Gestures--hand movements that accompany speech and express ideas--can help children learn how to solve problems, flexibly generalize learning to novel problem-solving contexts, and retain what they have learned. But does it matter who is doing the gesturing? We know that producing gesture leads to better comprehension of a message than watching…

Purpose: Children and early adolescents seem to have an advantage over adults in acquiring nonnative speech sounds, supported by evidence showing that earlier age of acquisition strongly predicts second language attainment. Although many factors influence children's ultimate success in language learning, it is unknown whether children rely on…

Previous studies have shown that older children gesture more while telling a story than younger children. This increase in gesture use has been attributed to increased story complexity. In adults, both narrative complexity and imagery predict gesture frequency. In this study, we tested the strength of three predictors of children's gesture use in…

In the current study, we investigated the effects of an instructional package (i.e., response prompting, sentence frames) on sentence writing for three middle school participants (ages 12-13) with moderate to severe disabilities. We employed a multiple probe across behaviors design to evaluate the efficacy of the intervention package and also used…

Using a modified system of least prompts, two classroom teachers taught three participants with moderate intellectual disability to generate questions about United States history. After reading brief portions of the text aloud to the participants, the teachers taught participants to identify if the answer to the question was in the book or not in…

A paradox at the heart of language acquisition research is that, to achieve adult-like competence, children must acquire the ability to generalize verbs into non-attested structures, while avoiding utterances that are deemed ungrammatical by native speakers. For example, children must learn that, to denote the reversal of an action,…

Generalization refers to the extension of learned behaviours to novel conditions, and it is one of the criteria by which the effectiveness and efficiency of a remediation programme may be judged. This article extracts principles of generalization from the treatment literature, and provides examples of how this information may be used to help guide…

A reliability generalization of the Revised Children's Manifest Anxiety Scale (RCMAS) was conducted using the normative sample. The RCMAS consists of a Total Anxiety scale as well as four subscales. Results suggest that the Total Anxiety scores are typically reliable (median across 48 samples = .81). Subscale scores were less reliable: The median…

Retrospective study of case records of speech-delayed children (N=73) given 14 different management programs over seven years suggested that age and error type may be predictors of potential spontaneous generalization and that the inclusion of self-monitoring procedures may increase the probability of early spontaneous generalizations of target…