The acquisition of complex motor, cognitive, and social skills, like playing a musical instrument or mastering sports or a language, is generally associated with implicit skill learning . Although it is a general view that SL is most effective in childhood, and such skills are best acquired if learning starts early, this idea has rarely been tested by systematic empirical studies on the developmental pathways of SL from childhood to old age. In this paper, we challenge the view (...) that childhood and early school years are the prime time for skill learning by tracking age-related changes in performance in three different paradigms of SL. We collected data from participants between 7 and 87 years for a Serial Reaction Time Task testing the learning of motor sequences, an Artificial Grammar Learning task testing the extraction of regularities from auditory sequences, and Probabilistic Category Learning in the Weather Prediction task , a non-sequential categorization task. Results on all three tasks show that adolescence and adulthood are the most efficient periods for skill learning, since instead of becoming less and less effective with age, SL improves from childhood into adulthood and then later declines with aging. (shrink)

Testing is an effective learning method, and it is the basis of mobile quiz apps. Quiz apps have the potential to facilitate remote and self-regulated learning. In this context, automatized feedback plays a crucial role. In two experimental studies, we examined the effects of two feedback types of quiz apps on performance, namely, the standard corrective feedback of quiz apps and a feedback that incorporates additional information related to the correct response option. We realized a controlled lab setting (...) (n= 68, Study 1) and an unsupervised mobile setting (n= 150, Study 2). In the learning phase, participants used the quiz app and received feedback. They also completed a subsequent test as well as a follow-up test 1 week later by using the same quiz app. Irrespective of feedback type and setting, cognitive outcomes (quiz scores) and metacognitive outcomes (response certainty) increased similarly in the short term and long term. Feedback effects were not moderated by participants' overall response certainty during learning, their prior knowledge, and the difficulty of quiz items. Moreover, we found that participants perceived the quiz app to be similarly attractive, interesting, and enjoyable in both feedback conditions and that they spent slightly more time to process quiz items in the lab setting. We discuss these results in detail, including the role of moderating and mediating factors and prospects for further research and practice. Overall, our results underline that quiz apps are useful and effective tools that can support the acquisition and retention of semantic knowledge in different learning settings. (shrink)

How to reduce pupils’ burden and improve learning efficiency? Research shows that non-intelligence factors and learning strategies are the key factors in the effective learning process, and external intervention can play a greater role in these two aspects. The purpose of this study is to explore the effects of different learning strategies on learning motivation under the presentation of augmented reality multimedia or traditional text learning. Sixty third-grade pupils in Hebei Province were selected, and (...) 2 × 3 between-subjects design was adopted. The dependent variable is learning motivation, which includes three dimensions: surface motivation, deep motivation and achievement motivation. The results showed that Learning strategies had a significant impact on deep motivation. The deep motivation aroused by retrieval practicing strategies was significantly higher than that aroused by restudying strategies and self-generated drawing strategies. The interaction between learning materials and learning strategies was marginally significant. When learning with AR materials, the achievement motivation of pupils in the restudying strategy group was higher than that in the retrieval practicing strategy group. Retrieval practicing strategies have positive significance in cultivating deep motivation. The combination of different learning modes and learning strategies will impact achievement motivation. (shrink)

In typical statistical learning studies, researchers define sequences in terms of the probability of the next item in the sequence given the current item (or items), and they show that high probability sequences are treated as more familiar than low probability sequences. Existing accounts of these phenomena all assume that participants represent statistical regularities more or less as they are defined by the experimenters—as sequential probabilities of symbols in a string. Here we offer an alternative, or possibly supplementary, hypothesis. (...) Specifically, rather than identifying or labeling individual stimuli discretely in order to predict the next item in a sequence, we need only assume that the participant is able to represent the stimuli as evincing particular similarity relations to one another, with sequences represented as trajectories through this similarity space. We present experiments in which this hypothesis makes sharply different predictions from hypotheses based on the assumption that sequences are learned over discrete, labeled stimuli. We also present a series of simulation models that encode stimuli as positions in a continuous two‐dimensional space, and predict the next location from the current location. Although no model captures all of the data presented here, the results of three critical experiments are more consistent with the view that participants represent trajectories through similarity space rather than sequences of discrete labels under particular conditions. (shrink)

