Individuals with autism show a complex profile of differences in imitative ability, including a general deficit in precision of imitating another's actions and special difficulty in imitating nonmeaningful gestures relative to meaningful actions on objects. Given that they also show atypical patterns of visual attention when observing social…

A total of 50 behaviorally disruptive (conduct-disordered or oppositional defiant-disordered) adolescents and 50 comparison adolescents assessed how they expected to feel following both aggressive and nonaggressive situations. Compared with their peers, behaviorally disruptive adolescents expected fewer normative emotions and exhibited somewhat…

Eight autistic children, who evidenced overselectivity on a preassessment task, and 8 normal children with similar mental age levels were trained on 3 tasks to determine if overselectivity varied as a function of different stimulus conditions. Stimulus overselectivity was found not to be a generalized deficit in autistic subjects; instead it…

The goal of this study was to examine incidental and intentional spatial sequence learning during middle childhood and adolescence. We tested four age groups (8-10 years, 11-13 years, 14-17 years, and young adults [18+ years]) on a serial reaction time task and used manual and oculomotor measures to examine incidental sequence learning.…

A total of 11 reading-disabled and 11 nondisabled children ages 13 and 14 were presented a list of 10 words at different rates. Immediately after the last word of each list, subjects recalled the words in any order. Results focused on the use of elaborative encoding. (Author/CI)

Naturalistic and experimental study of the extent to which the use of the vocal prosody typical of motherese improved the responsiveness of children with severe developmental delays suggested that the use of such vocal prosody could help remediate unresponsiveness in severely handicapped learners. (RH)

Assessed perception of phonemic contrast based on voice onset time (VOT) and a nonspeech analog of VOT contrast among children and adolescents with reading disability (RD), ADHD, RD and AHDH, or no impairment. Found that RD children had difficulty processing speech and nonspeech stimuli containing similar auditory temporal cues. Phoneme perception…

Obtained thresholds for octave-band noises with center frequencies of 0.4, 1, 2, 4, and 10 kHz and 1/3-octave band noises centered at 10 and 20 kHz from children aged 6 to 16 years. Compared results with findings for infants, preschool children, and adults. Continuing sensitivity improvements were evident from infancy well into the school years.…

Investigated the ontogenesis of oddity learning. Children and adults were tested on two versions of the oddity task using nonverbal procedures. Results suggested that children use different strategies to solve different versions of the oddity task, and in tasks in which stimuli are presented simultaneously, behavior may be controlled by stimulus…

Twenty mildly mentally retarded adolescents were matched with two groups of nonretarded students, one of the same chronological age (CA 16) and the other of the same mental age (MA 9), to examine the influence of age and metamemory on recall. This was achieved using an adapted metamemory instrument which included relevant recall tasks. (Author)

Examined whether age-related working memory deficits in learning disabled (LD) readers across four age groups (7, 10, 13, and 20) reflected retrieval efficiency or storage capacity problems. Found that LD readers' working memory performance was inferior to skilled readers' on verbal and visual-spatial working memory tasks across all ages.…

Two experiments were concerned with exploring the relative accessibility and availability of category information in retarded adolescents in comparison with CA equivalent nonretarded subjects. (Author/SB)

Educable mentally retarded (EMR) and nonretarded (NR) adolescents verified superordinate and basic level descriptions of common objects. Results suggest that EMR subjects had difficulty making semantic classification decisions in general. Other results suggest that group differences in semantic processing speed were related to the deliberate…

In 2 experiments, 13-year olds and college students were asked to make risky decisions in a game format. Results showed that the age groups differed in strategies, confidence, and types of options chosen, especially when the game became more complex. (Author/SW)