Infants, children and adults are capable of extracting recurring patterns from their environment through statistical learning (SL), an implicit learning mechanism that is considered to have an important role in language acquisition. Research over the past 20 years has shown that SL is present from very early infancy and found in a variety of tasks…

Many studies have been conducted on the development of young children; however, not many have explored the cognitive processes of prereaders. The eye-tracker has been used with success to investigate the cognitive processes of young children abroad, but such studies are lacking in Malaysia. This study used an experimental procedure created with…

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…

Fine motor skills develop in childhood. In this study, we evaluate motor planning in 6- to 11-year-old children using a pegboard and midline crossing task. The results of the pegboard task showed that children modified their strategies of hand use and space use as a function of age, albeit with a transition in the 8- to 9-year-old children. The…

Purpose: As a class, fricatives are more "resistant" to consonant-vowel coarticulation than other English sounds. This study investigates the relative coarticulatory resistance of /[voiceless dental fricative], s, [voiceless palato-alveolar fricative]/ in child and adult speech to better understand the acquisition of individuated speech…

Bilingual infants from 6- to 24-months of age are more likely to generalize, flexibly reproducing actions on novel objects significantly more often than age-matched monolingual infants are. In the current study, we examine whether the addition of novel verbal labels enhances memory generalization in a perceptually complex imitation task. We…

The mature visual system condenses complex scenes into simple summary statistics (e.g., average size, location, orientation, etc.). However, children, often perform poorly on perceptual averaging tasks. Children's difficulties are typically thought to represent the suboptimal implementation of an adult-like strategy. This paper examines another…

An ability to detect the common location of multisensory stimulation is essential for us to perceive a coherent environment, to represent the interface between the body and the external world, and to act on sensory information. Regarding the tactile environment "at hand", we need to represent somatosensory stimuli impinging on the skin…

Purpose: The aim of this longitudinal study was to describe developmental courses of childhood dysarthria against the background of typical speech motor development by collecting auditory-perceptual data. Method: Fourteen children (four girls, 10 boys; 5;1-8;4 [years;months] at Time 1) with neurological conditions (CNC) and 14 typically developing…

Developmental theory has long emphasized the importance of linking perception, cognition, and action. Techniques designed to record the spatial and temporal characteristics of hand movements (i.e., "manual dynamics") present new opportunities to study the nature of these links across development by providing a window into how perceptual,…

We investigated the kinds of biological properties that children aged 3-6 years attribute to animals, plants, and artifacts by administering a property attribution task and eliciting explanations for the resulting property attributions. Findings indicated that, from the age of 3 years, children more frequently attribute properties to animals than…

In human adults, visual dominance emerges in several multisensory tasks. In children, auditory dominance has been reported up to 4 years of age. To establish when sensory dominance changes during development, 41 children (6-7, 9-10, and 11-12 years) were tested on the Colavita task (Experiment 1) and 32 children (6-7, 9-10, and 11-12 years) were…

This study investigated transfer effects of gaze-interactive attention training to more complex social and cognitive skills in infancy. Seventy 9-month-olds were assigned to a training group (n = 35) or an active control group (n = 35). Before, after, and at 6-week follow-up both groups completed an assessment battery assessing transfer to…

This study examined differences in visual attention as a function of label learning from 6 to 9 months of age. Before and after 3 months of parent-directed storybook training with computer-generated novel objects, event-related potentials and visual fixations were recorded while infants viewed trained and untrained images (n = 23). Relative to a…

Here we describe the performance of children with autism, their siblings, and typically developing children using the Florida Apraxia Battery. Children with autism showed the lowest performance in all sections of the test. They were mostly impaired in pantomime actions execution on imitation and on verbal command, and in imitation of meaningless…