Effective intraverbal responding often requires control by multiple elements of a verbal stimulus. The purpose of this study was to examine the emergence of such intraverbal relations following tact instruction with compound stimuli and to analyze any resulting error patterns. Participants were seven typically developing children between 3 and…

Purpose: The present study examined whether engaging working memory in a secondary task benefits speech fluency. Effects of dual-task conditions on speech fluency, rate, and errors were examined with respect to predictions derived from three related theoretical accounts of disfluencies. Method: Nineteen adults who stutter and twenty adults who do…

We examined the late positive potential (LPP) event related potential in response to social and nonsocial stimuli from youths 9 to 19 years old with (n = 35) and without (n = 34) ASD. Social stimuli were faces with positive expressions and nonsocial stimuli were related to common restricted interests in ASD (e.g., electronics, vehicles, etc.). The…

Executive functioning deficits found in college students with ASD may have debilitating effects on their everyday activities. Although laboratory studies tend to report unimpaired inhibition in autism, studies of resistance to distractor inhibition reveal difficulties. In two studies, we compared a Virtual Classroom task with paper-and-pencil and…

The authors have worked with teachers across the country as they have exposed social studies students to primary source texts only to find consistent challenges with: (1) Academic language gaps (lack of content knowledge to contextualize or interpret texts); (2) Comprehension gaps (inability to accurately derive meaning from text); (3) Inaccurate…

Empathy can be experienced in powerful ways through art education when students explore and connect with others from different communities and their own concepts of self (Jeffers, 2009). In art education, students see images from various visual cultures and if they are to understand and become open to cultures or groups different from them, they…

Similar to sign language and picture boards, Picture Exchange Communication System (PECS) is an augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) system. AAC systems are used to help individuals who do not have typical verbal skills to communicate with others. PECS is a behavior based intervention that teaches the learner to use visual-graphic…

This study examined relationships between reading comprehension, known predictors of reading comprehension (i.e., cognitive flexibility, fluency, reading motivation and attitude, vocabulary), and graphical device comprehension. One-hundred fifty-six third graders completed assessments of known predictor variables and an assessment tapping…

This study aimed to examine the relative effectiveness of using an animation versus static pictures in terms of supporting the learning of genetics. To provide a methodologically sound comparison, the two sessions were constructed to be equivalent and were designed based on principles provided by the cognitive theory of multimedia learning and the…

Two studies examined when and why children (10-13 years) help ethnic in-group and out-group peers. In Study 1 (n = 163) children could help an out-group or in-group peer with a word-guessing game by entering codes into a computer. While children evaluated the out-group more negatively than the in-group, they helped out-group peers "more"…

In 2 cross-lagged, longitudinal studies we contrasted parental talk about want in a single context versus multiple contexts. Study 1 examined thirty-two 2 year olds, with mothers describing pictures to children. Mothers could use want in zero, one, or multiple contexts. Children whose mothers used want in multiple contexts experienced a…

Background: Dysphagia is common after stroke, affecting up to 50% of patients initially. It can lead to post-stroke pneumonia, which causes 30% of stroke-related deaths, a longer hospital stay and poorer health outcomes. Dysphagia care post-stroke generally focuses on the management of symptoms, via modified oral intake textures and adapted…

Inhibition is often conceptualized as a unitary construct reflecting the ability to ignore and suppress irrelevant information. At the same time, it has been subdivided into inhibition of prepotent responses (i.e., the ability to stop dominant responses) and resistance to distracter interference (i.e., the ability to ignore distracting…

This study investigated whether brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) genotype moderated inhibitory control during an emotionally valenced task in a sample of internationally adopted adolescents (N = 109, ages 12-13 years) who spent their early years in institutional care. Participants were genotyped for the Val66Met polymorphism of the BDNF…

Past research has shown that children recognize emotions from facial expressions poorly and improve only gradually with age, but the stimuli in such studies have been static faces. Because dynamic faces include more information, it may well be that children more readily recognize emotions from dynamic facial expressions. The current study of…