Learning to Learn: A pilot study on explicit strategy instruction to incoming college students.

The current pilot study implemented a "Learning to Learn" (L2L) course designed to teach first-year college students about the science of how learning works, how to take ownership of their own learning, and how to effectively apply learning strategies to achieve their academic goals. A cognitive apprenticeship model was used in which students planned, executed, and evaluated strategy use in vivo during the course. Two sections of the course were taught at each of two different institutions, distributed across four semesters. Quantitative data showed an increased growth mindset among L2L students at the end of the semester compared to the beginning of the semester. In contrast, first-year students surveyed from control groups in the same semester had a decreased growth mindset. Furthermore, compared to students in the control groups, students in the L2L courses maintained more stable levels of effort across the semester and felt more in control of their learning by the end of the semester. Qualitative data collected from focus groups indicated that the L2L students continued to use the strategies they had learned in the course in the subsequent semester, and that the changes in their perceptions about growth mindset continued beyond the duration of the course. Several L2L students noted a desire for the learning strategies to be taught earlier in their education. Next steps involve feasibility studies on appropriate scaling to support more undergraduates each year, and to support students during the critical transition from K-12 schooling to the college environment.

Effects of changes in narrative time on eye movements and recognition responses.

In two experiments we examined how temporal aspects of narrative events influence comprehension. In Experiment 1 participants read paragraphs in which a critical event was followed by a phrase that signaled a time shift (After an hour versus After a moment). Consistent with earlier findings (e.g., Zwaan, 1996), fixation durations were longer on the phrase that signaled a larger time shift. However, there was no evidence that a larger time shift affected the accessibility of event information in Experiment 1, when the dependent measure was ease of anaphor comprehension, or in Experiment 2, when a recognition probe task was used. Although the discontinuation of an event (Maurice stopped versus was painting) did not affect anaphor reading times, it did lead to longer recognition times for the event. These results indicate that at least some event aspects remain accessible following a change in time and that the dependent measure can have a critical impact on the conclusions.

Lexical embeddings produce interference when they are morphologically unrelated to the words in which they are contained: Evidence from eye movements.

Many words in the English language contain semantically and morphologically unrelated smaller words (e.g., room in groom). Recent findings indicate that a high frequency embedded word produces interference during visual word identification (e.g., Bowers, Davis, & Hanley, 2005; Davis, Perea, & Acha, 2009; Davis & Taft, 2005). In an eye movement experiment we examined whether lexical embeddings produce interference even when explicit judgments about lexicality or category membership are not solicited. Participants silently read sentences that each contained a target word with a lexical embedding. Fixation times were longer on target words that contained a higher frequency embedding compared to those that contained a lower frequency embedding. This finding indicates that a high frequency embedding interferes with word identification during silent reading and adds to a growing body of evidence that a word's orthographic neighborhood includes embedded words.

On the norming of homophones.

Associative norms for homographs have been widely used in the study of language processing. A number of sets of these are available, providing the investigator with the opportunity to compare materials collected over a span of years and a range of locations. Words that are homophonic but not homographic have been used to address a variety of questions in memory as well as in language processing. However, a paucity of normative data are available for these materials, especially with respect to responses to the spoken form of the homophone. This article provides such data for a sample of 207 homophones across four different tasks, both visual and auditory, and examines how well the present measures correlate with each other and with those of other investigators. The finding that these measures can account for a considerable proportion of the variance in the lexical decision and naming data from the English Lexicon Project provides an additional demonstration of their utility. The norms from this study are available online in the Psychonomic Society Archive of Norms, Stimuli, and Data, at www .psychonomic.org/archive.

Repeating phrases across unrelated narratives: evidence of text repetition effects.

Research has shown that text repetition effects are limited to conditions in which the context remains consistent across the two processing episodes, particularly when readers are focused on comprehension. Despite this, we found evidence of transfer effects across unrelated narratives. In a repeated condition, an ambiguous phrase appeared in two consecutive stories. In Story A, the phrase was presented in a sarcasm-biasing context, and in Story B, the phrase was presented in a neutral context. The pattern of findings from an offline measure (Experiment 1) and a reading time measure (Experiments 2, 3, and 4) indicated that participants were more likely to interpret the phrase in Story B as sarcastic in the repeated version than in a nonrepeated version, in which the phrase was absent from Story A. We conclude that during the reading of Story B, the phrase was reactivated from memory, even though the two stories were unrelated.

Perspective taking during reading: an on-line investigation of the illusory transparency of intention.

Although proficient readers must be reasonably successful at keeping track of what information they share with characters and what information is privileged to them, there is evidence that they are unable to do so with complete accuracy. Keysar (1994) used off-line tasks to demonstrate that readers sometimes mistakenly use privileged information when evaluating a character's interpretation of an ambiguous message. After we replicated Keysar's (1994) findings (Experiment 1), the results of an on-line task indicated that this "illusory transparency of intention" extends to natural reading (Experiment 2). In Experiment 3, we provided preliminary support for the hypothesis that readers' accuracy in assessing a given character's perspective is influenced by whether or not that character is in the focus of the story. The results are discussed with regard to two competing theoretical views: the construal view and the standard view.

Readers' sensitivity to linguistic cues in narratives: how salience influences anaphor resolution.

Despite the general assumption that anaphoric inferences are necessary inferences, Levine, Guzmán, and Klin (2000) concluded that the probability of resolving noun phrase anaphors depends both on the degree of accessibility in memory of the antecedent concepts and the extent to which resolution is necessary to create a coherent discourse representation. Four experiments are presented in which the factors that influence readers' standard of coherence are investigated. We examine the hypothesis that readers are more likely to resolve anaphors that are perceived as salient; salience was manipulated both with a syntactic focusing structure (wh- clefts) and with the addition of prenominal adjectival modifiers. The results of a probe recognition time task provide support for the hypothesis that a variety of linguistic cues serve as mental processing instructions (Givón, 1992), which instruct readers as to how much attention to devote to processing.