This study used an ethological approach to explore the behavioural adaptation of nineteen infants during their first six weeks in Residential Care (RC), or a Foster Family (FF) or an Infant-Mother Centre (IMC). Direct observations were conducted once a week at bath time. Observed behaviours were: sleep-wake states, visual exploration, motor…

This survey study describes rates of utilization of evidence-informed auditory-verbal strategies among 132 professionals (teachers of the deaf, speech-language pathologists, audiologists, early interventionists, and others) working with children who are deaf or hard of hearing who use listening and spoken language. Relationships between provider…

Visual attention and active engagement during shared book reading are important for facilitating emergent literacy learning during the preschool years. Children on the autism spectrum often show difficulties in language and literacy development, yet research investigating potential indicators of shared book reading engagement, including visual…

Study stimuli presented at the same time as unrelated targets in a detection task are better remembered than stimuli presented with distractors. This attentional boost effect (ABE) has been found with pictorial (Swallow & Jiang, 2010) and more recently verbal materials (Spataro, Mulligan, & Rossi-Arnaud, 2013). The present experiments…

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…

Working memory is typically defined as a system devoted to the simultaneous maintenance and processing of information. However, the interplay between these 2 functions is still a matter of debate in the literature, with views ranging from complete independence to complete dependence. The time-based resource-sharing model assumes that a central…

Visual STM (VSTM) is thought to be related to visual attention in several ways. Attention controls access to VSTM during memory encoding and plays a role in the maintenance of stored information by strengthening memorized content. We investigated the involvement of visual attention in recall from VSTM. In two experiments, we measured…

Background: Recent evidence suggests that specific language impairment (SLI) might be secondary to general cognitive processing limitations in the domain of executive functioning. Previous research has focused almost exclusively on monolingual children with SLI and offers little evidence-based guidance on executive functioning in bilingual…

A comprehensive investigation of the neuropsychological strengths and weaknesses of children with autism may help to better describe their cognitive abilities and to design appropriate interventions. To this end we compared the NEPSY-II profiles of 22 children with high-functioning autism spectrum disorders (HFASD) with those of 44 healthy control…

The relationship between trait anxiety and memory functioning in young children was investigated. Two studies were conducted, using tasks tapping verbal and visual-spatial short-term memory (Study 1) and working memory (Study 2) in preschoolers. On the verbal storage tasks, there was a detrimental effect of anxiety on processing efficiency…

This study investigated the prevalence and stability of latent classes at risk for reading disabilities (RD) in elementary-aged children whose first language is Spanish. To this end, children (N = 489) in Grades 1, 2, and 3 at Wave 1 were administered a battery of reading, vocabulary, and cognitive measures (short-term memory [STM], working memory…

The present study examines coviewing of "Baby Mozart" by 6- to 18-month-old infants and their caregivers under naturalistic conditions. We had two questions. First, extending the method of Barr, Zack, Garcia, and Muentener (Infancy, 13 [2008], 30-56) to a younger population, we asked if age, prior exposure, and caregiver verbal input would predict…

Perceptual-cognitive processes play an important role in open, fast-paced, interceptive sports such as tennis, basketball, and soccer. Visual information processing has been shown to distinguish skilled from less skilled athletes. Research on the perceptual demands of sports performance has raised questions regarding athletes' visual information…

Languages differ in how they encode motion. When describing bounded motion, English speakers typically use verbs that convey information about manner (e.g., "slide", "skip", "walk") rather than path (e.g., "approach", "ascend"), whereas Greek speakers do the opposite. We investigated whether this strong cross-language difference influences how…

Demonstrates that the attentiveness construct can be accurately represented in terms of behavioral signals, sensitivities, and self-evaluations. Indicates that attentiveness is a function of posture, verbal behavior, and eye contact and demonstrates that attentiveness varies as a function of role status across differing contexts. (JMF)