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People who read and dismiss distracting notifications while performing academic or professional tasks may pay a high cognitive price. Multimedia interruptions clearly impair comprehension and memory; however, their impact may depend on the individual's cognitive abilities and experiences. In a pilot study and two experiments, we explored the effects of three levels of distraction from cellphone notifications (no notifications, dismiss notifications and read notifications) on memory for categorised word lists. Individual differences in working memory capacity, attachment to and dependence on cellphones, and media multitasking, texting, video gaming and musical experience were assessed. Memory impairment increased with the level of distraction irrespective of participant scores on the individual difference measures. Dismissing notifications disrupted relational processing more than individual-item processing, whereas reading notifications disrupted both types of processing. Heavy texters demonstrated particularly poor memory performance, whereas individuals with high working memory capacity and high reliance on their cellphones performed relatively well. These results were interpreted in terms of recent multitasking theories and suggest that no one is immune from the disruptive effects of cellphone notifications while performing academic or professional tasks.

In less than a decade, the western world has witnessed an unprecedented rise in the numbers of children and adolescents seeking gender transition. Despite the precedent of years of gender-affirmative care, the social, medical and surgical interventions are still based on very low-quality evidence. The many risks of these interventions, including medicalizing a temporary adolescent identity, have come into a clearer focus through an awareness of detransitioners. The risks of gender-affirmative care are ethically managed through a properly conducted informed consent process. Its elements-deliberate sharing of the hoped-for benefits, known risks and long-term outcomes, and alternative treatments-must be delivered in a manner that promotes comprehension. The process is limited by: erroneous professional assumptions; poor quality of the initial evaluations; and inaccurate and incomplete information shared with patients and their parents. We discuss data on suicide and present the limitations of the Dutch studies that have been the basis for interventions. Beliefs about gender-affirmative care need to be separated from the established facts. A proper informed consent process can both prepare parents and patients for the difficult choices that they must make and can ease professionals' ethical tensions. Even when properly accomplished, however, some clinical circumstances exist that remain quite uncertain.

Research has often emphasised that children who experience difficulties in learning to read get poorer in their performance, and the gap between good and poor readers increases over time which describes the well-accepted phenomenon called the Mathew Effect. However, some studies have shown that the Matthew Effect has not been confirmed. In this study, the reading growth curves of Turkish-speaking children and the existence of the Matthew Effect in their performances were examined. For this purpose, the reading skills of 482 children were measured twice a year in the first and second grades. A quadratic growth model successfully fit the data to explain overall reading performance across four-time points. Further, three latent classes, named as good, moderate, and poor readers, were identified on the basis of individual trajectories. Accordingly, the difference in performance between good readers and poor readers continued in all time points. Although the difference between classes continued to increase especially in the second and third time points, and supported the Matthew Effect, it showed a horizontal slope in the fourth time point. This slope shows that reading differences between classes may close in the future. The results were discussed on the basis of Turkish sample.

IgA Nephropathy (IgAN) is common chronic kidney disease with a high incidence. This study aims to analyze comprehensively therapeutic clinical trials for IgAN registered on ClinicalTrials.gov.Therapeutic trials for IgAN registered on ClinicalTrials.gov. up to 15 August 2021 were obtained. The general characteristics, features of experimental design, treatment strategies, and some main inclusion criteria and outcome measures were accessed.A total of 104 therapeutic clinical trials for IgAN were extracted on ClinicalTrials.gov up to 15 August 2021. Most of these trials explored the treatment for primary IgAN confirmed by renal biopsy in adults. Only 9% of all selected trials had results. Forty-five percent of trials recruited 50 or fewer participants, and 73% were adults or older adults. 99% of trials were interventional studies, and of all the interventional trials, 70% of trials were randomized, and 68% exercised a parallel assignment of intervention model. Immunosuppression was the most studied for the treatment of IgAN. Moreover, many novel agents had been increasingly studied in recent years. Furthermore, the inclusion criteria and primary outcome measures in these trials were diverse, and the level of proteinuria and change of proteinuria levels were the most used as inclusion criteria and primary outcome, respectively.The majority of therapeutic trials for IgAN were randomized, none masking and parallel-assignment interventional studies, primarily recruiting adult patients as research subjects. These trials had relatively small sample sizes and short observation. Thus, more large-scale, multicenter, and randomized controlled trials are still needed to improve the management for IgAN.