Cross-situational statistical learning of words involves tracking co-occurrences of auditory words and objects across time to infer word-referent mappings. Previous research has demonstrated that learners can infer referents across sets of very phonologically distinct words, but it remains unknown whether learners can encode fine phonological differences during cross-situational statistical learning. This study examined learners’ cross-situational statistical learning of minimal pairs that differed on one consonant segment, minimal pairs that differed on one vowel segment, and non-minimal pairs that (...) differed on two or three segments. Learners performed above chance for all pairs, but performed worse on vowel minimal pairs than on consonant minimal pairs or non-minimal pairs. These findings demonstrate that learners can encode fine phonetic detail while tracking word-referent co-occurrence probabilities, but they suggest that phonological encoding may be weaker for vowels than for consonants. (shrink)

The sudden outbreak of COVID-19 has made blended learning widely accepted, followed by many studies committed to blended learning outcomes and student attitudes. Few studies have, however, focused on the summarized effect of blended learning. To complement this missing link, this study meta-analytically reviews blended learning outcomes and student attitudes by including 30 peer-reviewed journal articles and 70 effect sizes. It concludes that blended learning outcomes are significantly higher than the traditional learning outcomes with (...) a medium effect size, and learners hold significantly more positive attitudes toward blended learning than traditional learning with a medium effect size. Blended learning may be promising, and information technology scientists may focus on the development of more advanced and effective devices to improve blended learning effectiveness. (shrink)

The present study aimed at investigating the motivational factors affecting Iranian learners’ learning of English as a Foreign Language across differing levels of language proficiency. To this end, 110 males and 70 females with an age range of 18–31 took part in the study and a mixed-methods approach was adopted. First, the researchers administered Oxford Placement Test to determine the proficiency level of the participants and placed them into three levels of language proficiency. Elementary, intermediate, and advanced. Next, as (...) for the quantitative part of the study, the Attitude/Motivation Test Battery questionnaire was distributed among all the participants to delve into the motivational factors. Finally, a semi-structured interview was conducted to qualitatively probe into EFL learners’ motivational factors affecting their learning of English. It was found that the motivational factors which encouraged EFL learners resulted from either intrinsic or extrinsic tendencies. The recognized intrinsically-based motivational factors were personal enjoyment, social prestige, and being challenged. The extrinsically-oriented factors as the source of motivation to learn English were getting a job, pursuing education, earning more money, traveling to foreign countries, pursuing academic careers, making efficient use of technology, and effectively interacting with native speakers. It was concluded that beginner and intermediate English language learners tended to learn English more based on extrinsic factors whereas advanced learners were found to be more intrinsically motivated. (shrink)

ObjectiveThis systematic review aims to analyze existing literature of the effects of transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) on motor skills learning of healthy adults and discuss the underlying neurophysiological mechanism that influences motor skills learning.MethodsThis systematic review has followed the recommendations of the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses. The PubMed, EBSCO, and Web of Science databases were systematically searched for relevant studies that were published from database inception to May 2022. Studies were included based on (...) the Participants, Intervention, Comparison, Outcomes, and Setting inclusion strategy. The risk of bias was evaluated by using the Review manager 5.4 tool. The quality of each study was assessed with the Physiotherapy Evidence Database (PEDro) scale.ResultsThe electronic search produced 142 studies. Only 11 studies were included after filtering. These studies performed well in terms of distribution, blinding availability and selective reporting. They reported that tDCS significantly improved motor skills learning. The main outcomes measure were the improvement of the motor sequence tasks and specific motor skills. Nine studies showed that tDCS interventions reduced reaction time to complete motor sequence tasks in healthy adults and two studies showed that tDCS interventions improved golf putting task performance.ConclusionThe included studies showed that tDCS can help healthy adults to improve the motor skills learning by activating different brain regions, such as the primary motor cortex, left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and right cerebellum. However, the number of included studies was limited, and the sample sizes were small. Therefore, more studies are urgently needed to validate the results of current studies and further explore the underlying neurophysiological mechanisms of tDCS in the future. (shrink)

