Knowledge that Transforms

A comprehensive cognitive appraisal of elementary school children with learning disabilities showed that within the language sphere, deficits associated with reading disability are selective Phonological deficits consistently accompany reading problems whether they occur in relatively pure form or in the presence of coexisting attention deficit or arithmetic disability Although reading-disabled children were also deficient in production of morphologically related forms, this difficulty stemmed in large part from the same weakness in the phonological component that underlies reading disability In contrast, tests of syntactic knowledge did not distinguish reading-disabled children from those with other cognitive disabilities, nor from normal children after covarying for intelligence

A flood of new studies explores people's subjective well-being (SWB) Frequent positive affect, infrequent negative affect, and a global sense of satisfaction with life define high SWB These studies reveal that happiness and life satisfaction are similarly available to the young and the old, women and men, blacks and whites, the rich and the working-class Better clues to well-being come from knowing about a person's traits, close relationships, work experiences, culture, and religiosity We present the elements of an appraisal-based theory of happiness that recognizes the importance of adaptation, cultural world-view, and personal goals

Subjects read sentences containing target words that were homophones (words with a single pronunciation but different spellings) while their eye movements were recorded A prime word was presented briefly at the onset of fixation on the target region The prime for a given target (e g, beach) was either identical to the target (beach), a phonologically similar word (the homophone beech), a visually similar nonhomophone (bench), or a dissimilar word (noise) Phonological priming effects were assessed by comparing fixation times on the target when it was preceded by the homophone versus the visually similar word Results suggest that phonological codes are automatically activated during eye fixations in reading

Differences in mathematical competence between U S and Chinese children first emerge during the preschool years, favor Chinese children, and are limited to specific aspects of mathematical competence The base-10 structure of number names is less obvious in English than in Chinese, differences between these languages are reflected in children's difficulties learning to count Language differences do not affect other aspects of early mathematics, including counting small sets and solving simple numerical problems Because later mathematics increasingly involves manipulation of symbols, this early deficit in apprehending the base-10 structure of number names may provide a basis for previously reported differences in mathematical competence favoring Chinese schoolchildren

In this article, we propose and test a model of how readers construct representations of the situations described in simple narratives the event-indexing model According to the event-indexing model, events are the focal points of situations conveyed in narratives and are connected in memory along five dimensions time, space, protagonist, causality, and intentionality The results of a verb-clustering task provide strong support for the event-indexing model