Prosody is the fundamental organizing principle of spoken language, carrying lexical, morphosyntactic, and pragmatic information. It, therefore, provides highly relevant input for language development. Are infants sensitive to this important aspect of spoken language early on? In this study, we asked whether infants are able to discriminate…

Previous studies indicate that at least some aspects of audiovisual speech perception are impaired in children with specific language impairment (SLI). However, whether audiovisual processing difficulties are also present in older children with a history of this disorder is unknown. By combining electrophysiological and behavioral measures, we…

Language and culture endow humans with access to conceptual information that far exceeds any which could be accessed by a non-human animal. Yet, it is possible that, even without language or specific experiences, non-human animals represent and infer some aspects of similarity relations between objects in the same way as humans. Here, we show that…

In quantity discrimination tasks, adults, infants and animals have been sometimes observed to process number only after all continuous variables, such as area or density, have been controlled for. This has been taken as evidence that processing number may be more cognitively demanding than processing continuous variables. We tested this hypothesis…

Human adults are more accurate at discriminating faces from their own race than faces from another race. This "other-race effect" (ORE) has been characterized as a reflection of face processing specialization arising from differential experience with own-race faces. We examined whether 3.5-month-old infants exhibit ORE using morphed faces on which…

Reports the results of two experiments dealing with children's visual and tactual performance. In the first task, after several presentations of a series, the tactual group made almost errorless discriminations. But with memory demands, tactual performance became poorer than visual performance. Found a large developmental difference. (JAC)

Two experiments studied the influence of an individual's cognitive style on concept identification. Subjects were high school males, classified into levels of cognitive style according to their performance on the Hidden Figures Test. For the first experiment, three non-overlapping groups of 30 each were required to classify figural patterns, which…

Subjects were 359 children divided by grade (3 and 6), culture (U.S. and Indian), and sex. Hypothesis was that developmental, cross-cultural, and sex differences would be found in the perception of situational causality. All cross-cultural and developmental differences were found to be significant for U.S. children but not for Indian children. (RJ)

This guide provides group activities for teachers to aid in planning a multicultural curriculum for developing sensory perception in children. The guide emphasizes the cognitive processes involved in sorting out sensory data and the use of multicultural materials as resources for sensory experience. Activities are presented in six sections.…

This study tested the assimilation of an auditory-visual stimulus configuration in 32 infants aged 15 to 16 weeks. The infants' discrimination of matched and mismatched auditory-visual stimuli indicated that infants by 4 months of age are capable of constructing bimodal schemata. (JMB)

Age and condition (either constancy-relevant or variability-relevant) interact, with the youngest group in the constancy-relevant condition performing most poorly on concept identification tasks. (MH)