The association between aerobic fitness and language processing in children: implications for academic achievement.

Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) have been instrumental for discerning the relationship between children's aerobic fitness and aspects of cognition, yet language processing remains unexplored. ERPs linked to the processing of semantic information (the N400) and the analysis of language structure (the P600) were recorded from higher and lower aerobically fit children as they read normal sentences and those containing semantic or syntactic violations. Results revealed that higher fit children exhibited greater N400 amplitude and shorter latency across all sentence types, and a larger P600 effect for syntactic violations. Such findings suggest that higher fitness may be associated with a richer network of words and their meanings, and a greater ability to detect and/or repair syntactic errors. The current findings extend previous ERP research explicating the cognitive benefits associated with greater aerobic fitness in children and may have important implications for learning and academic performance.

Young children fail to fully generalize a novel argument structure construction when exposed to the same input as older learners.

The present study exposed five-year-olds (M=5 ; 2), seven-year-olds (M=7 ; 6) and adults (M=22 ; 4) to instances of a novel phrasal construction, then used a forced choice comprehension task to evaluate their learning of the construction. The abstractness of participants' acquired representations of the novel construction was evaluated by varying the degree of lexical overlap that test items had with exposure items. We found that both child groups were less proficient than adults, but seven-year-olds showed evidence of across-the-board generalization whereas five-year-olds were sensitive to lexical overlap at test. This outcome is consistent with more conservative, item-based learning of syntactic patterns in younger children. Additionally, unlike adults and seven-year-olds, five-year-olds showed no evidence of having mastered the novel construction's linking rules. Thus, younger learners are less likely to generalize abstract argument structure constructions when exposed to the same systematic input as older learners.

A comparison of competitive employment outcomes for the clubhouse and PACT models.

OBJECTIVE: This study determined whether the clubhouse model of community support and psychiatric rehabilitation can produce competitive employment outcomes that are comparable or superior to those of the Program of Assertive Community Treatment (PACT) model. METHODS: This longitudinal study followed a group of 170 individuals with severe mental illness who were randomly assigned either to the experimental design, a clubhouse program (N=86), or to the control design, a PACT team (N=84). Study participants were tracked for 30 months, and employment outcome data were collected. RESULTS: After 30 months, 72 clubhouse and 76 PACT participants remained active in the project. After 30 months, 74 percent of PACT participants and 60 percent of clubhouse participants had been placed in at least one job. The average clubhouse participant worked 21.8 weeks per job and earned $7.38 per hour, whereas the average PACT participant worked 13.1 weeks per job and earned $6.30 per hour. CONCLUSIONS: Participants from both the PACT and clubhouse models achieved high employment levels, with no significant differences in weekly employment or 30-month job placement rates over the course of the study. During this time, clubhouse participants earned significantly higher wages and remained competitively employed for significantly more weeks per job than PACT participants.