Background: Mapping fraction symbols to magnitudes is easier for students to master than comparing fraction magnitudes. Fraction mapping assesses students' understanding of part-whole interpretations of fractions; fractions represent the parts of an object or set of objects. Fraction comparison assesses students' understanding of measurement…

Contrastive focus, conveyed by prosodic cues, marks important information. Studies have shown that 6-year-olds learning English and Japanese can use contrastive focus during online sentence comprehension: focus used in a "contrastive context" facilitates the identification of a target referent (speeding up processing), whereas focus used…

The current study examined eye movement control in autistic (ASD) children. Simple targets were presented in isolation, or with central, parafoveal, or peripheral distractors synchronously. Sixteen children with ASD (47-81 months) and nineteen age and IQ matched typically developing children were instructed to look to the target as accurately and…

It has been demonstrated that the Simon effect may be increased or reversed due to proportion congruency manipulation, suggesting that learned spatial irrelevant stimulus-response (S-R) associations are used to guide responses. In this study, we tested the hypothesis that learning spatial irrelevant S-R associations by rewards may show a similar…

Two experiments investigated Chinese deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) adolescents' recognition of category names in an innovative task of semantic categorization. In each trial, the category-name target appeared briefly at the screen center followed by two words or two pictures for two basic-level exemplars of high or middle typicality, which…

We designed two experiments to investigate subsyllabic unit preference in reading Pinyin in Chinese kindergarteners. Pinyin is an alphabetic transcription used in Mainland China to assist children in learning to read Chinese characters. In Pinyin instruction, teachers rely heavily on onset-rime division. Spoken Chinese, however, encourages…