RESUMEN
This study investigated the role of theme-based blocks play in enhancing Chinese children's language capacity with a quasi-experiment. Altogether 61 young children were assigned to the experiment group (M age = 5.83, SD = 0.25, 56.25% girls) and the control group (M age = 5.87, SD = 0.28, 51.72% girls). The experiment group was engaged in a 12-week theme-based block play intervention programs, whereas the control group received no interventions but free block play during the parallel time sessions. All the children were tested with the Language Assessment for Preschool Children (LAPC) before and after the intervention. The ANCOVA results indicated that the experimental group significantly improved in LAPC test, whereas the control group showed no significant change. The educational implications of these findings are discussed.
RESUMEN
This study investigated the effects of the teaching block-building intervention on overall spatial representation and its three sub-forms, namely linguistic, graphic and model representations, in kindergartners. Eighty-four children (39 girls and 45 boys), aged 5-6 years old, were randomly selected and equally divided into two groups, i.e., experimental group and control group. The experimental group received the intervention of teaching block-building for 14 weeks (45 min each time, once a week), while children in the control group freely played with blocks for the equivalent time. Children's spatial representation performances were measured in both pre- and post-tests by the Experimental Tasks of Spatial Representation for Children. The results showed that: (1) teaching block-building could promote not only the overall spatial representation but also all three sub-forms of spatial representations; (2) there was no gender differences regarding the effect of teaching block-building on neither the overall nor three sub-forms of spatial representations; (3) after the intervention, the diversity of children's choices regarding the use of sub-forms spatial representations was also promoted in the experimental group. In summary, these results contributed to a comprehensive and systematic understanding of the effects of teaching block-building on spatial representation among children in kindergartens.
RESUMEN
Although there has been extensive research on the processing of the emotional meaning of music, little is known about other aspects of listeners' experience of music. The present study investigated the neural correlates of the iconic meaning of music. Event-related potentials (ERP) were recorded while a group of 20 music majors and a group of 20 non-music majors performed a lexical decision task in the context of implicit musical iconic meaning priming. ERP analysis revealed a significant N400 effect of congruency in time window 260-510 ms following the onset of the target word only in the group of music majors. Time-course analysis using 50 ms windows indicated significant N400 effects both within the time window 410-460 ms and 460-510 ms for music majors, whereas only a partial N400 effect during time window 410-460 ms was observed for non-music majors. There was also a trend for the N400 effects in the music major group to be stronger than those in the non-major group in the sub-windows of 310-360 ms and 410-460 ms. Especially in the sub-window of 410-460 ms, the topographical map of the difference waveforms between congruent and incongruent conditions revealed different N400 distribution between groups; the effect was concentrated in bilateral frontal areas for music majors, but in central-parietal areas for non-music majors. These results imply probable neural mechanism differences underlying automatic iconic meaning priming of music. Our findings suggest that processing of the iconic meaning of music can be accomplished automatically and that musical training may facilitate the understanding of the iconic meaning of music.