Background: Around 800 million young children worldwide have cognitive-developmental limitations due to issues related to biological, environmental, and psychosocial factors. These problems lead to educational challenges, limited skill development, and higher unemployment rates. Therefore, timely interventions addressing the underlying problems in…

It has been demonstrated that children with specific language impairment (SLI) show difficulties not only with auditory but also with audiovisual speech perception. The goal of this study was to assess whether children with SLI might show reduced attention to the talker's mouth compared to their typically developing (TD) peers. An additional aim…

Background: Children with specific language impairment (SLI) have problems not only with language performance but also with sustained attention, which is the ability to maintain alertness over an extended period of time. Although there is consensus that this ability is impaired with respect to processing stimuli in the auditory perceptual…

Purpose: Bilingual individuals have been shown to be more proficient on visual tasks of inhibition compared with their monolingual counterparts. However, the bilingual advantage has not been evidenced in all studies, and very little is known regarding how bilingualism influences inhibitory control in the perception of auditory information. The…

Mathematical giftedness (MG) is an intriguing phenomenon, the nature of which has yet to be sufficiently explored. This study goes a step further in understanding how MG is related to expertise in mathematics (EM) and general giftedness (G). Cognitive testing was conducted among 197 high school students with different levels of G and of EM. Based…

Infants, children and adults are capable of extracting recurring patterns from their environment through statistical learning (SL), an implicit learning mechanism that is considered to have an important role in language acquisition. Research over the past 20 years has shown that SL is present from very early infancy and found in a variety of tasks…

Progress in applied neuroscience and neuropsychology in the educational context has revealed efficient methodologies for preventing academic failure and developing the potential of students. The aim of this work is to adopt a neuropsychological perspective to study learning-related differences between students with learning difficulties (LD),…

The music industry is built on a system of expert evaluation focused on sound, but the foundations are challenged by recent research, which suggests that sight trumps sound. This presents a challenge to music educators, who train the next generation of expert performers and listeners. The aim of this study is to investigate students' perceptions…

Purpose: The authors examined whether school-age children with a history of specific language impairment (H-SLI), their peers with typical development (TD), and adults differ in sensitivity to audiovisual temporal asynchrony and whether such difference stems from the sensory encoding of audiovisual information. Method: Fifteen H-SLI children, 15…

The purpose of this study was to examine gender differences in self-reported symptomatology and working memory (visuospatial and auditory) in college students with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). Forty-seven college students with ADHD and 44 non-affected control participants completed two self-report questionnaires and six tests…

Multimodal approaches have been shown to be effective for many learning tasks. In this study, we compared the effectiveness of five multimodal methods for second language (L2) Mandarin tone perception training: three single-cue methods (number, pitch contour, color) and two dual-cue methods (color and number, color and pitch contour). A total of…

Individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) exhibit alterations in sensory processing, including changes in the integration of information across the different sensory modalities. In the current study, we used the sound-induced flash illusion to assess multisensory integration in children with ASD and typically-developing (TD) controls.…

In human adults, visual dominance emerges in several multisensory tasks. In children, auditory dominance has been reported up to 4 years of age. To establish when sensory dominance changes during development, 41 children (6-7, 9-10, and 11-12 years) were tested on the Colavita task (Experiment 1) and 32 children (6-7, 9-10, and 11-12 years) were…

South Africa consists of developed and developing contexts. This article reports on a study undertaken to determine the effect of a Perceptual--motor Intervention Programme in learning readiness of Grade R learners from deprived environments. Le Roux's Group Test for School Readiness was used as baseline assessments to establish the school…

This study used the modality shift experiment, a relatively simple reaction time measure to visual and auditory stimuli, to examine attentional shifting within and across modalities in 33 children and 42 adults with high-functioning autism as compared to matched numbers of age- and ability-matched typical controls. An exaggerated "modality shift…