This study explores literature reading and reception of narrative texts among Swedish middle school students. Through a written assignment and a think-aloud protocol, students’ comprehension and interpretation of narrative texts are investigated. The study shows that Swedish middle school students tend to focus mainly on the plot. The main comprehension hindrance is at the lexical level, but cultural aspects, such as general knowledge of the surrounding world, are also crucial. The students also tend to have difficulties interpreting the gaps in the text and making meaning from the implicit. However, the students are also capable of interpretations and conclusions that go beyond the text. The study suggests that literature teaching in middle school should strive to activate both syntagmatic and paradigmatic thinking [Bruner, J. (1986). Actual minds, possible words. Harvard University Press] to help students to a better comprehension of the literary text, but that the syntagmatic reading should be emphasised to encourage the joy of reading. Funding: Linkopings Universitet, Styrelsen for utbildningsvetenskap

Genuine engagement by academic staff and students in reflective practice in a time of great institutional pressure and a neo-liberal agenda for more metrics driven practice has become increasingly difficult to set time aside for. While more and more feedback is being requested on teaching practice, the quality, validity or reliability of this feedback is not always apparent. This case study explores a project developed at a small-medium sized institution, which aimed to provide an alternative rationale for lecturers to gain richer feedback about their teaching and student experience. The UK Engagement Survey was used in an original way as a reflective tool to increase the engagement with the survey itself and thus enhance the quality of the data. This article will outline the interactive, workshop-based nature of our approach and the effects this has had on the nature of the survey data and response rate.

This study explored whether age differences in task-specific metacomprehension accuracy are partly explained by age differences in generalized metacomprehension (GM) or the use of GM as a task-specific judgment anchor. GM was measured before and after a summarization and metacomprehension judgment task and then correlated with prediction judgment magnitude to assess anchoring, and correlated with comprehension and task-specific metacomprehension accuracy to assess GM accuracy. Age differences in these relationships were then tested. GM was related to judgment magnitude but despite age differences in GM ratings, age did not moderate anchoring or GM accuracy. Age differences in task-specific metacomprehension accuracy do not seem to be explained by age differences in GM accuracy or its use as a judgment anchor. However, results are the first to show that older adults anchor task-specific metacomprehension judgments on their GM, providing unique evidence for the Anchoring and Adjustment Model of Metacomprehension in advanced age.

This study aims to investigate adult L2 speakers’ use of different types of information in the comprehension of pragmatic inferences by examining L1-Mandarin Chinese L2-English speakers’ sensitivit...

During language comprehension, comprehenders build conceptual models of linguistic content. Despite their fundamental nature, relatively little is known about how plural expressions are realised in...

The goal of this study was to investigate whether the semantic processing of the audiovisual combination of communicative gestures with speech differs between men and women. We recorded event-related brain potentials in women and men during the presentation of communicative gestures that were either congruent or incongruent with the speech.Our results showed that incongruent gestures elicited an N400 effect over frontal sites compared to congruent ones in both groups. Moreover, the females showed an earlier N2 response to incongruent stimuli than congruent ones, while larger sustained negativity and late positivity in response to incongruent stimuli was observed only in males. These results suggest that women rapidly recognize and process audiovisual combinations of communicative gestures and speech (as early as 300 ms) whereas men analyze them at the later stages of the process.

This study aimed to profile the sublexical, lexical, and text level language skills, and cognitive processes of a sub-group of children with poor reading comprehension known as poor comprehenders. ...

With the purpose of promoting academic inclusion, it is essential for educators to understand the nature underlying poor reading comprehension in children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). In th...

How do laypeople understand meaning in life (MIL) and how are lay beliefs about MIL related to well-being in specific groups of laypeople? To address these questions, we recruited 417 adults and id...

