Background: To be successful, students must learn to deal with socially and cognitively demanding tasks. Much remains unknown about the effects of previous classroom experiences and of students' emotional appraisal of a task on their physiological adaptive responses to it. Aims: To investigate how children's physiological response to a social and…

Arabic is characterized by diglossia, which involves the use of two language varieties within a single speech community: Spoken Arabic (SpA) for everyday speech and Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) for formal speech and reading/writing. Earlier research suggests that some Arabic-speaking children with Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) might favor MSA…

Understanding that people's ideas may be false is a challenging step in Theory of Mind (ToM) development, which is accomplished around the age of 4-5 years old by typically developing (TD) children. False-belief attribution remains difficult beyond this age for certain clinical populations, such as Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), where delays in…

We investigated "scalar implicature" in adolescents and children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) to test whether theory of mind deficits associated with autism affect pragmatic inferences in language. We tested scalar implicature computation in adolescents with ASD (12-18 years) and asked whether they reason about mental states when…

Analogical reasoning is an important mechanism for social cognition in typically developing children, and recent evidence suggests that some forms of analogical reasoning may be preserved in autism spectrum disorder. An unanswered question is whether children with autism spectrum disorder can apply analogical reasoning to social information. In…

Background: Children who have social communication disorder (CwSCD) demonstrate persistent difficulties with language pragmatics in conversations and other verbal interactions. Speech-language interventions for these children often include promotion of metapragmatic awareness (MPA); that is, the ability to identify explicitly and reflect upon…

Children with autism spectrum disorder present with a variety of social communication deficits such as atypicalities in social gaze and verbal and non-verbal communication delays as well as perceptuo-motor deficits like motor incoordination and dyspraxia. In this study, we had the unique opportunity to study praxis performance in deaf children…

The impact of goal salience and verbal cues given by the model on 3- to 5-year-olds' reproduction of action components (movement or goal) was investigated in an imitation choice task. Preschoolers watched an experimenter moving a puppet up or down a ramp, terminating at one of two target objects. The target objects were either differently colored…

The study investigated whether 10-week soccer training can benefit the inhibitory control and neuroelectric indices in children with developmental coordination disorder (DCD). Fifty-one children were divided into groups of typically developing (TD, n = 21), DCD-training (n = 16), and DCD non-training (n=14) individuals using the for Children test,…

Over-imitation, which is common in children, is the imitation of elements of an action sequence that are clearly unnecessary for reaching the final goal. A variety of cognitive mechanisms have been proposed to explain this phenomenon. Here, 48 3- and 5-year-olds together with a puppet observed an adult demonstrate instrumental tasks that included…

We compared variations for teaching a sequence of responses through forward chaining. Seven children who had been diagnosed with autism participated in a comparison of teacher completion (TC) of steps beyond the training step and manually guiding the student (SC) to complete steps beyond the training step. A no-completion (NC) condition, in which…

In this study, event related potentials (ERPs) were used to investigate the extent to which dyslexics (aged 9-13 years) differ from normally reading controls in early ERPs, which reflect prelexical orthographic processing, and in late ERPs, which reflect implicit phonological processing. The participants performed an implicit reading task, which…

In a recent study, Gevers and colleagues (2010, "Journal of Experimental Psychology: General," Vol. 139, pp. 180-190) showed that the SNARC (spatial numerical association of response codes) effect in adults results not only from spatial coding of magnitude (e.g., mental number line hypothesis) but also from verbal coding. Because children are…

Parenting programs for school-aged children are typically based on behavioral principles as applied in social learning theory. It is not yet clear if the benefits of these interventions extend beyond aspects of the parent-child relationship quality conceptualized by social learning theory. The current study examined the extent to which a social…

We evaluated the effects of a training package, including instructions, modeling, rehearsal, and feedback, for training staff members to conduct mand training with children. Experimenters collected data on staff performance on each step of a task analysis of mand training and on unprompted child vocal mands. Training resulted in increases in staff…