911 calls reporting the mysterious disappearance of a child may contain information critical to law enforcement. If this information is untruthful, valuable resources can be misdirected and precious time may be lost. Therefore, the current study examined verbal cues of veracity and deception in 911 calls placed by caregivers of missing children.…

The author discusses the process of play in terms of six elements in the play cycle first introduced by Sturrock and Else in 1998 and revised by King and Newstead in 2020--precue, play cue, play return, play frame, flow, and annihilation--and their relation to Winnicott's concepts of "potential space" or the "third area," which…

During language acquisition, children are tasked with the challenge of determining which words can appear in which syntactic constructions. This has been long recognized as a learnability paradox. On one hand, there are generalizations that children must learn. On the other hand, language is known for its arbitrariness, so children also need to…

We sought to evaluate a set of procedures based on Relational Frame Theory in teaching children with disabilities to reason analogically using relations between the contextual cues "same," "opposite," and "different." Two children were first taught to respond to the relational cues using common pictures and were…

We examined knowledge-based inference in 6-, 8- and 10-year-olds. Participants listened to texts where the number of clues for an inference was manipulated and then judged whether single-word probes (target inference, competing inference, literal word from the text and an unrelated concept) were related to the story. Accuracy and response times…

Autoclitics are secondary verbal operants that are controlled by a feature of the conditions that occasion or evoke a primary verbal operant such as a tact or mand. Qualifying autoclitics extend, negate, or assert a speaker's primary verbal response and modify the intensity or direction of the listener's behavior. Howard and Rice (1988)…

This study investigated the comprehension of prosodically and syntactically marked focus by 5- to 8-year-old Cantonese-speaking children with and without autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Children listened to question-answer dialogues while looking at pictures depicting the scenarios, and judged whether the answers were correct responses to the…

Abstract Although the presence of toys in childhood has remained steady for decades, the types of toys that fill children's toy boxes have changed, especially over the last 10-15 years. Many of today's toys are marked by technological enhancements, from a shape sorter driven by a singing bear to robotic plastic animals designed to match a…

Background: Children with Down syndrome have speech and language difficulties that are disproportionate to their overall intellectual ability and relative strengths in the use of gesture. Shared book reading between parents and their children provides an effective context in which language development can be facilitated. However, children with…

The study of children's prospective memory has gained new momentum over the past 20 years and is now an active area of research in cognitive development. Yet, this resurgence has been accompanied by significant challenges that offer important lessons and insights for other areas of developmental science. In this article, I provide an overview and…

Previous studies have found reduced leftward bias of facial processing in individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). However, it is not clear whether they manifest a leftward bias in general visual processing. To shed light on this issue, the current study used the manual line bisection task to assess children 5 to 15 years of age with ASD…

Using a semi-spontaneous speech corpus, we present evidence from computational modelling of tonal productions from Mandarin-speaking children (4- to 11-years old) and adults, showing that children exceed the adult-level tonal distinction at the age of 7 to 8 years using F0 cues, but do not reach the high adult-level distinction using spectral cues…

Previous research on training auditory-visual conditional discriminations (AVCDs) have compared several prompt types including gestural, positional, and identity-matching prompts. Other prompting procedures, such as those that involve the manipulation of the comparison array, have received less attention in the applied literature. For example, the…

Autistic children (AC) show less audiovisual speech integration in the McGurk task, which correlates with their reduced mouth-looking time. The present study examined whether AC's less audiovisual speech integration in the McGurk task could be increased by increasing their mouth-looking time. We recruited 4- to 8-year-old AC and nonautistic…

There is a long-standing gap in literacy achievement between African American and European American students (e.g., NAEP, 2019, 2022). A large body of research has examined different factors that continue to reinforce performance differences across students. One variable that has been a long-term interest to sociolinguists and applied scientists…