Being looked at is an important communicative signal, and attenuated responses to such direct gaze have been suggested as an early sign of autism. Using live eye tracking, we examined whether direct gaze elicits different gaze responses in infants at ages 10, 14 and 18 months with and without later autism in real-life interaction. The sample…

This two-part study looks at disrespectful talk and behavior in tween's television programming (study 1) and its relationship to disrespectful talk and behavior by young viewers (study 2). First, a content analysis was conducted to examine the amount of disrespectful talk and disrespectful behavior in the top programs that children aged 6-12…

Purpose: Early motor abilities (gesture, oral motor, and gross/fine skills) are related to language abilities, and this is not due to an association with cognitive or symbolic abilities: Oral motor skills are uniquely associated with language abilities at 21 months of age. It is important to determine whether this motor-language relationship…

This study used an ethological approach to explore the baby-caregiver dyadic exchanges (Attempted interactions, Triggers, Interactions) of nineteen infants during their first weeks in Residential Care (RC), or a Foster Family (FF) or an Infant-Mother Centre (IMC). Direct observations were conducted at feeding time. Observed behaviours were: baby…

Purpose: This study followed up children identified with expressive language delay (ELD) or receptive/expressive language delay (R/ELD) at 2 years of age, Time 1 (T1), in order to identify their language profiles at 4--5 years, Time 2 (T2), and explore relationships to T1 language, gesture use, and symbolic comprehension. Method: Nineteen of 22…

The current laboratory-based study examined individual differences in sadness coherence (i.e., coherence between objectively coded sad facial expressions and heart rate in response to a sad film clip) and associations with dispositional affect (i.e., positive and negative affect, extraversion, neuroticism) and age in a sample of younger and older…

Purpose: The aim of this study is to analyze the changes in temporal synchrony between gesture and speech of multimodal communicative behaviors in the transition from babbling to two-word productions. Method: Ten Spanish-speaking children were observed at 9, 12, 15, and 18 months of age in a semistructured play situation. We longitudinally…

We tested social cognition abilities of adolescents with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and neurotypically developed peers (NTD). A multi-faceted test-battery including facial emotion categorization (FEC), classical false belief tasks (FBT), and complex social cognition (SC), yielded significantly lower accuracy rates for FEC and complex SC tasks…

Mother-infant interactions are a proximal process in early development and may be especially salient for children who are at risk for social difficulties (i.e. infant siblings of children with autism spectrum disorder). To inform how indices of maternal behaviors may improve parent-mediated interventions designed to mitigate autism spectrum…

This exploratory research is aimed at studying facial emotion recognition abilities in deaf children and how they relate to linguistic skills and the characteristics of deafness. A total of 166 participants (75 deaf) aged 3-8 years were administered the following tasks: facial emotion recognition, naming vocabulary and cognitive ability. The…

Parent-child interaction plays a crucial role in early language acquisition. In young typically developing children, direct and indirect relationships between parent gesture, child gesture and child language have been observed. Far less is known about these relationships in atypical language development. The present study investigated parent…

Previous studies have shown that older children gesture more while telling a story than younger children. This increase in gesture use has been attributed to increased story complexity. In adults, both narrative complexity and imagery predict gesture frequency. In this study, we tested the strength of three predictors of children's gesture use in…

This paper represents a multimodal analysis of the paraverbal (prosodic and gesture) features of expressive female political speech in Latin America and Spain. The language corpus consisted of public speeches delivered by Spanish-speaking female politicians Eva Peron, Christina de Kirchner and Manuela Carmena. The article includes an overview of…

This study explores the developmental change of mother-child interactions in order to investigate which aspects of maternal behavior affect children's speech production. To this end, the interactions between 79 German-speaking mothers and their two- or five-year-old children were observed at two time points (12 months apart) and in two interactive…

With increasing age, the ratio of gains to losses becomes more negative, which is reflected in expectations that positive events occur with a high likelihood in young adulthood, whereas negative events occur with a high likelihood in old age. Little is known about expectations of social events. Given that younger adults are motivated to establish…