Current methods of assessing children's physiological "stress reactivity" may be confounded by psychomotor activity, biasing estimates of the relation between reactivity and health. We examined the joint and independent contributions of psychomotor activity and challenge reactivity during a protocol for 5- and 6-year-old children (N = 338).…

Children's reasoning about the appropriateness of accepting credit for one's own prosocial behavior was examined. Participants aged 7-11 years old in Japan and the USA (total N = 206) were presented with a series of stories in which a protagonist performs a good deed and is asked about it by another character. Across stories, the protagonist…

One conception of inhibitory functioning suggests that the ability to successfully inhibit a predominant response depends mainly on the strength of that response, the general functioning of working memory processes, and the working memory demand of the task (Roberts, Hager, & Heron, 1994). The proposal that inhibition and functional working memory…

Attention lapses resulting from reactivity to task challenges and their consequences constitute a pervasive factor affecting everyday performance errors and accidents. A bidirectional model of attention lapses (error [image omitted] attention-lapse: Cheyne, Solman, Carriere, & Smilek, 2009) argues that errors beget errors by generating attention…

What accounts for the Right Hemisphere (RH) functional superiority in visual change detection? An original task which combines one-shot and divided visual field paradigms allowed us to direct change information initially to the RH or the Left Hemisphere (LH) by deleting, respectively, an object included in the left or right half of a scene…

To identify neural regions that automatically respond to linguistically structured, but meaningless manual gestures, 14 deaf native users of American Sign Language (ASL) and 14 hearing non-signers passively viewed pseudosigns (possible but non-existent ASL signs) and non-iconic ASL signs, in addition to a fixation baseline. For the contrast…

Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and Specific Language Impairment (SLI) are disorders of communication that are sometimes thought to show similar structural language difficulties. Recent research has even suggested that they might be aetiologically related. However, it may be that standardized language tasks are not sensitive enough to detect…

In three experiments, we investigated the role of automatic and controlled inhibitory retrieval processes in true and false memory development in children and adults. Experiment 1 incorporated a directed forgetting task to examine controlled retrieval inhibition. Experiments 2 and 3 used a part-set cue and retrieval practice task to examine…

This study investigated the formulation of verb argument structure in Catalan- and Spanish-speaking children with specific language impairment (SLI) and typically developing age-matched controls. We compared how language production can be guided by conceptual factors, such as the organization of the entities participating in an event and knowledge…

Twenty-five monolingual (L1) children with specific language impairment (SLI), 32 sequential bilingual (L2) children, and 29 L1 controls completed the Test of Active & Passive Sentences-Revised (van der Lely 1996) and the Self-Paced Listening Task with Picture Verification for actives and passives (Marinis 2007). These revealed important…

Computer modeling has been widely promoted as a means to attain higher order learning outcomes. Substantiating these benefits, however, has been problematic due to a lack of proper assessment tools. In this study, we compared computer modeling with expository instruction, using a tailored assessment designed to reveal the benefits of either mode…

Background: The ability to compare numbers, as the most basic form of number sense, has been related to arithmetical achievement. Aims: The current study addressed the predictive value of non-symbolic and symbolic (number word (NW) and Arabic number (AN)) comparison for arithmetics by means of a longitudinal design. Sample: Sixteen children with…

We investigated whether 6- and 7-year-olds and 9- and 10-year-olds, as well as adults, process object dimensions independent of or in interaction with one another in a perception and action task by adapting Ganel and Goodale's method for testing adults ("Nature", 2003, Vol. 426, pp. 664-667). In addition, we aimed to confirm Ganel and Goodale's…

Although visual functions have been proposed to be enhanced in deaf individuals, empirical studies have not yet established clear evidence on this issue. The present study aimed to determine whether deaf children with diverse communication modes had superior visual memory and whether their performance was improved by the use of differential…

The immediate and long-term neural correlates of linguistic processing deficits reported following paediatric and adolescent traumatic brain injury (TBI) are poorly understood. Therefore, the current research investigated event-related potentials (ERPs) elicited during a semantic picture-word priming experiment in two groups of highly functioning…