Past experience with video games and cognitive abilities have been hypothesized to independently facilitate a greater ability to learn new video games and other complex tasks. The present study was conducted to examine this “learning to learn” hypothesis. We examined the predictive effects of gaming habits and cognitive abilities on learning of two novel video games in 107 participants. One video game was from the action genre, and the other was from the strategy genre. Hours spent gaming per (...) week and working memory were found to specifically predict learning of the novel strategy video game, after controlling for the effects of age, gender, and action game learning. In contrast, self-identification as a “gamer” was the only specific significant predictor of action game learning, after controlling for the effects of age, gender, and strategy game learning. Age of the participant negatively impacted learning of both games; however, the pattern of the predictive relationships on both action and strategy game learning was not moderated by age. Importantly, a preference for the action versus the strategy game genre had no differential effects on learning of the two novel games, nor were there any gender differences in identification as a gamer or genre preference. Findings from this study suggest that while past gaming experience and cognition do appear to influence the learning of novel video games, these effects are selective to the game genre studied and are not as broad as the “learning to learn” model suggests. (shrink)

We report on rapid perceptual learning of intonation contour categories in adults and 9- to 11-year-old children. Intonation contours are temporally extended patterns, whose perception requires temporal integration and therefore poses significant working memory challenges. Both children and adults form relatively abstract representations of intonation contours: Previously encountered and novel exemplars are categorized together equally often, as long as distance from the prototype is controlled. However, age-related differences in categorization performance also exist. Given the same experience, adults form narrower (...) categories than children. In addition, adults pay more attention to the end of the contour, while children appear to pay equal attention to the beginning and the end. The age range we examine appears to capture the tail-end of the developmental trajectory for learning intonation contour categories: There is a continuous effect of age on category breadth within the child group, but the oldest children are adult-like. (shrink)

One of the most challenging tasks when adopting Bayesian networks is the one of learning their structure from data. This task is complicated by the huge search space of possible solutions and by the fact that the problem isNP-hard. Hence, a full enumeration of all the possible solutions is not always feasible and approximations are often required. However, to the best of our knowledge, a quantitative analysis of the performance and characteristics of the different heuristics to solve this problem (...) has never been done before. For this reason, in this work, we provide a detailed comparison of many different state-of-the-art methods for structural learning on simulated data considering both BNs with discrete and continuous variables and with different rates of noise in the data. In particular, we investigate the performance of different widespread scores and algorithmic approaches proposed for the inference and the statistical pitfalls within them. (shrink)

Down syndrome (DS) impacts several brain regions including the hippocampus and surrounding structures that have responsibility for important aspects of navigation and wayfinding. Hence it is reasonable to expect that DS may result in a reduced ability to engage in these skills. Two experiments are reported that evaluated route-learning of youth with DS, youth with intellectual disability (ID) and not DS, and typically developing (TD) children matched on mental age (MA). In both experiments, participants learned routes with eight choice (...) point presented via computer. Several objects were placed along the route that could be used as landmarks. Participants navigated the route once with turn indicators pointing the way and then retraced the route without them. In Experiment 1 we found that the TD children and ID participants performed very similarly. They learned the route in the same number of attempts, committed the same number of errors while learning the route, and recalled approximately the same number of landmarks. The participants with DS performed significantly worse on both measures of navigation (attempts and errors) and also recalled significantly fewer landmarks. In Experiment 2, we attempted to reduce TD and ID vs DS differences by focusing participants’ attention on the landmarks. Half of the participants in each group were instructed to identify the landmarks as they passed them the first time. The participants with DS again committed more errors than the participants in the ID and TD groups in the navigation task. In addition, they recalled fewer landmarks. While landmark identification improved landmark memory for both groups, it did not have a significant impact on navigation. Participants with DS still performed more poorly than did the TD and ID participants. Of additional interest, we observed that the performance of persons with DS correlated with different ability measures than did the performance of the other groups. The results the two experiments point to a problem in navigation for persons with DS that exceeds expectations based solely on intellectual level. (shrink)

