In two-way interactive listening, listeners are expected to use interactional skills or strategies to understand meaning, recognize interlocutors' intentions, make responses, and establish common ground. However, strategy use can be affected by learner differences and affective factors. The present study investigated the effects of group…

Children with autism use hand taking and hand leading gestures to interact with others. This is traditionally considered to be an example of atypical behaviour illustrating the lack of intersubjective understanding in autism. However the assumption that these gestures are atypical is based upon scarce empirical evidence. In this paper I present…

Interactive learning environments with body-centric technologies lie at the intersection of the design of embodied learning activities and multimodal learning analytics. Sensing technologies can generate large amounts of fine-grained data automatically captured from student movements. Researchers can use these fine-grained data to create a…

Little is known about whether stereotypes influence social judgments of autistic individuals, in particular when they compete with tacit face-to-face cues. We compared impression formation of 17 subjects with high-functioning autism (HFA) and 17 age-, gender- and IQ-matched controls. Information about the profession of a job applicant served as…

Two studies investigated whether typically developing children (TD) and children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) were able to decide whether two characters were communicating or not on the basis of point-light displays. Point-lights portrayed actors engaged or not in a social interaction. In study 1, TD children (4-10 years old; n = 36)…

Interactive storybook reading is effective in enhancing deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) children's emergent literacy skills. The current digital era gives parents more opportunities to read books with their child. From an early age on, interaction between parent and child during literacy activities is very important for the development of emergent…

Individuals with autism spectrum disorder do not just 'grow out of' their early difficulties in understanding the social world. Even for those who are cognitively able, autism-related difficulties continue into adulthood. Atypicalities attending to and interpreting communicative signals from others can provide barriers to success in education,…

Findings are presented from the first randomized control trial of the effects of encouraging symbolic gesture (or "baby sign") on infant language, following 40 infants from age 8 months to 20 months. Half of the mothers were trained to model a target set of gestures to their infants. Frequent measures were taken of infant language…

Cranial nerve (CN) knowledge is essential for students in health professions. Gestures and body movements (e.g., mime) have been shown to improve cognition and satisfaction with anatomy teaching. The aim of this pilot study was to compare the effectiveness of didactic lecturing with that of miming lecturing for student learning of the CNs. The…

Children with autism spectrum disorders display atypical development of gesture production, and gesture impairment is one of the determining factors of autism spectrum disorder diagnosis. Despite the obvious importance of this issue for children with autism spectrum disorder, the literature on gestures in autism is scarce and contradictory. The…

Students playing digital learning games in the classroom rarely play alone, even in digital games that are ostensibly "single-player" games. This study explores the patterns of physics reasoning that emerge in face-to-face and online forum collaboration while students play a physics-focused educational game in their classroom. We…

Musical group interaction (MGI) is a complex social setting requiring certain cognitive skills that may also elicit shared psychological states. We argue that many MGI-specific features may also be important for emotional empathy, the ability to experience another person's emotional state. We thus hypothesized that long-term repeated participation…

The current study investigated if deficits in processing emotional expression affect facial identity processing and vice versa in children with autism spectrum disorder. Children with autism and IQ and age matched typically developing children classified faces either by emotional expression, thereby ignoring facial identity or by facial identity…

The aim of the present study was to explore and compare systematically the developmental patterns of certain aspects of imitation, longitudinally from 2 to 10 months, in interactions of infants with grandfathers and grandmothers. Sixteen infants were video-recorded at home in the course of spontaneous dyadic interactions with maternal grandfathers…

This study conducted comparative assessment of friendship in preschoolers with high-functioning autism spectrum disorder (HFASD, n = 29) versus preschoolers with typical development (n = 30), focusing on interactions with friends versus acquaintances. Groups were matched on SES, verbal/nonverbal MA, IQ, and CA. Multidimensional assessments…