The current study examined the effectiveness of an experimental functional analysis for assessing the functions of emergent vocal-verbal behavior in children with developmental disabilities. Experiment 1 consisted of a systematic replication of Lerman et al. (2005). Participants were 3 children with developmental disabilities, between the ages of…

One important finding with the picture-word interference paradigm is that picture-naming performance is facilitated by the presentation of a distractor (e.g., CAP) formally related to the picture name (e.g., "cat"). In two picture-naming experiments we investigated the nature of such form facilitation effect with Mandarin Chinese, separating the…

Open-ended tasks are rarely used to investigate cognition in autism. No known studies have directly examined whether increased attention to the perceptual level of speech in autism might contribute to a reduced tendency to process language meaningfully. The present study investigated linguistic versus perceptual speech processing preferences.…

The present study employs event related potentials (ERPs) to verify the utility of using electrophysiological measures to study developmental questions within the field of language comprehension. Established ERP components (N400 and P600) that reflect semantic and syntactic processing were examined. Fifteen adults and 14 children (ages 8-13)…

Four problems in children's paired-associate memory were addressed: (1) reappraisal of the presumed developmental trend in presentation mode effect during grade-school years, (2) identification of the locus of this developmental effect, (3) evaluation of the influence of combined presentation (verbal plus pictorial) relative to pictorial…

This study indicates that the way in which stories are presented to children (verbal versus pictorial) makes little or no difference in the children's comprehension or recall of the stories. Ninety-six kindergarten and second grade children either looked at a series of pictures (and were told they formed a story) or listened to the story through a…

Left versus right hemispheric auditory-verbal processing ability was studied in 28 learning-disabled children and adolescents, by measuring the influence on reaction time of the hand used to respond versus the hemisphere stimulated. The LD children did not develop the ability to suppress right hemisphere linguistic processes as a function of age.…