This study aimed at investigating the relative impact of comprehensible input and comprehensible output on the development of grammatical accuracy and syntactic complexity of Iranian EFL learners’ oral production. Participants were 60 female EFL learners selected from a whole population pool of 80 based on the standard test of IELTS. To investigate the research questions, the participants were ...

Some studies, so far limited in number, suggest the existence of procedural metacognition in young children, that is, the practical capacity to monitor and control one's own cognitive activity in a given task. The link between procedural metacognition and false belief understanding is currently under theoretical discussion. If data with primates seem to indicate that procedural metacognition an...

According to the procedural deficit hypothesis (PDH), abnormal development in the procedural memory system could account for the language deficits observed in specific language impairment (SLI). Recent studies have supported this hypothesis by using a serial reaction time (SRT) task, during which a slower learning rate is observed in children with SLI compared to controls. Recently, we obtained...

Drawing on Robinson’s cognition hypothesis, the study attempted to examine how task conditions influence EFL learners’ oral performance and whether learners’ individual differences in terms of tolerance of ambiguity and self-efficacy mediate the effects of such conditions. To this end, 62 Iranian intermediate EFL learners from private language institutes in Tehran performed four dyadic decision...

We compared procedural learning, translation of procedural knowledge into declarative knowledge, and use of declarative knowledge in age-matched normal volunteers (n = 30), patients with Parkinson's disease (n = 20), and patients with cerebellar degeneration (n = 15) by using a serial reaction time task. Patients with Parkinson's disease achieved procedural knowledge and used declarative knowle...

In robot programming by demonstration, we hypothesize that in a class of procedural tasks where the end goal primarily consists of the states of objects that are external to a task performer, one can significantly reduce complexity of a robot learner by not processing a human demonstrator’s motions at all. In this class of tasks, object behaviors are far more critical than human behaviors. Base...

The purpose of the present study was to explore the possibility of a procedural learning deficit among children with Developmental Coordination Disorder (DCD). We tested 34 children aged 6 to 12 years with and without DCD using the serial reaction time task, in which the standard keyboard was replaced by a touch screen in order to minimize the impact of perceptuomotor coordination difficulties ...