To test a central assumption of the increased perceptual capacity account in individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), the effects of perceptual load and target-stimulus degradation on auditory detection sensitivity were contrasted. Fourteen adolescents with ASD and 16 neurotypical controls performed a visual letter search task under three…

This article reports on the acquisition of relative clauses in Tagalog, the most widely spoken language in the Philippines. A distinctive feature of Tagalog is a unique system of voice that creates competing patterns, each with different possibilities for relativization. This study of children's performance on agent and patient relative clauses in…

The present study addresses the scope of the writing difficulties observed in patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) and mild cognitive impairment (MCI). Patients with AD, patients with MCI and healthy controls performed a written picture-naming task and a direct copy transcoding task in which phonology-to-orthography (P-O) consistency was…

Different lines of research suggest that our mental representations of time and space are linked, though the strength of this linkage has only recently been addressed for the front-back mental timeline (Eikmeier, Schröter, Maienborn, Alex-Ruf, & Ulrich, 2013). The present study extends this investigation to the left-right mental timeline. In…

This paper tests a new method of teaching vocabulary to young second language learners through the medium of drama, specifically the effect of drama teaching techniques on vocabulary acquisition among primary school learners of Welsh. Vocabulary Acquisition via Drama (VAD) is based on principles derived from both process drama and communicative…

Previous studies report that minimally verbal children with autism spectrum disorder show impaired picture comprehension when matched to typically developing controls on language comprehension. Here, we compare "both" picture comprehension and picture production abilities in linguistically delayed children with autism spectrum disorder…

From birth on, infants show long-term recognition memory for persons. Furthermore, infants from six months onwards are able to store and retrieve demonstrated actions over long-term intervals in deferred imitation tasks. Thus, information about the model demonstrating the object-related actions is stored and recognition memory for the objects as…

Frith's original notion of 'weak central coherence' suggested that increased local processing in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) resulted from reduced global processing. More recent accounts have emphasised superior local perception and suggested intact global integration. However, tasks often place local and global processing in direct trade-off,…

It is surprising that there are inconsistent findings of transitive inference (TI) in young infants given that non-linguistic species succeed on TI tests. To conclusively test for TI in infants, we developed a task within the social domain, with which infants are known to show sophistication. We familiarized 10- to 13-month-olds (M = 11.53 months)…

We examine whether German children attach an adultlike relevance to the pragmatic category of polarity contrast (e.g., "In my picture the child IS eating the candies" following after "In my picture the child is not eating the candies") with linguistic expressions (i.e., the affirmative particles…

It is well established in language acquisition research that monolingual children and adult second language learners misinterpret sentences with the universal quantifier "every" and make quantifier-spreading errors that are attributed to a preference for a match in number between two sets of objects. The present Visual World eye-tracking…

Recent research has begun to explore individual differences in statistical learning, and how those differences may be related to other cognitive abilities, particularly their effects on language learning. In this research, we explored a different type of relationship between language learning and statistical learning: the possibility that learning…

The roles of phonological short-term memory (pSTM) and speech perception in spoken sentence comprehension were examined in an experimental design. Deficits in pSTM and speech perception were simulated through task demands while typically-developing children (N = 71) completed a sentence-picture matching task. Children performed the control,…

Brain damaged participants offer an opportunity to evaluate the cognitive and linguistic processes and make assumptions about how the brain works. Cognitive linguists have been investigating the underlying mechanisms of idiom comprehension to unravel the ongoing debate on hemispheric specialization in figurative language comprehension. The aim of…

This study examined the effectiveness of explicit instruction and feedback, focusing on degrees of prior knowledge of the personal "a" in intermediate level second language (L2) Spanish. On the pretest, participants (n = 58) completed grammaticality judgment and picture description tasks, which found that learners had different degrees…