Rhyme awareness is a varied skill emerging consistently only in late preschool, yet children respond to rhythmic and phonological patterns to spontaneously complete rhymes in everyday settings. Our study replicates and extends previous work using a modified preferential looking task to test whether preschoolers can efficiently use rhyme to…

According to prediction-based learning theories, erroneous predictions support learning. However, empirical evidence for a relation between prediction error and children's language learning is currently lacking. Here we investigated whether and how prediction errors influence children's learning of novel words. We hypothesized that word learning…

Educational screen media is increasingly salient in the lives of young children. Research affirms preschool-aged children can learn content from media when they attend to it, however less is known about how specific screen-based pedagogical supports (SBPS) might draw children's attention. Using eye-tracking methodology, the current study examines…

This study examined the effects of virtual reality immersion with audio on eye contact, directional focus and focus of attention for novice wind band conductors. Participants (N = 34) included a control group (n = 12) and two virtual reality groups with (n = 10) and without (n = 12) head tracking. Participants completed conducting/score study…

Young infants have demonstrated a remarkable sensitivity to probabilistic relations among visual features (Fiser & Aslin, 2002; Kirkham et al., 2002). Previous research has raised important questions regarding the usefulness of statistical learning in an environment filled with variability and noise, such as an infant's natural world. In…

The goal of this study was to examine developmental change in visual attention to dynamic visual and audiovisual stimuli in 3-, 6-, and 9-month-old infants. Infant look duration was measured during exposure to dynamic geometric patterns and Sesame Street video clips under three different stimulus modality conditions: unimodal visual, synchronous…

The distinct music genre known as baby music is based on the premise that infants benefit from music "re-orchestrated for their little ears" ("Baby Einstein Takealong Tunes". (2012). Retrieved December 11, 2012, from http://www.babyeinstein.com/en/products/product_explorer/theme/music/62350/Takealong_Tunes.html). We completed a…

The present study aims to investigate the interplay of verbal and nonverbal communication with respect to infants' perception of pointing gestures. Infants were presented with still images of pointing hands (cue) in combination with an acoustic stimulus. The communicative content of this acoustic stimulus was varied from being human and…

The present eye-tracking study aimed to investigate the impact of auditory speech information on 12-month-olds' gaze behavior to silently-talking faces. We examined German infants' face-scanning behavior to side-by-side presentation of a bilingual speaker's face silently speaking German utterances on one side and French on the other side, before…

Research has demonstrated that children use different strategies to infer a referent. One of these strategies is to use inflectional morphology. We present evidence that toddlers learning Spanish are capable of using gender word inflections to infer word reference. Thirty-month-olds were tested in a preferential looking experiment. Participants…

Identification of the second of two targets (T2) is impaired when presented shortly after the first (T1). This "attentional blink" (AB) is thought to arise from a delay in T2 processing during which T2 is vulnerable to masking. Conventional studies have measured T2 accuracy which is constrained by the 100% ceiling. We avoided this problem by using…

Drawing upon video recordings over two years, teacher interviews, school reports, and field notes, this practitioner research study described and analyzed 16 video excerpts from a music therapy group in a public preschool class serving 14 children with autism, for durations ranging from two to sixteen months. The research centered on three of the…

Thirty-five children diagnosed with autism were randomly assigned to either a joint attention or a symbolic play intervention. During the 5-8 week treatment, three novel probes were administered to determine mastery of joint attention skills. The probes consisted of auditory and visual stimuli, such as a loud spider crawling or a musical ball…

The eye movements of infants, between 4 and 11 weeks old, were recorded while they viewed either a representation of a face or nonface stimulus. (Author/SB)

This study examined 4- and 6-month-olds' responses to static or dynamic stimuli using behavioral and heart-rate-defined measures of attention. Infants looked longest to dynamic stimuli with an audio track and least to a static stimulus that was mute. Overall, look duration declined with age to the different stimuli. The amount of time spent in…