Does speaking more than one language help a child perform better on certain types of cognitive tasks? One possibility is that bilingualism confers either specific or general cognitive advantages on tasks that require selective attention to one dimension over another (e.g. Bialystok, [Bialystok, E., 2001]; Hilchey & Klein, [Hilchey, M.D.,…

Do words cue children's visual attention, and if so, what are the relevant mechanisms? Across four experiments, 3-year-old children (N = 163) were tested in visual search tasks in which targets were cued with only a visual preview versus a visual preview and a spoken name. The experiments were designed to determine whether labels facilitated…

Face recognition performance improves during childhood, not reaching adult levels until late adolescence, yet the source of this improvement is unclear. Recognition of faces across changes in viewpoint appears particularly slow to develop. Poor cross-view recognition suggests that children's face representations may be more view specific than…

Statistical learning is characterized by detection of regularities in one's environment without an awareness or intention to learn, and it may play a critical role in language and social behavior. Accordingly, in this study we investigated the electrophysiological correlates of visual statistical learning in young children with autism…

Many early intervention curricular manuals recommend teaching auditory-visual conditional discriminations (i.e., receptive labeling) using the simple-conditional method in which component simple discriminations are taught in isolation and in the presence of a distracter stimulus before the learner is required to respond conditionally. Some have…

Adults are expert at recognizing faces, in part because of exquisite sensitivity to the spacing of facial features. Children are poorer than adults at recognizing facial identity and less sensitive to spacing differences. Here we examined the specificity of the immaturity by comparing the ability of 8-year-olds, 14-year-olds, and adults to…

This twin study examined the relative contributions of genes and environment on 2nd language reading acquisition of Chinese-speaking children learning English. We examined whether specific skills-visual word recognition, receptive vocabulary, phonological awareness, phonological memory, and speech discrimination-in the 1st and 2nd languages have…

This study examined the ability of young children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) to detect affective correspondences between facial and vocal expressions of emotion using an intermodal matching paradigm. Four-year-old children with ASD (n = 18) and their age-matched normally developing peers (n = 18) were presented pairs of videotaped facial…

Purpose: This research examined how the color distribution of symbols within a visual aided augmentative and alternative communication array influenced the speed and accuracy with which participants with and without Down syndrome located a target picture symbol. Method: Eight typically developing children below the age of 4 years, 8 typically…

Reports on three experiments that investigated why young children's perceptions of bimodal speech are less influenced by the visual component of speech than adults' perceptions are. Results argue in favor of the explanation that children are poorer lipreaders than adults. (HOD)

Infants in four age groups--three, six, nine and twelve months--were exposed to an experimental procedure designed to assess the extent to which such subjects were capable of discriminating between different orientations of the same form, and the extent to which they were capable of recognizing the identity between different orientations of the…

This study compared Chinese-American and Caucasian-American children and families in order to better understand which cultural and family characteristics, parent beliefs, and parent practices operate at the early childhood level to produce the more uniform high level of math achievement among Asian-American children. Forty second-generation…