The pig sector is struggling with negative attitudes of citizens. This may be the result of conflicting attitudes toward pig husbandry between citizens and other stakeholders. To obtain knowledge about these attitudes, the objectives of this study were to determine and compare attitudes of various stakeholders toward animals, humans and the environment in the context of pig husbandry and to determine and compare the acceptability of publically discussed issues related to pig husbandry of various stakeholders. A questionnaire was distributed to (...) citizens, conventional pig farmers, organic pig farmers, pig husbandry advisors and pig veterinarians. Respondents could indicate their attitude toward aspects related to animals, humans and the environment in the context of pig husbandry and they could indicate their opinion about the acceptability of issues of pig husbandry, e.g. piglet mortality and inside pig housing. Based on measured attitudes and the acceptability of issues, the studied stakeholders could be divided into three distinctive groups. The group of citizens and organic pig farmers showed negative attitudes toward all aspects of pig husbandry, the group of conventional pig farmers and pig husbandry advisors only showed negative attitudes toward aspects related to economics and the group of pig veterinarians showed negative attitudes to specific aspects of pig husbandry. This indicates that stakeholders have different interests and different perspectives with regard to pig husbandry. The pig sector should learn to understand citizens’ perspectives and take these into account in their line of work, the implementation of animal welfare measures and in their communication. (shrink)

This paper contrasts the personal experiences of a man with learning disabilities and autism with staff in two different settings: a long-stay institution for people with learning disabilities, and the community. These experiences highlight some of the potential personal, professional and ethical conflicts facing staff working in learning disability services.

Regarding awareness as a consistent concept has contributed to the controversy about implicit learning. The present study emphasized the importance of distinguishing aspects of awareness in order to determine whether learning is implicit. By decomposing awareness into awareness of contingencies, of the procedure being a learning task, and of the reinforcing stimuli, it was demonstrated that implicit operant learning modulated pain sensitivity. All of these aspects of awareness were demonstrated to not be necessary for learning. (...) Additionally, discrimination of contingencies was not necessary on different levels of processing as demonstrated by a verbal and a behavioral method. It was demonstrated that explicit cognitive processes about one’s own behavior, impaired learning, even though these cognitions were not immediately related to the learning process. The results of this study are of special interest in the context of pain, since implicit operant learning can explain the gradual development of hypersensitivity in chronic pain. (shrink)

Easy and cheap access to the Internet and a wide array of new technologies, such as smartphones, have multiplied opportunities for online informal learning of English. Yet, despite sizeable research, few studies have examined the issue of OILE in the context of university students of different disciplines. The aim of this research study was to examine the role of online language use through smartphones among students of various disciplines and its possible effects on enhancement of their foreign language skills. (...) The study assumed both qualitative and quantitative methodology encompassing three research instruments: an online survey, the self-assessment language competence grid of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages and a semi-structured interview. Data were collected with 377 students from two universities: University of Białystok, Poland and University of Osijek, Croatia. The research outcomes indicate that both Croatian and Polish students of different disciplines use their smartphones chiefly for receptive activities with infrequent use for language learning purposes and the predominant use of the mother tongue or English for the listed online activities through smartphones do not significantly affect the self-assessed level of their communicative competence in English. However, it can be stated that the choice of the preponderant language for online use through smartphones, especially for study-related issues, is conditioned by the students’ discipline of study. (shrink)

