Purpose: This article's aim is to discuss the potential of audio description (AD) in two contexts: (1) developmental and educational difficulties experienced by children with low vision or total blindness; (2) psycho-social importance of access to mass media by children and adolescents. Method: The considerations presented here are formed on the…

Previous studies suggest that age of acquisition affects the outcomes of learning, especially at the morphosyntactic level. Unknown is how syntactic development is affected by increased cognitive maturity and delayed language onset. The current paper studied the early syntactic development of adolescent first language learners by examining word…

Designing instruments for children and youth that result in reliable and valid data requires consideration beyond calculating grade-level equivalence of the text. Very little methodological research has been conducted on the survey response processes of children and youth and there are no comprehensive guidelines informing instrument development…

"Child Development and Learning" integrates concepts of learning and development into one comprehensive text for understanding child development. At its core is the belief that learning and development are intertwined. As children learn, they also develop. As children develop, they also learn. With an understanding of how children…

Purpose: Verbal short-term memory (STM) and working memory (WM) skills predict speech and language outcomes in children with cochlear implants (CIs) even after conventional demographic, device, and medical factors are taken into account. However, prior research has focused on single end point outcomes as opposed to the longitudinal process of…

Hobson (Autism and the development of mind. Lawrence Erlbaum, Hove, UK "1993") has proposed that the cognitive and linguistic disabilities that characterise autism result from abnormalities in inter-subjective engagement during infancy, which in turn results in impaired reflective self-awareness. The aim of the present study was to test Hobson's…

Children and youth learn in countless ways, anywhere, anytime. And one of the most powerful levers of children's learning--from the early childhood years through adolescence--is families. For families, libraries provide the books, media, and activities that help them open doors for children's literacy and lifelong learning. Libraries are poised to…

Concern for the impact of prenatal cocaine exposure (PCE) on human language development is based on observations of impaired performance on assessments of language skills in these children relative to non-exposed children. We investigated the effects of PCE on speech processing ability using event-related potentials (ERPs) among a sample of…

Background: Girls with fragile X syndrome (FXS) have a wide range of cognitive and language abilities. The range of language outcomes experienced by girls with FXS, however, has been relatively unexplored. The purpose of this exploratory study was to examine receptive and expressive language, with a focus on vocabulary and syntax, in a group of…

Developmental cognitive neuroscience is a rapidly growing field that examines the relationships between biological development and cognitive ability. In the past decade, there has been ongoing refinement of concepts and methodology related to the study of "functional connectivity" among distributed brain regions believed to underlie cognition and…

Patterns of development of ToM belief abilities in intellectually disabled (ID) children and typically developing (TD) children matched on their developmental age were investigated. The links between cognition, language, social understanding and ToM belief abilities were examined. EDEI-R [Perron-Borelli M. (1996). "Echelles Differentielles…

Comparisons of age and test score correlations, comparisons of cross-sequential means, and trends of means for diagnostic subgroups and normal controls suggest developmental delay for all measured skills at all ages for autistic and schizophrenic children. Findings also suggest a trend for steady prepubertal cognitive skill development, followed…

This study examined characteristics of a group of adolescent mothers and their infants who participated in an intervention program run by a public health department. The subjects were administered a structured interview and a measure of self-esteem, and efforts were made to obtain their school records from local public schools. The Mental Scale of…

Approximately 500 works concerning acquisition of French as a first or second language by children from infancy to adolescence are listed. Although works on prelinguistic development are not included, research on comprehension during this period is. Studies of early simultaneous bilingual development are included if one of the languages is French.…

Discusses differences between authors' view of conversation and Ervin-Tripp's (included in this issue) on the similarities between adult and child conversation, planfulness in achieving topic coherence, the generalization of research results to other groups, and the socialization of conversational behavior. Also presents evidence supporting their…