In light of the known visuoperceptual strengths and altered language skills in autism, we investigated the impact of problem content (semantic/visuospatial) combined with complexity and presence of lures on fluid reasoning in 43 autistic and 41 typical children (6-13 years old). Increased complexity and presence of lures diminished performance,…

Purpose: Children with cochlear implants (CIs) have less experience accessing spoken language. Mandarin Chinese uses pitch information to contrast word meaning, and the signal that the CI devices provide is degraded. Thus, Mandarin-speaking children with CIs may face more challenges in the development of language skills. This study examines…

Word retrieval and lexical organization were explored in 16 Danish children with slight to severe hearing loss (HL), 11 children with developmental language disorder (DLD), and 25 typically developing (TD) children in the age range of 7 to 12 years. There is a special focus on children with HL with and without language difficulties compared with…

Working memory is necessary for a wide variety of cognitive abilities. Developmental work has shown that as working memory capacities increase, so does the ability to successfully perform other cognitive tasks, including language processing. The present work demonstrates the effects of working memory availability on children's language production.…

Purpose: Brain imaging has provided puzzle pieces in the understanding of language. In neurologically healthy populations, the structure of certain brain regions is associated with particular language functions (e.g., semantics, phonology). In studies on focal brain damage, certain brain regions or connections are considered sufficient or…

The present study examined the role of language capacities in explaining differences in social information processing (SIP) among three school-age groups: high-functioning children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD, IQ > 75), children with specific learning disorder (SLD), and children with typical development (TD). Participants were 96 boys…

The purpose of this study was to examine verbal fluency and verbal short-term memory in 12 adults with Down syndrome (DS) and 12 adults with Intellectual Disability (ID) of unspecified origin, matched for receptive vocabulary and chronological age. Participants' performance was assessed on two conditions of a verbal fluency test, namely, semantic…

Schizophrenia is a complex mental disorder that results in language-related symptoms at various discourse levels, ranging from semantics (e.g. inventing words and producing nonsensical strands of similar-sounding words) to pragmatics and higher-level functioning (e.g. too little or too much information given to interlocutors, and tangential…

The present study explored the relation between language control and nonverbal cognitive control in different bilingual populations. We compared monolinguals, Dutch-French unbalanced bilinguals, balanced bilinguals, and interpreters on the Simon task (Simon & Rudell, 1967) and the Attention Network Test (ANT; Fan, McCandliss, Sommer, Raz,…

Atypical cerebral lateralization in motor and language functions in regard to schizotypal personality traits in healthy populations, as well as among schizophrenic patients, has attracted attention because these traits may represent a risk factor for schizophrenia. Although the relationship between handedness and schizotypal personality has been…

Purpose: This study presents evidence that gesture is a means to understanding the semantic representations of toddlers. Method: The data were part of a study of toddlers' word learning conducted by N. C. Capone and K. K. McGregor (2005). The object function probe from that study was administered after 1 exposure and after 3 exposures to objects.…

Recent data suggest recovery of language systems but persistent structural abnormalities in the prematurely born. We tested the hypothesis that subjects who were born prematurely develop alternative networks for processing language. Subjects who were born prematurely (n = 22; 600-1250 g birth weight), without neonatal brain injury on neonatal…

Lukatela and Turvey (2000) demonstrated a phonological priming effect in the lexical decision task (LDT) with a 14-ms prime and concluded that phonology plays a central role in word meaning activation. In contrast, several other researchers reported that phonological priming is significant only at much longer prime durations (e.g., Ferrand &…

A theory of comprehension in verification tasks is developed from a general conception of language comprehension. Models are developed for a task involving transfer verbs "borrow" and "loan" and the possession verb "have." Models and theoretical framework are superior in some respects to constituent comparison and conversion models. (CHK)