Learner control is an important instructional design in video-based learning. This study assessed two conditions: a full learner control where learners direct their learning path, and a hybrid learner control where learners follow the instructor-set path but still enjoy certain aspects of control. Two groups of university students participated in this study by learning statistics through online video courses. The findings show that the full learner control condition attained higher learning performance than the hybrid learner control (...) condition, but spent more time than the latter. The full learner control condition scored higher than the hybrid condition in the difficult sections of video-based learning; but no significant difference was found in the easy section. There was a significant difference between the two conditions in learning agency, but no differences in cognitive load and affective and cognitive engagement. Hierarchical regression analysis indicated differences between the full and the hybrid learner control conditions in the factors predicting overall scores. The findings carry important contributions and implications for the research and practice of instructional designs in online video-based learning such as MOOCs. (shrink)

An intelligent model of the incremental capacity curve of an automotive lithium-ferrophosphate battery is presented. The relative heights of the two major peaks of the IC curve can be acquired from high-current discharges, thus enabling the state of health estimation of the battery while the vehicle is being operated and in certain cases, aging mechanisms can be suggested. Our model has been validated using a large dataset representing different degradation scenarios, obtained from a recently available open-source database.

This paper is an attempt to answer the charge that extreme moral particularism is unable to explain the possibility of moral concepts and our ability to acquire them. This charge is based on the claim that we acquire moral concepts from experience of instances, and that the sorts of similarities that there must be between the instances are ones that only a generalist can countenance. I argue that this inference is unsound.

Two experiments were conducted to examine adult learners' ability to extract multiple statistics in simultaneously presented visual and auditory input. Experiment 1 used a cross‐situational learning paradigm to test whether English speakers were able to use co‐occurrences to learn word‐to‐object mappings and concurrently form object categories based on the commonalities across training stimuli. Experiment 2 replicated the first experiment and further examined whether speakers of Mandarin, a language in which final syllables of object names are more predictive of category (...) membership than English, were able to learn words and form object categories when trained with the same type of structures. The results indicate that both groups of learners successfully extracted multiple levels of co‐occurrence and used them to learn words and object categories simultaneously. However, marked individual differences in performance were also found, suggesting possible interference and competition in processing the two concurrent streams of regularities. (shrink)

In preparing to write this paper, I found myself repeatedly stopped by conflicting conceptions of the structure of address into which I was inserting myself. It was not clear to me what I, as a white deconstructor, was doing talking about Zora Neale Hurston, a black novelist and anthropologist, or to whom I was talking. Was I trying to convince white establishment scholars who long for a return to Renaissance ideals that the study of the Harlem Renaissance is not a (...) trivialization of their humanistic pursuits? Was I trying to contribute to the attempt to adapt the textual strategies of literary theory to the analysis of Afro-American literature? Was I trying to rethink my own previous work and the re-referentialize the notion of difference so as to move the conceptual operations of deconstruction out of the realm of abstract linguistic universality? Was I talking to white critics, black critics, or myself?Well, all of the above. What finally struck me was the fact that what I was analyzing in Hurston’s writings was precisely, again and again, her strategies and structures of problematic address. It was as though I were asking her for answers to questions I did not even know I was unable to formulate. I had a lot to learn, then, from Hurston’s way of dealing with multiple agendas and heterogeneous implied readers. I will focus here on three texts that play interesting variations on questions of identity and address: two short essays, “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” and “What White Publishers Won’t Print,” and a book-length collection of folktales, songs, and hoodoo practices entitles Mules and Men. Barbara Johnson is professor of French and comparative literature at Harvard University. She is the author of Défigurations du langage poétique and The Critical Difference, translator of Jacques Derrida’s Dissemination, and editor of The Pedagogical Imperative: Teaching as a Literary Genre. Her previous contribution to Critical Inquiry, “Rigorous Unreliability,” appeared in the December 1984 issue. (shrink)