International audience; Purpose:The aim of this study is to evaluate the influence of explanatory texts characteristics on comprehension performances in children from 2nd to 9th grade. Method: Several metrics have been applied to 40 explanatory texts, accounting for length, complexity and age accuracy. Children were asked to read an age-appropriate text, and answer questions evaluating surface, semantic and inferential dimensions of comprehension. Results: Results revealed that all group age obtained similar performances on surface questions, but younger children performed poorly in semantic and inferential questions in comparison to older ones, suggesting a weaker ability to rely on previous knowledge. Comprehension performances were also modulated by text characteristics. Principal Components Analysis identified metrics accounting for text coherence, namely number of words, word length and word frequency with 75% of variance explained. Multiple Regression Analysis allowed us to identify sentence length and word length as predictors of performances obtained at the surface and inferential questions. Conclusion: this research provides interesting evidence to increase our comprehension of explanatory text comprehension in French language for different grades. The results obtained should also be useful to develop further researches using text characteristics to predict readers' comprehension performances. . \textcopyright 2021 Society for the Scientific Study of Reading.

The animate–inanimate distinction is of crucial importance cognitively, and animacy has been known to influence language comprehension. However, little is known about the role of animacy in verb agreement processing. The present study employed event-related brain potentials to examine whether the gender agreement of the verb with animate (natural gender) and inanimate (grammatical gender) subject nouns reveal similar or different processing mechanisms in Hindi. Critical stimuli were intransitive sentences of the form subject–verb–aux. Subject nouns were either animate or inanimate, and the verb either showed correct gender agreement or violated it. The violation of gender agreement with animate subjects evoked a P600 effect, whereas gender agreement violation with inanimate subjects revealed a long-latency N400-like effect. The result suggests that different underlying mechanisms are involved in the computation of gender agreement with animate and inanimate arguments in Hindi, illustrating the crucial role that animacy plays in verb agreement processing.

The purpose of the present study was to investigate if following data-driven learning (DDL) to raise the learners’ awareness of discourse organizers through concordancing improves their comprehensi...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: The stress people experience in relation to a highly stressful event, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, can undermine their sense of meaning in life. This study examined the relationship between COVID-19 pandemic-related stress and meaning in life and whether self-compassion and savoring positive emotional experience moderated this relationship. METHODS: Participants (N = 498) completed measures of pandemic-related stress, dimensions of meaning in life (comprehension, purpose, mattering), self-compassion (self-kindness, common humanity, mindfulness), and savoring (savoring through anticipation, savoring the moment, savoring through reminiscence). RESULTS: Results of regression analyses showed that pandemic-related stress related to less meaning in life and that all dimensions of self-compassion and savoring (with the exception of savoring through reminiscence) related positively to a dimension of meaning in life. Only common humanity buffered the relationship between pandemic-related stress and a dimension of meaning in life (purpose) as expected. Unexpectedly, for people high on common humanity the relationship between pandemic-related stress and mattering was positive, and for people high on mindfulness, the relationship between pandemic-related stress and comprehension was negative. CONCLUSIONS: Although cross-sectional, this study's findings suggest that promoting common humanity might be important for protecting purpose and enhancing one's sense of mattering during a pandemic.

Asking questions about a text enhances comprehension whether the questions are self-generated by the reader or asked by another. Previous parent training studies have focused on Latino parents with...

