It is common to see mirror errors in letters in early stages of reading due to the mirror-generalization process that allows a visual stimulus to be identified independently of its orientation. To avoid such errors, this process must be inhibited. A special case would be children with dyslexia since their difficulties with the alphabetic code may…

Purpose: The purpose of the study was to evaluate implicit learning in children with developmental language disorder (DLD) by employing a visual artificial grammar learning task. Method: Thirteen children with DLD and 24 children with typical language development between the ages of 8 and 12 years completed a visual artificial grammar learning…

Background: Analogical mapping is a domain-general cognitive process used notably in language development, and particularly in the abstraction of construction schemas. Children with developmental language disorders (DLD) display an impairment in linguistic productivity and creativity, which can be linked to a lack of generalization of construction…

The present study explores the ways in which young EFL learners draw on lived experiences, viewed as interactional experiences in L1 or L2 which they have participated in or observed, to ground their metapragmatic understandings. Building on previous research with adult (e.g. McConachy 2018) and young learners (Savic 2021; Savic and Myrset 2021),…

Research Findings: In 2 experiments, we tested whether children generalize psychological and biological properties to novel foods. We used an induction task in which a property (either biological or psychological) was associated with a target food. Children were then asked whether a taxonomically related and a script-related food would also have…

Error-correction strategies are essential considerations for behavior analysts implementing discrete trial training with children with autism. The research literature, however, is still lacking in the number of studies that compare and evaluate error-correction procedures. The purpose of this study was to compare two error-correction strategies:…

Considerable research has demonstrated that English-speaking children extend nouns on the basis of shape. Here we asked whether the development of this bias is influenced by the structure of a child's primary language. We tested English- and Spanish-speaking children between the ages of 1 ; 10 and 3 ; 4 in a novel noun generalization task. Results…

The present study exposed five-year-olds (M=5 ; 2), seven-year-olds (M=7 ; 6) and adults (M=22 ; 4) to instances of a novel phrasal construction, then used a forced choice comprehension task to evaluate their learning of the construction. The abstractness of participants' acquired representations of the novel construction was evaluated by varying…

The benefits of permanent pictorial prompts in enhancing maintenance and generalization are likely dependent on their degree of stimulus control and the extent to which their use is generalized. Although several studies on the use of pictorial prompts have demonstrated their efficacy (e.g., Pierce & Schreibman, 1994; Wacker & Berg, 1983; Wacker,…

Purpose: To understand the components of auditory learning in typically developing children by assessing generalization across stimuli, across modalities (i.e., hearing, vision), and to higher level language tasks. Method: Eighty-six 8- to 10-year-old typically developing children were quasi-randomly assigned to 4 groups. Three of the groups…

This study is part of a programmatic line of research into the use of basic positive reinforcement procedures for improving working memory in children with autism spectrum disorders. The authors evaluated the effects of multiple exemplar training, utilizing positive reinforcement, on performance of a "digit span backwards" task--a test of working…

Several bodies of research have found different results with regard to presentation timing, categorization, and generalization. Both presenting instances at the "same time" (simultaneous) and presenting instances "apart in time" (spacing) have been shown to facilitate generalization. In this study, we resolved these results by examining…

Stimuli that are processed fluently tend to be regarded as more familiar and are more likely to be classified as old on a recognition test compared with less fluent stimuli. Recently it was shown that the standard relationship between fluency and positive recognition judgments can be reversed if participants are trained that previously studied…

Background: Previous theories implicate hippocampal dysfunction in anxiety disorders. Most of the data supporting these theories stem from animal research, particularly lesion studies. The generalization of findings from rodent models to human function is hampered by fundamental inter-species differences. The present work uses a task of spatial…

The present study was designed to determine whether parents (three mothers and one grandmother) could implement CBI with SP reliably for teaching community skills to their children and the effects of parent-delivered intervention on teaching the community skills. Maintenance and generalization effects of the intervention were also analyzed in the…