Previous research suggests that implicit sequence learning is superior for believers in the paranormal and individuals with increased cerebral dopamine. Thirty-five healthy participants performed feedback-guided anticipations of four arrow directions. A 100-trial random sequence preceded two 100-trial biased sequences in which visual targets on trial t tended to be displaced 90° clockwise or counter-clockwise from those on t − 1. ISL was defined as a positive change during the course of the biased run in the difference between pro-bias (...) and counter-bias responses. It was hypothesized that this difference would be greater for believers in the paranormal than for skeptics, for those who received dopamine than for those who received placebo, and for believers who received dopamine than for the other groups. None of the hypotheses were supported by the data. It is suggested that a simple binary guessing task with a focus on prediction accuracy during early trials should be considered for future explorations. (shrink)

This article focuses on the intersections between theological knowledge and the use of the Internet to access study resources for students studying Catholic theology at tertiary institutions. In the 21st century, the use of the Internet to access electronic resources is gaining momentum as a tool for obtaining needed information among theology students, to support many aspects of their learning activities. This is mainly because of the proliferation of online theological libraries, as well as the fact that theology students (...) ought to resist the easy path of uncritical passivity and select reliable data from other resources, and welcome it without merely imposing their critical theological opinions and views. Recent literature indicates that the hierarchical nature of Catholic doctrine needs not to exclude openness to the more rhizomatic approaches to knowledge structures that students' independent accessing of online ER represents. This intersection in learning theology requires a theoretical paradigm shift for adult theology students which can contribute greatly to the enlargement of the theology students' academic horizon and enriches their minds for an open theological dialogue and discussion with different theological opinions and views. (shrink)

The generation of the pitch control signal in a wind turbine (WT) is not straightforward due to the nonlinear dynamics of the system and the coupling of its internal variables; in addition, they are subjected to the uncertainty that comes from the random nature of the wind. Fuzzy logic has proved useful in applications with changing system parameters or where uncertainty is relevant as in this one, but the tuning of the fuzzy logic controller (FLC) parameters is neither straightforward nor (...) an easy task. On the other hand, reinforcement learning (RL) allows systems to automatically learn, and this capability can be exploited to tune the FLC. In this work, a WT pitch control architecture that uses RL to tune the membership functions and scale the output of a fuzzy controller is proposed. The RL strategy calculates the fuzzy controller gains in order to reduce the output power error of the WT according to the wind speed. Different reward mechanisms based on the output power error have been considered. Simulation results with different wind profiles show that this architecture performs better (123.7 W) in terms of power errors than an FLC without RL (133.2 W) or a simpler PID (208.8 W). Even more, it provides a smooth response and outperforms other hybrid controllers such as RL-PID and radial basis function neural network control. (shrink)

Cross‐situational word learning (XSWL) tasks present multiple words and candidate referents within a learning trial such that word–referent pairings can be inferred only across trials. Adults encode fine phonological detail when two words and candidate referents are presented in each learning trial (2 × 2 scenario; Escudero, Mulak, & Vlach, ). To test the relationship between XSWL task difficulty and phonological encoding, we examined XSWL of words differing by one vowel or consonant across degrees of within‐learning (...) trial ambiguity (1 × 1 to 4 × 4). Word identification was assessed alongside three distractors. Adults finely encoded words via XSWL: Learning occurred in all conditions, though accuracy decreased across the 1 × 1 to 3 × 3 conditions. Accuracy was highest for the 1 × 1 condition, suggesting fast‐mapping is a stronger learning strategy here. Accuracy was higher for consonant than vowel set targets, and having more distractors from the same set mitigated identification of vowel set targets only, suggesting possible stronger encoding of consonants than vowels. (shrink)

