Unlike children's early ability to navigate by continuous boundaries, their ability to extract geometric information from an array of objects emerges gradually over childhood. To investigate children's developing representation of object arrays for navigation and its relation to their mental representation of the global spatial layout,…

It is considerably harder to generalize identity across different pictures of unfamiliar faces, compared with familiar faces. This finding hints strongly at qualitatively distinct processing of unfamiliar face stimuli--for which we have less expertise. Yet, the extent to which face selective versus generic visual processes drive outcomes during…

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effects of different speech-generating device displays and vocabulary organizations on the acquisition of multi-step requesting responses in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Four young children with ASD were taught to use an iPad® application to make requests using both a taxonomically…

Previous word learning studies suggest that children with autism spectrum disorder may have difficulty understanding pictorial symbols. Here we investigate the ability of children with autism spectrum disorder and language-matched typically developing children to contextualize symbolic information communicated by pictures in a search task that did…

In recent years, multiple studies have shown that the languages of a bilingual interact during processing. We investigated sign activation as deaf children read words. In a word-picture verification task, we manipulated the underlying sign equivalents. We presented children with word-picture pairs for which the sign translation equivalents varied…

Working memory (WM) as the ability to temporarily maintain and manipulate various kinds of information is known to be affected by proactive interference (PI) from previously relevant contents, but studies on developmental changes in the susceptibility to PI are scarce. In the present study, we investigated life span development of item-specific…

Children with specific language impairment (SLI) demonstrate consistent comprehension problems. The present study investigated whether these problems are driven primarily by structural complexity or length. A picture-sentence matching task was presented to 30 children: (1) 10 children with SLI, (2) 10 comprehension-matched children with typical…

This study investigated whether Foygel and Dell's (2000) interactive two-step model of speech production could simulate the number and type of errors made in picture-naming by 68 children of elementary-school age. Results showed that the model provided a satisfactory simulation of the mean error profile of children aged five, six, seven, eight and…

If older children automatically label pictorial stimuli, then their performance should be impaired on tasks in which such labeling would increase the error rate. Children were asked to learn pairs of verbal or pictorial stimuli which, when combined, formed a different compound word (BUTTER-FLY). Subsequently, a false recognition test that included…

This study examined ten children with specific language impairment (SLI), 16 normally developing children, and ten adults for the production of novel root compounds. The participants were asked to invent names for pictures of 24 pairs of contrasting, novel objects. For half of the pictures, the context supported a grammatical novel root compound,…