Forgetting of Foreign-Language Skills: A Corpus-Based Analysis of Online Tutoring Software.

We explore the nature of forgetting in a corpus of 125,000 students learning Spanish using the Rosetta Stone foreign-language instruction software across 48 lessons. Students are tested on a lesson after its initial study and are then retested after a variable time lag. We observe forgetting consistent with power function decay at a rate that varies across lessons but not across students.

Context effects on second-language learning of tonal contrasts.

Studies of lexical tone  learning generally focus on monosyllabic contexts, while reports of phonetic learning benefits associated with input variability are based largely on experienced learners. This study trained inexperienced learners on Mandarin tonal contrasts to test two hypotheses regarding the influence of context and variability on tone  learning. The first hypothesis was that increased phonetic variability of tones in disyllabic contexts makes initial tone  learning more challenging in disyllabic than monosyllabic words.

Alternatives to switch-cost scoring in the task-switching paradigm: their reliability and increased validity.

In the task-switching paradigm, the latency switch-cost score-the difference in mean reaction time between switch and nonswitch trials-is the traditional measure of task-switching ability. However, this score does not reflect accuracy, where switch costs may also emerge. In two experiments that varied in response deadlines (unlimited vs.