Adult Japanese speakers judged the grammaticality of isolated simple bitransitive sentences involving an illegitimate extra argument in addition to three legitimate arguments. The sentences therefore violated Chomsky’s principle of Full Interpretation. The extra argument was a mere repetition of a preceding legitimate argument. The role of emphasis placed on the extra argument in the judgments was studied. The role of argument type, subjective and objective, was also investigated for sentences different in argument order, basic and transformed. Findings showed first that the sentences were judged moderately on a 7-point scale. Second, the transformed sentences were judged less grammatical than basic sentences. Third, sentences having two objective arguments (objective sentences) were judged more grammatical than those having two subjective arguments (subjective sentences) both for the basic and for the transformed sentences. Lastly, for the transformed sentences emphasis slightly increased the judged grammaticality of both the subjective and the objective sentences. These findings are not compatible with Chomsky’s theory of knowledge of language that he claims every speaker possesses.

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This study explored the relationships among a self-schema, achievement goals, learning approaches and performance in learning high school mathematics. Based on the responses of a group of Australian students to a survey questionnaire, two alternative sets of linear models depicting the relationships among these variables were compared. The findings supported a direct-mediational model of learning engagement, in which a self-schema was taken as the most important independent variable predicting why and how Australian students learnt mathematics albeit that different performance indicators were used during the modelling process. The relationships among a self-schema, achievement goals, learning approaches and performance were discussed. In addition, it was found that a self-schema in mathematics learning opened up three qualitatively different paths of learning, a mastery-focused path, an adaptive performance-focused path and a maladaptive performance-focused path. Overall, the current findings were consistent with a previous study involving a group of Chinese students. They also clarified some major problems in the previous study.

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Literature on mental rotation tasks consistently reports that males perform better than females. The current study is an attempt to scrutinize the influence of culture and experience with spatial activities in performance on a mental rotation test. The participants were 115 Ecuadorians, 120 Irish Caucasians and 128 Japanese. Half the participants in each group were male and half were female. They completed the Group Mental Rotation Test (GMRT) and a Spatial Activities Questionnaire (SAQ). Males outperformed females on the GMRT in all three cultures. Participation in “masculine activities” from the SAQ correlated with high GMRT scores, in “feminine activities” with low GMRT scores. There was a main effect of nationality; subjects from Ireland and Japan scored higher than their counterparts in Ecuador. The implications of the nationality effect raises questions about the widely accepted stability of the gender difference in spatial ability.

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Recent years have witnessed an increased interest in studying the effect of first language (L1) reading experience on second language (L2) literacy. Such cross-language influence in reading is understood as a particular case of the more general phenomenon of cognitive mobilization, which refers to the application of L1-related mechanisms to L2 processing (Ellis, 1994). In this paper, we propose a model of cognitive mobilization for the bilingual reader. The model postulates an L1 and an L2 word recognition system the automaticity of which depends on language proficiency, and a language-neutral central system which entails effortful, strategic control processes. Under the assumptions of limited attentional resources and increasing L2 word recognition automaticity due to enhanced L2 proficiency, the model makes different predictions about cognitive mobilization in reading for bilingual readers at various levels of L2 proficiency. L1-to-L2 mobilization and top-down application of general reading strategies to L2 word decoding are similarly modelled. The paper contributes to the area by providing a framework for the formulation of working hypotheses about cognitive mobilization in reading.

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The purpose of this paper was to examine the effects of warning on performance during the Deese-Roediger-McDermott recognition test (Roediger & McDermott, 1995), by manipulating the test type. We presented subjects with lists of semantically related words, followed by a recognition test. The test was composed of studied words, related non-studied words (critical lures), and unrelated non-studied words. Half the subjects were uninformed about the false recognition effect, while the others were forewarned. During the test phase, half of each group reported on recognition of each item within 4 seconds (fast condition), and the others did so within 8 seconds (slow condition). In the slow condition, the false critical lure recognition rate was lower in forewarned subjects than in uninformed subjects. However, in the fast condition, there was no significant difference in false recognition rates. Our results demonstrate that identification of critical lures can reduce the frequency of false recognition.

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Wrong:Hiroshi YAMA¹⁾ and Ken I. MANKTELOW^1)
1)Kobe College, Japan and University of Wolverhampton, U.K.
Right:Hiroshi YAMA¹⁾ and Ken I. MANKTELOW^2)
1)Kobe College, Japan and ²⁾University of Wolverhampton, U.K.

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