This present study was designed to investigate whether face-type (stereotypical or nonstereotypical) facilitates stereotype-consistent categorization and decision-making. Previous literature suggests an associative link between adults' stereotypically Black facial features and assumed criminality. The question addressed here is whether the…

We systematically compared beliefs about animal (e.g., "lion"), artifactual (e.g., "hammer"), and institutional (e.g., "police officer") categories, aiming to identify whether people draw different inferences about which categories are subjective and which are socially constituted. We conducted two studies with 270…

Intelligence tests are important tools in psychology and education; however, the stability of scores and use of intelligence tests has always been surrounded by some controversy. Since its conception in 1905, intelligence testing has become one of the most prominent tasks for school psychologists worldwide. Today's need for frequent use of…

Autism spectrum disorder is associated with diverse social, educational, and occupational challenges. To date, no standardized, internationally accepted tools exist to assess autism spectrum disorder-related functioning. World Health Organization's International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health can serve as foundation for…

This study investigated the developmental trajectories of three perceptual domains related to regional dialect competence: the linguistic domain, tested through an intelligibility in noise task; the objective indexical domain, tested through locality judgments and a free classification task; and the subjective indexical domain, tested through…

Purpose: Current research has demonstrated that behavioral, emotional, and/or social difficulties often accompany developmental language disorder (DLD). It is an open question to what degrees such difficulties arise as consequence of impaired language and communicative skills, or whether they might also be driven by deficits in verbal and…

Despite early emerging and impressive linguistic abilities, young children demonstrate ostensibly puzzling beliefs about the nature of language. In some circumstances monolingual children even express the belief that an individual's language is more stable than her race. The present research investigated bilingual children's thinking about the…

Language exposure plays a large role in language acquisition, and bilingual children must acquire both of their languages in environments that typically include abundant speech variability. The specific goals of this dissertation were to examine how speech exposure affected phonological retuning and lexical access in bilingual children's second…

Delayed appearance of early language milestones can be one of the first signs of a developmental disorder. In this study, we investigated how well late acquisition of language milestones predicted an outcome of specific language impairment (SLI). The sample included 150 children (76 SLI), aged 4 to 7 years old. Milestone information was collected…

Many theories of human cognition postulate that people are equipped with a repertoire of strategies to solve the tasks they face. This theoretical framework of a cognitive toolbox provides a plausible account of intra- and interindividual differences in human behavior. Unfortunately, it is often unclear how to rigorously test the toolbox…

Three experiments assessed the development of children's part and configural (part-relational) processing in object recognition during adolescence. In total, 312 school children aged 7-16 years and 80 adults were tested in 3-alternative forced choice (3-AFC) tasks. They judged the correct appearance of upright and inverted presented familiar…

Decisions can be made by applying a variety of decision-making rules--sequential rules in which decisions are based on a sequential evaluation of choice dimensions and the integrative normative rule in which decisions are based on an integration of choice dimensions. In this study, we investigated the developmental trajectory of such…

Aim: The aim of this study was to evaluate the rheological properties of saliva after submandibular botulinum toxin type A (BoNT-A) injections. Method: We enrolled 15 children (11 males and six females; age range 3-17y, mean age 9y 10mo) diagnosed with spastic (n=9) or dyskinetic (n=6) quadriplegic cerebral palsy (CP); Gross Motor Function…

We conducted three experiments to study the role of instrumental (e.g. "knife-bread") and categorical (e.g. "cake-bread") relations in the development of conceptual organization with a priming paradigm, by varying the nature of the task (naming--Experiment 1--or categorical decision--Experiments 2 and 3). The participants were 5-, 7- and…

This study examined cross-cultural differences and similarities in children's moral understanding of individual- or collective-oriented lies and truths. Seven-, 9-, and 11-year-old Canadian and Chinese children were read stories about story characters facing moral dilemmas about whether to lie or tell the truth to help a group but harm an…