The accurate detection of children's truthful and dishonest reports is essential as children can serve as important providers of information. Research using automated facial coding and machine learning found that children who were asked to lie about an event were more likely to look surprised when hearing the first question during an interview…

Domestic violence typically recurs over time, involving the same victim and perpetrator. When complainants make an allegation about abuse, they are required to particularise the offence and recall details unique to specific occurrences. This experiment investigated adults' ability to particularise an occurrence after experiencing a single or…

Music performance is an intensive sensorimotor task that involves the generation of mental representations of musical information that are actively accessed, maintained, and manipulated according to the demands of the performance. Internal representations and external information interact through feedback and feedforward processes that adjust the…

Purpose: Augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) systems are important to support communication for individuals with complex communication needs. A recent addition to AAC system options is the brain-computer interface (BCI). This study aimed to compare the clinical application of the P300 speller BCI with two more common AAC systems, the…

Visual attention in complex, dynamic scenes is attracted to locations that contain socially relevant features, such as faces, and to areas that are visually salient. Previous work suggests that there is a "global shift" over development such that observers increasingly attend to faces with age. However, no prior work has tested whether…

Many words are associated with more than a single meaning. Words are sometimes "ambiguous," applying to unrelated meanings, but the majority of frequent words are "polysemous" in that they apply to multiple "related" meanings. In a preregistered design that included 2 tasks, we tested adults' and 4.5- to 7-year-old…

The high prevalence of brain injury incidents in adolescence and adulthood demands effective models for re-learning lost cognitive abilities. Impairment in brain injury survivors' higher-level cognitive functions is common and a negative predictor for long-term outcome. We conducted two small-scale interventions (N = 12; 33.33% female) with…

Ticuna (ISO: tca) is a language isolate spoken in the northwestern Amazon Basin (Brazil, Colombia, Peru). Ticuna has more speakers than almost all other Indigenous Amazonian languages and -- unlike most languages of the area -- is still learned by children. Yet academic linguists have given it relatively little research attention. Therefore, to…

Purpose: Right hemisphere brain damage (RHD) commonly causes pragmatic language disorders that are apparent in discourse production. Specific characteristics and approaches to assessment, diagnosis, and treatment of these disorders are not well-defined. RHDBank, a shared database of multimedia interactions for the study of communication using…

This study deals with speech acts addressed to Hadza infants in Tanzania, a group that has traditionally lived off hunting and gathering. Three research questions are addressed: How do Hadza speech acts compare with those found in previous studies in other cultures? Are there differences between child and adult speakers? And do speech acts differ…

This pilot study is a mixed-methods sequential explanatory study that investigated the effects of watching text-relevant video segments supported by the Schematic Information-Processing (SIP) model of reading comprehension on reading comprehension of adult speakers of English as a Second Language (ESL) in terms of text familiarity and the…

Recent research has shown the effectiveness of literacy-based behavioral interventions (LBBIs) as an instructional strategy for a host of skills and routines, including employment skills. This study compared the effects of three LBBI storybook formats (print, e-book, and e-book enhanced with video clips) on the accuracy and independent completion…

We are expected to behave appropriately to suit social situations. One form of behavioral control is the selection of a linguistic register that is appropriate to the listener. Register selection errors can sometimes be interpreted as rude behavior and result in having a bad influence on the relationship with the listener and the evaluation by…

Background: The U.S. uninsured rate has dropped significantly since the passage of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), yet insurance coverage remains lower in historically marginalized communities than in the overall population. New consumer engagement approaches that involve these populations are needed. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the…

The phenomenon of regularization -- learners imposing systematicity on inconsistent variation in language input -- is complex. Studies show that children are more likely to regularize than adults, but adults will also regularize under certain circumstances. Exactly why we see the pattern of behaviour that we do is not well understood, however.…