Athletes devote their lives to practicing their chosen sport so as to attain the highest level of skilled performance. A perennial question is why are some athletes better than others? Most debates on this issue reduce to genetics (natural abilities) vs differences in accumulated deliberative practice. In contrast, the target article under discussion here reports on a study that identified psyc...

OBJECTIVE Box model trainers have been used for many years to facilitate the improvement of laparoscopic skills. However, there are limited data available on box trainers and their impact on skill acquisition, assessed by virtual reality systems. MATERIAL AND METHODS Twenty-two Postgraduate Year 1 gynecology residents with no laparoscopic experience were randomly divided into one group that r...

The writing skill is often perceived as the most difficult language skill since it requires a higher level of productive language control than other skills (Celce-Murcia & Olshtain, 2000). The present study introduced a discourse-based framework for the teaching of writing on the basis Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). To this end, 60 students majoring in Teaching English as a Foreign Lang...

OBJECTIVE To investigate the prevalence of oral language, orofacial motor skill and auditory processing disorders in children aged 4-10 years old and verify their association with age and gender. METHODS Cross-sectional study with stratified, random sample consisting of 539 students. The evaluation consisted of three protocols: orofacial motor skill protocol, adapted from the Myofunctional Ev...

the present research examines the academic listening comprehension strategies (lcs) among a total number of 59 intermediate and upper-intermediate persian learners who were taking pre-university courses in 2011 in persian language centre in imam khomeini international university, qazvin. the study examined nature of lcs, the variety of applying lcs, and finally predictability of strategies as a...

We investigated whether fine motor and expressive language skills are related in the later-born siblings of children with autism (heightened-risk, HR infants) who are at increased risk for language delays. We observed 34 HR infants longitudinally from 12 to 36 months. We used parent report and standardized observation measures to assess fine motor skill from 12 to 24 months in HR infants (Study...