated without delay if it is used in a natural context. The processing of two negated forms (not authorised and unauthorised) and an affirmative form (authorised) was studied in complex congruent and incongruent contexts. Incongruities in affirmative sentences elicited a biphasic N400–P600. In both types of negated sentences, ERP patterns associated with higher processing difficulties (anterior and central negativities) were observed. The results did not support one or the other model, suggesting that the processing of negation cannot be fully captured by either of them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study has two goals: First, to give an account of the semantic organization of individually used antonymic adjectives in discourse and second, based on those findings and previous work on antonymic meanings, to contribute to a comprehensive theoretical account of their representation within the framework of Cognitive Linguistics. The hypothesis is that the members of the pairs are used in the same contexts and in the same type of constructions, not only when they co-occur and are used to express binary opposition as shown in previous studies, but also when they do not. The manually coded corpus data from the BNC are analyzed along four semantic parameters: (i) the configuration of the adjectives in terms of gradability, (ii) the way they modify the nominal meanings, i.e., attributively or predicatively (iii) the meaning type of the modified nouns, and (iv) the status of the constructions with respect to whether their meanings are what we refer to as 'basic', metaphorical or metonymical. Correspondence analysis technique is used to identify similarities and differences on the basis of the totality of the data. As predicted, our findings confirm a high degree of pairwise similarity - but also some differences. On the basis of these results, it can be argued that the long-standing controversy within Structuralism between proponents of the co-occurrence hypothesis and the substitutability hypothesis in antonym research is a non-issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]