Pandemics such as Covid-19 are often described in terms of “wars” or “waves” and “troughs.” But this imagery has its potential shortcomings, and therefore a great many researchers and commentators argue that we are thinking about the coronavirus pandemic the wrong way, suggesting replacing the war or ocean analogy with a better or particularly appropriate one, wildfire. Yet, the rarely asked question is: Where do Covid-19 metaphors come from? This type of metaphorical creativity, the so-called context-induced metaphors, has been somewhat systematically investigated in linguistic metaphor research, but not in the literature on nonverbal and multimodal metaphor. I argue that for context-induced creativity to be fully appreciated we need to move beyond verbal metaphors, or verbal manifestations of metaphor, and consider factors that commonly produce creative multimodal metaphors. Will the evidence from multimodality confirm or challenge the linguistic findings? There may be other major possible sources of metaphorical creativity, ones based more on visual or multimodal thinking, but which have not been identified before because data from non-linguistic behavior had not been examined. I thus show that there is a real gap in the literature in that respect and my study of political cartoons fills this both in terms of data and theory. In this article, I will limit myself to the discussion of six motivational forces or contextual factors (in no order of importance): (1) the immediate physical environment, (2) the immediate cultural context, (3) the immediate social setting, (4) knowledge about the major elements participating in the discourse, (5) physical resemblance between the source and target concepts, and (6) word plays and literalizations of famous proverbs and idioms in a language. Sometimes these factors work singly, but often in combination. It is argued that these kinds of context, albeit involved in discourse production and comprehension, do not control discourse as cognitive context models do. Particularly interesting is that among the thousands of books and articles on knowledge, so little is said on the discursive sources of knowledge (besides perception, personal experience, etc.), also about other cultures. The possible implications of this study for metaphor theory, multimodality, and intercultural communication are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Social Semiotics is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Although it has been scarcely investigated, personality might help shape language comprehension during social interaction. The aim is to investigate how differences in personality might affect morp...

This study synthesized impacts of integrated literacy and content-area instruction (i.e., science, social studies) on vocabulary and comprehension outcomes in the elementary years (i.e., kindergart...

Understanding emotions is an important predictor of children's mental health and school adjustment. However, interventions to improve this skill are not always accessible to all children. In 2019, Roy, Denommee, and Quenneville developed stories with content specifically designed to 'teach' about emotions. Because it is a literacy-oriented intervention, it is possible that vocabulary may play a role in learning. This project explored the role of vocabulary in understanding emotion in preschool children and its learning. Forty-three preschoolers (19 control and 24 experimental) were evaluated on vocabulary skills and emotion comprehension. For multiple components, results showed an effect of time of measure, regardless of group. However, the addition of receptive vocabulary as a covariate made this effect non-significant. Results revealed that the stories were an effective strategy in promoting emotion comprehension for Components Belief and Reminder; two skills that are in the process of development in this age group. Furthermore, vocabulary skills did not impact the interaction for Belief for post-test gains and, for Reminder, while emotional vocabulary skills impacted the interaction at post-test, receptive vocabulary did not.

This study examined 57 learners’ emotions (i.e., joy, anger, confusion, frustration) as they engaged with scientific content while learning about microbiology with Crystal Island, a game-based lear...

Background: Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) show difficulty in comprehension and production of the deictic verbs "come/go." Objective: To examine whether introducing conditions related to daily conversations into training would improve the use of deictic verbs. Methods: Six Japanese children with ASD participated. We set up multiple scenes where the questioner presented the sentence using "come/go" with/without deictic gestures, and children with ASD replied with "come/go." The conditions such as spatial relations between the two parties (face-to-face or side-by-side) and presentations of the gestures (moving one's arm toward or away from the body or moving one's upper body forward/backward) were introduced. Results: The appropriate use of deictic verbs during training and in daily life situations among children with ASD increased. Conclusions: Training children with ASD to look in the direction indicated by the questioner and to synchronize their bodies with the questioner's movements promotes their acquisition of deictic verbs.

Contains fulltext : 236005.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Open Access) Number sense and working memory contribute to mathematical development throughout primary school. However, it is still unclear how the contributions of each of these predictors may change across development and whether the cognitive contribution is the same for children with and without mathematical difficulties. The aim of the two studies in this paper was to shed light on these topics. In a cross-sectional design, a typically developing group of children (study 1; N = 459, Grades 1-4) and a group with mathematical difficulties (study 2; N = 61, Grades 4–6) completed a battery of number sense and working memory tests, as well as a measure of arithmetic competence. Results of study 1 indicated that number sense was important in first grade, while working memory gained importance in second grade, before predictive value of both predictors waned. Number sense and working memory supported mathematics development independently from one another from Grade 1. Analysis of task demands showed that typically developing children rely on comprehension and visualization of quantity-to-number associations in early development. Later in development, pupils rely on comparing larger numerals and working memory until automatization. Children with mathematical difficulties were less able to employ number sense during mathematical operations, and thus might remain dependent on their working memory resources during arithmetic tasks. This suggests that children with mathematical difficulties need aid to employ working memory for mathematics from an early age to be able to automatize mathematical abilities later in development. 28 p.

