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Over the past 20 years, a significant amount of research has located sports coaching principally as an educational endeavour. In particular, non-linear educative approaches have attracted much attention yet few studies have explored in any real depth the theoretical underpinnings of such practices. Where conceptual analyses have been conducted, the work of Vygotsky has emerged as a useful framework. The aim of the present study was to investigate the extent to which Vygotskian principles of learning and development might be evident within non-linear sports coaching practices and to examine whether embracing these principles might enhance coaching practice both in youth and adult settings. Drawing on qualitative empirical data, this paper explores how six coaches perceived their everyday practice as non-linear. Resultant findings uncover the nuances of both coach and athlete experience in line with three of Vygotsky's key theoretical assertions, namely: Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD), scaffolding and mediation. The paper concludes by suggesting that the application of theoretical ideas has the potential to inform and enhance non-linear pedagogical approaches, yet coaches must remain cognisant of the bespoke nature of the coaching context.

The study purpose was to assess preliminary validity and reliability of the Physical Education and School Sport Environment Inventory (PESSEI), which was designed to audit physical education (PE) and school sport spaces and resources. PE teachers from eight English secondary schools completed the PESSEI. Criterion validity was assessed by researcher observations of schools' spaces and facilities. To measure test-retest reliability, teachers completed the PESSEI twice within 14 days. Pearson's correlations for teacher and researcher observations ranged from r = 0.8 through 0.99. Test-retest reliability was also very high (intraclass correlation coefficients = 0.93 through 1.0). Limits of agreement were acceptable for all variables with the exception of indoor spatial area. Results support the potential of the PESSEI as an objective measure of the school physical environment. To confirm these initial findings, further validity and reliability analyses are required in differing school contexts. (Contains 1 figure and 4 tables.)

Signed languages exploit the visual/gestural modality to create iconic expression across a wide range of basic conceptual structures in which the phonetic resources of the language are built up into an analogue of a mental image (Taub, 2001). Previously, we demonstrated a processing advantage when iconic properties of signs were made salient in a corresponding picture during a picture and sign matching task (Thompson, Vinson, & Vigliocco, 2009). The current study investigates the extent of iconicity effects with a phonological decision task (does the sign involve straight or curved fingers?) in which the meaning of the sign is irrelevant. The results show that iconicity is a significant predictor of response latencies and accuracy, with more iconic signs leading to slower responses and more errors. We conclude that meaning is activated automatically for highly iconic properties of a sign, and this leads to interference in making form-based decisions. Thus, the current study extends previous work by demonstrating that iconicity effects permeate the entire language system, arising automatically even when access to meaning is not needed. (Contains 5 footnotes and 2 figures.)

This study investigated whether the semantic similarity and grammatical class of distracter words affects the naming of pictured actions (verbs) in Japanese. Three experiments used the picture-word interference paradigm with participants naming picturable actions while ignoring distracters. In all three experiments, we manipulated the semantic similarity between distracters and targets (similar vs. dissimilar verbs) and the grammatical class of semantically dissimilar distracters (verbs, verbal nouns, and also nouns in Experiment 3) in addition to task demands (single word naming vs. phrase/sentence generation). While Experiment 1 used visually presented distracters, Experiment 2 and 3 used auditory distracter words to rule out possible confounding factors of orthography (kanji vs. hiragana). We found the same results for all three experiments: robust semantic interference in the absence of any effects of grammatical class. We discuss the lack of grammatical class effects in terms of structural characteristics of the Japanese language. (Contains 3 figures, 3 tables and 12 footnotes.)