This article presents the Moral Sensitivity Inventory, a unique reading-free tool for evaluating the moral sensitivity of people with intellectual disability. Moral sensitivity, one of the four components of Rest's Four Component Model of Morality (1994), is thought to influence moral behavior. The Moral Sensitivity Inventory is intended for…

This research investigated how word production is influenced by six feature-based semantic variables (number of semantic features, intercorrelational density, number of near semantic neighbors, semantic similarity, typicality, and distinctiveness). We simultaneously investigated effects of the six semantic variables on spoken picture naming in a…

Recent findings have shown that language plays an important role in the acquisition of novel cognitive tasks (van 't Wout & Jarrold, 2020). The current study sought to elucidate the factors that influence the contribution of language to novel task learning, focusing specifically on the role of task complexity (defined by the number of…

Emotion can influence various cognitive processes. Communication with children often involves exaggerated emotional expressions and emotive language. Children with autism spectrum disorder often show a reduced tendency to attend to emotional information. Typically developing children aged 7 to 9 years who varied in their level of autism-like…

The critical developmental implications of childcare centre teachers' caregiving sensitivity have been extensively documented. More efforts are pressing to identify antecedents of such sensitivity and elucidate implicated mechanisms. This study examined the association between socioeconomic status and caregiving sensitivity among Chinese childcare…

Background and aims: Although young children's gaze behaviors in experimental task contexts have been shown to be potential biobehavioral markers relevant to autism spectrum disorder (ASD), we know little about their everyday gaze behaviors. The present study aims (1) to document early gaze behaviors that occur within a live, social interactive…

Mathematics is crucial to the educational and vocational success of students. The concrete-representational-abstract (CRA) approach is a method to teach students mathematical concepts. The CRA involves instruction with manipulatives, representations, and numbers only in different lessons (i.e., concrete lessons include manipulatives but not…

Individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities have increased risk for developing challenging behavior. One particularly dangerous topography of challenging behavior is rapid eating. Rapid eating can lead to increased risk for choking and obesity as well as negatively impact social interactions during mealtimes (Anglesea et al.,…

Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) display difficulties with response to joint attention in natural settings but often perform comparably to typically developing (TD) children in experimental studies of gaze following. Previous work comparing infants at elevated likelihood for ASD versus TD infants has manipulated aspects of the gaze…

The purpose of this study is to explore the effects of an affective recommendation system on the developmental trajectories of prospective teachers' emotional patterns, integrated with a Simulated Virtual Classroom (SVC) platform called SimInClass. SVC exposes teachers to a range of student discourses in the form of unexpected stimuli. Fifteen…

Recent work has shown significant sublexical effects of long-term memory in nonword repetition (NWR) using a dichotomous consonant age of acquisition (CAoA) variable (Moore, 2018; Moore, Fiez, and Tompkins, 2017). Performance consistently decreased when stimuli comprised consonants acquired later versus earlier in speech development. To address…

Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often demonstrate difficulty communicating with others, and this may impact the extent to which they can engage in language during play. Previous researchers have used interventions to increase commenting during play with caregivers, siblings, and adult play partners. In these previous studies,…

Early and late bilinguals both differ in the speed with which they comprehend language or in their processing of sentences compared to monolinguals. This is possibly a result of cross-language interference, differential allocation of cognitive resources, or some other difference in language-dependent processes. This dissertation presents research…

Purpose: The purpose of the current study was to examine inhibition of irrelevant information in younger and older English monolingual and Spanish--English bilingual adults. Method: Sixty-one participants divided into four groups: 15 younger English monolinguals, 16 younger Spanish-English bilinguals, 15 older English monolinguals, and 15 older…

Scientific enquiry is a creative process, commonly beginning with a question or problem, then generating a tentative answer or solution, and testing it. In the classroom, the question, perhaps in the form of a problem, is generally given, ready-made, to students by the teachers. With the aim of providing young students with a fuller experience of…