Language comprehension involves cognitive abilities that are specific to language as well as cognitive abilities that are more general and involved in a wide range of behaviors. One set of domain-general abilities that support language comprehension are executive functions (EFs), also known as cognitive control. A diverse body of research has demonstrated that EFs support language comprehension when there is conflict between competing, incompatible interpretations of temporarily ambiguous words or phrases. By engaging EFs, children and adults are able to select or bias their attention toward the correct interpretation. However, the degree to which language processing engages EFs in the absence of ambiguity is poorly understood. In the current experiment, we tested whether EFs may be engaged when comprehending speech that does not elicit conflicting interpretations. Different components of EFs were measured using several behavioral tasks and language comprehension was measured using an eye-tracking procedure. Five-year-old children (n = 56) saw pictures of familiar objects and heard sentences identifying the objects using either their names or colors. After a series of objects were identified using one dimension, children were significantly less accurate in fixating target objects that were identified using a second dimension. Further results reveal that this decrease in accuracy does not occur because children struggle to shift between dimensions, but rather because they are unable to predict which dimension will be used. These effects of predictability are related to individual differences in children’s EFs. Taken together, these findings suggest that EFs may be more broadly involved when children comprehend language, even in instances that do not require conflict resolution.

This study examines differences in English language comprehension, reading fluency, and executive functions among Spanish-English bilinguals with reading difficulties. Reading difficulties examined...

This study examines the efficacy, cost, and implementation of an integrated science and literacy curriculum for kindergarten. The study was conducted in a large urban district and included 1,589 st...

Sentence comprehension can be facilitated when readers anticipate the upcoming word. Notwithstanding, it remains uncertain if only the most expected word is anticipated, as postulated by the serial...

The movement to decolonise global health is gathering pace. In its concern with the fundamental, distal causes of inequality and its call for social justice, the decolonisation movement forces us to question how global health works, for whom, where it is located, its funding practices, power asymmetries, cultures of collaboration and publication. This paper uses a new book by Harvard-based physician-anthropologist Eugene T. Richardson, Epidemic Illusions, as a point of departure for a broader analysis of the nature of global health knowledge, science, authorship, research and practice. Written in a 'carnivalesque' style, the book proceeds through a series of 'ironic (re)descriptions' to argue that global public health is an 'apparatus of coloniality'. In so doing, the book is generative of four ironic turns that we explore through the themes of guilt, humility, privilege and ambiguity. In locating these ironic turns within the broader landscape of global health, we reflect on whether the means of such a book achieve the ends of decolonisation.

Students’ difficulties in scientific argumentation have been widely reported in the literature. Researchers argue that these difficulties result mainly from students’ lack of understanding of the g...

Learning words in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and story retelling was tested using an e-book with dictionary. One hundred and sixty-three Arabic-speaking kindergartners were randomly divided into ...

One potential contributor to student achievement that has garnered recent attention is students' mindset. A recent review of the literature on the effect of a growth mindset intervention on student...

This research explores the use of online graphic narratives (a.k.a. comics) in consumer health promotion. More specifically, the study evaluates the persuasive power of online graphic narratives to communicate type 2 diabetes information, relative to other traditional health communication media such as videos and blogs. A framework including four variables related to narrative processing - narrative transportation, affective response, narrative comprehension, and message comprehension - is proposed. This model compares the effects of the three online media - graphic narrative, video and blog- on consumer persuasion. Overall, the study demonstrates that graphic narratives are more persuasive for health promotion than videos and blogs.