In this essay I’d like to help readers prepare to learn from Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition.1 Such an essay is needed, as truer words were never spoken than when Deleuze said of it in his "Letter to a Harsh Critic": "it's still full of academic elements, it's heavy going"2 Now part of the “academic” aspect of the work comes from Deleuze having submitted Difference and Repetition to his jury as the primary thesis for the doctorat d'Etat in (...) 1968.3 But that doesn’t lessen the need for help when first approaching the book. The context of Deleuze’s remarks in his “Letter” should be noted: he has just been noting that "the history of philosophy plays a patently repressive role in philosophy, it's philosophy's own version of the Oedipus complex."4 Deleuze continues that he tried to subvert this repressive function by various means. First, by writing on authors such as Lucretius, Hume, Spinoza and Nietzsche who contested the rationalist tradition by the "critique of negativity, the cultivation of joy, the hatred of interiority, the externality of forces and relations, the denunciation of power [pouvoir]." Second, and quite notoriously, by “a sort of buggery [enculage] or (it comes to the same thing) immaculate conception.” That is, by making the author say something in their own words that would be “monstrous.”5 These are famous lines, and the last is certainly amusing in an épater les bourgeois sort of way. But what's really important in my view comes next, when Deleuze explains what it means to finally write "in your own name," as he claims he first did in Difference and Repetition. (shrink)

The learning of immediate causation within a dynamic environment was examined. Participants encountered seven decision points in which they needed to choose which of three possible candidates was the cause of explosions in the environment. Each candidate was firing a weapon at random every few seconds, but only one of them produced an immediate effect. Some participants showed little learning, but most demonstrated increases in accuracy across time. On average, men showed higher accuracy and shorter latencies that were (...) not explained by differences in self-reported prior video game experience. This result suggests that prior reports of sex differences in causal choice in the game are not specific to situations involving delayed or probabilistic causal relations. (shrink)

Infants show impressive speech decoding abilities and detect acoustic regularities that highlight the syntactic relations of a language, often coded via non-adjacent dependencies. It has been claimed that infants learn NADs implicitly and associatively through passive listening and that there is a shift from effortless associative learning to a more controlled learning of NADs after the age of 2 years, potentially driven by the maturation of the prefrontal cortex. To investigate if older children are able to learn NADs, (...) Lammertink et al. recently developed a word-monitoring serial reaction time task and could show that 6–11-year-old children learned the NADs, as their reaction times increased then they were presented with violated NADs. In the current study we adapted their experimental paradigm and tested NAD learning in a younger group of 52 children between the age of 4–8 years in a remote, web-based, game-like setting. Children were exposed to Italian phrases containing NADs and had to monitor the occurrence of a target syllable, which was the second element of the NAD. After exposure, children did a “Stem Completion” task in which they were presented with the first element of the NAD and had to choose the second element of the NAD to complete the stimuli. Our findings show that, despite large variability in the data, children aged 4–8 years are sensitive to NADs; they show the expected differences in r RTs in the SRT task and could transfer the NAD-rule in the Stem Completion task. We discuss these results with respect to the development of NAD dependency learning in childhood and the practical impact and limitations of collecting these data in a web-based setting. (shrink)

The concept of difference occupies a central place in the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. In this work, David Bright explores how Deleuze's difference can be put to work in critical qualitative research. The book explores research and writing as a creative process of dynamically pursuing problems. Following Deleuze's advice not tothink of problems in terms of solutions, the book offers important methodological insights into the ways the subjects, objects, and processes of research might be conceived and represented in (...) writing, exploring the problem of thinking and writing about difference in complex ways without reducing thought to static representations of identity. Bright uses the example of foreign teachers and international schooling in Vietnam to show us how Deleuze's difference can be used in critical qualitative research, demonstrating the limits of traditional ways of thinking about difference in learning and teaching. Exploring Deleuze's Philosophy of Differenceis a book that will interest all those with an interest in the application of Deleuze's philosophy to critical qualitative research. Perfect for courses such as: Critical Qualitative Research | Qualitative Inquiry | Post-qualitative Inquiry | Deleuze | Difference | Identity | Ethnography | English Language Teaching | International Education | Writing as a Method of Inquiry. (shrink)