Writing assessments often make use of analytic rating scales to describe the criteria for different performance levels. However, the use of such rating scales requires a level of interpretation by raters and if several raters are involved, the reliability of examinee scores can be significantly affected (Engelhard, 1992; McNamara 1996). Variability between raters is partly managed by rater trai...

Studies that have addressed questions concerning when framing effects are likely to occur have produced mixed results. In this article we examine how differences in personality factors influence a group–based framing task. Specifically, when high collective importance individuals evaluated a framing task involving their group no framing effects were observed. Different results were obtained for...

This study analyzes lexical proficiency in oral and written texts produced by second language (L2) learners of English. The purpose of the study is to examine relationships between analytic scores of depth of lexical knowledge, breadth of lexical knowledge, and access to core lexical items and holistic scores of lexical proficiency. A corpus of 240 spoken texts and 240 written texts produced by...

Expertise in Chinese character recognition is marked by analytic/reduced holistic processing (Hsiao & Cottrell, 2009), which depends mainly on readers’ writing rather than reading experience (Tso, Au, & Hsiao, 2011). Here we examined whether simplified and traditional Chinese readers process characters differently in terms of holistic processing. When processing characters that are distinctive ...

In this study we examine how native language, sex, and college major interact to influence accuracy and preferred strategy when performing mental rotation (MR). Native monolingual Chinese and English speakers rotated 3-D shapes while maintaining a concurrent verbal or spatial memory load. For English speakers, male physical science majors were more accurate than social science majors and employ...

Throughout the history of psychology, the study of perception has been marked by a conflict between analytic and holistic views. According to the analytic view, object recognition involves analysis of the visual input of stimulus features. A stimulus is recognized to the extent that it contains the appropriate features and these features are registered by the visual system. Early examples of th...

Hierarchical stimuli have proven effective for investigating principles of visual organization in humans. A large body of evidence suggests that the analysis of the global forms precedes the analysis of the local forms in our species. Studies on lateralization also indicate that analytic and holistic encoding strategies are separated between the two hemispheres of the brain. This raises the que...