Students with learning disabilities in reading often have difficulty with comprehension. Four participants with learning disabilities, ages 16 and 17, were assessed in listening comprehension to de...

Although Talmud study is central to rabbinical school curriculums, rabbinical students’ experiences with Talmud study remain understudied. This article draws on interviews with students from five s...

This study explored how pre-K children process an e-book with narration through eye movements, and also the effects of visual cues on preschoolers’ visual attention to text, word recognition, and c...

We studied the effect of learning two symmetrical verbal relations in areading comprehension task. We explored emergence of intraverbals after 7- and 8-year-old children read ashort text with sente...

The comprehension of German political economy in the 19th century has been influenced by the so called Sonderweg thesis, which emphasises German “exceptionalism”. This interpretation points to the ...

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a complex pathology that includes impaired social interaction abilities. Insufficient attention has been paid to programs specifically devoted to improving communicative-pragmatic skills. Moreover, the majority of studies have focused on children, while programs specifically developed for the adolescents are lacking. The present study aims to test the feasibility and acceptability of the adapted version of the Cognitive Pragmatic Treatment for adolescents (A-CPT), a 15-session group training, as well as its ability to improve the communicative-pragmatic performance of adolescents with ASD. Twenty-one verbally fluent adolescents with ASD took part in the training; they were assessed in three phases, i.e., before, after and at three-month follow-up, using the equivalent forms of the Assessment Battery for Communication (ABaCo), a tool for testing a wide range of pragmatic phenomena, such as direct and indirect speech acts, irony, deceit and violation of Grice’s maxims, expressed through linguistic, non-verbal, i.e., gestures, or paralinguistic expressive means. Furthermore, Theory of Mind (ToM) tasks and tests investigating the main cognitive domains, for example, Executive Functions (planning, shifting, working memory) and long-term memory, were administered. The results showed an improvement in participants’ performance in all the four scales of the ABaCo, i.e., linguistic, extralinguistic, paralinguistic and context scale; this improvement was maintained at follow-up assessment three months after the end of the program. No improvement was observed in the cognitive and ToM domains investigated, with the only exception of expressive vocabulary task. Despite the lack of a control group, the high degree of feasibility of the CPT, highlight the importance of more work needed in this research line.

Repeated reading (RR) is an established and extensively researched intervention which has been shown to improve reading fluency and comprehension. However, past reviews have found the rigor of the ...

While studies on online learning have been extensive, it remains unclear, however, how educators engage themselves in the sudden shift to online/remote learning or distance education because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Specifically, there is a lacuna in the literature concerning English language teachers’ perceptions of the shift from the classroom to online teaching. To date, in the Philippines, no single study exists, which has examined the same or related focus. Thus, through a survey and focus group discussions among 38 Filipino university teachers of English, this study explores how English language teachers view the problems, advantages and disadvantages, and points for improvement in flexible learning (FL) amidst the pandemic. Findings indicated that most of the problems were minor. However, the most crucial concerns include comprehension of learning content, student engagement, and internet connectivity, which were likewise claimed by the participants as disadvantages of FL. The analysis also revealed two benefits: convenience, and enhancement of teaching and learning. Further, the participants emphasized the following suggestions to improve FL: planning, implementation, and monitoring of school administration; provision of adequate internet and technological resources; and capacity-building and trainings.

The coherence threshold marks the point at which a reader has gained a sufficient comprehension level to move on in a text. Previous research has demonstrated that the readers’ coherence threshold ...

Virtual Reality (VR) allows for an active learning environment that can enhance a student’s comprehension of material. This research explores the actual and perceived benefit of introducing a VR si...

There is resounding evidence of the existence of direct precursors of written language, most specifically phonological awareness, letter knowledge, vocabulary, and oral comprehension. The initial d...

Many languages encode phi-features via overt morphology, yet children’s use of this morphology in comprehension tasks varies widely. Here, we use a picture-selection task to test comprehension of S...

In order to comprehend the attributes of expert teachers, the current study investigated professional identity (PI) and related metacognitive thinking procedures of experienced Korean teachers of E...