Music performance is an intensive sensorimotor task that involves the generation of mental representations of musical information that are actively accessed, maintained, and manipulated according to the demands of the performance. Internal representations and external information interact through feedback and feedforward processes that adjust the…

Previous studies found an impact of language familiarity on face recognition in 9- and 12-month-olds. Own race faces are better recognized when associated with native language, whereas for other race faces, it is with non-native language. The aim of this study is to investigate if language familiarity can also influence abstract pattern…

A child's ability to comprehend speech in the mainstream classroom is vital for intellectual and social development. However, listening conditions are often sub-optimal; the presence of multiple talkers, high noise levels, and long reverberation times add to the challenge of listening with a developing auditory system. An assessment that captures…

People perform poorly at sighting missing and wanted persons in simulated searches due to attention and face recognition failures. We manipulated participants' expectations of encountering a target person and the within-person variability of the targets' photographs studied in a laboratory-based and a field-based prospective person memory task. We…

Symmetry studies in autism are inconclusive possibly due to different types of stimuli used which depend on either local or global cues. Therefore, this study compared symmetry detection between 20 autistic and 18 non-autistic adults matched on age, IQ, gender and handedness, using contour integration tasks containing open and closed contours that…

Background and aims: Fascinations for or aversions to particular sounds are a familiar feature of autism, as is an ability to reproduce another person's utterances, precisely copying the other person's prosody as well as their words. Such observations seem to indicate not only that autistic people can pay close attention to what they hear, but…

The visual system is tuned by its inputs. The behavior of reading offers a unique way to examine tuning for visual representations (letters) because readers have massive experience recognizing letters in a systematic context (reading). One aspect of reading is that letters are highly crowded within words, which severely limits their…

We investigated toddlers' understanding of the hierarchical syntactic configurations that constrain the referential meanings of reflexives and pronouns. In particular, reflexives must co-refer with the c-commanding antecedent within the local domain (Principle A) (e.g., He[subscript i] washes himself[subscript i]. John[subscript i] knows that…

A lack of response to voices, and a great interest for music are part of the behavioral expressions, commonly (self-)reported in Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). These atypical interests for vocal and musical sounds could be attributable to different levels of acoustical noise, quantified in the harmonic-to-noise ratio (HNR). No previous study has…

In spoken languages, children acquire locative terms in a cross-linguistically stable order. Terms similar in meaning to in and on emerge earlier than those similar to "front" and "behind," followed by "left" and "right." This order has been attributed to the complexity of the relations expressed by…

Memory decision-making in 26- to 32-month-olds was investigated using visual-paired comparison paradigms, requiring toddlers to select familiar stimuli (Active condition) or view familiar and novel stimuli (Passive condition). In Experiment 1 (N = 108, 54.6% female, 62% White; replication N = 98), toddlers with higher accuracy in the Active…

Psycholinguistic research on metaphor has focused on verbal material. Yet, metaphors frequently occur in a multimodal format, blending words and pictures to convey meaning. Here we compared verbal and multimodal metaphors by using item pairs where stimulus one was always a word (e.g., "language" in the metaphorical conditions and…

Purpose: The finite verb morphology composite (FVMC) is a valid measure for charting children's tense development and for differentiating children with and without language impairment during preschool and early elementary years. However, it is unclear whether FVMC scores vary as a function of language sample elicitation contexts. The current study…

The cognitive advantage (CA) hypothesis claims that multilingualism promotes the development of several basic cognitive capacities. A large number of empirical findings support this hypothesis, but recently there have also been numerous contradictory findings and methodological objections. The present paper extends the investigation of possible…

Eye-tracking procedures generate copious process data that could be valuable in establishing the response processes component of modern validity theory. However, there is a lack of tools for assessing and visualizing response processes using process data such as eye-tracking fixation sequences, especially those suitable for young children. This…