Two experiments investigated whether preverbal infants distinguish between humans and mammals. Study 1 found that 7-, 9-, and 11-month-olds distinguished humans from mammals in an object-examination task. Study 2 found that 7-month-olds but not 5-month-olds showed evidence for category discrimination with the 2-dimensional color photos of toy…

Calm or crying 9- and 12-week-olds sat facing a researcher who gazed into their eyes or at their forehead and delivered either a sucrose solution or pacifier or delivered nothing. Found that combining sweet taste and eye contact was necessary and sufficient for calm 9- and 12-week-olds to form a preference for the researcher, but not for crying…

This study examined the influence of stimulus context and audibility on sentence recognition in 60 normal-hearing children, 24 hearing-impaired children, and 20 normal-hearing adults. For both semantically correct and semantically anomalous sentences, there was a systematic age-related shift in the performance-intensity functions. Data from the…

Three studies investigated the role of surface attributes in infants' identification of agents, using a habituation paradigm designed to tap infants' interpretation of grasping as goal directed (Woodward, 1998). When they viewed a bare human hand grasping objects, 7- and 12-month-old infants focused on the relation between the hand and its goal.…

The Stroop paradigm was used to examine the role of phonological activation in semantic access and its development in reading Chinese characters. Subjects (age 7-23 years) of different reading ability were asked to name the display color of Chinese characters. The characters were displayed in four different colors: red, yellow, blue and green.…

Brief multiple-stimulus-without-replacement (MSWO) preference assessments were conducted with 3 adolescent boys with emotional-behavioral disorders in the context of their public school educational program. The reinforcing effects of stimuli identified as high, medium, and low preference were then evaluated using an alternating treatments design…

The aim of the present study was to investigate differences in brain activation in a family with SLI as compared to intact individuals with normally developed language during processing of language stimuli. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to monitor changes in neuronal activation in temporal and frontal lobe areas in 5…

Children typically learn in classroom environments that have background noise and reverberation that interfere with accurate speech perception. Amplification technology can enhance the speech perception of students who are hard of hearing. Purpose: This study used a single-subject alternating treatments design to compare the speech recognition…

Deficits in temporal resolution and/or the precedence effect may underlie part of the speech understanding difficulties experienced by older listeners in degraded acoustic environments. In a previous investigation, R. Roberts and J. Lister (2004) identified a positive correlation between measures of temporal resolution and the precedence effect,…

People behave as if they know the structure of their environment. Because people rarely study that structure explicitly, several theorists have postulated an implicit learning system that abstracts that structure automatically. An alternative view is that people respond to local structure that derives from global structure. Measures are developed…

Background: Some previous studies have linked Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) with a bias in spatial awareness away from the left. As genetic research suggests that ADHD may be better viewed as an extreme on a continuum rather than a distinct entity, here we examined this issue in boys from the normal population. Method: From an…

Background: People are better at recognizing faces of their own race than faces of another race. Such race specificity may be due to differential expertise in the two races. Method: In order to find out whether this other-race effect develops as early as face-recognition skills or whether it is a long-term effect of acquired expertise, we tested…

Investigation of children's knowledge of the Earth can reveal much about the origins, content and structure of scientific knowledge, and the processes of conceptual change and development. Vosniadou and Brewer (1992, claim that children construct coherent mental models of a flat, flattened, or hollow Earth based on a framework theory and intuitive…

This study examined the time course of typing in prelingually and profoundly deaf as well as hearing individuals. Both groups of participants performed a written picture naming task and a written pseudoword task. Keystroke timing measurements from the written picture naming task revealed that the deaf as well as the hearing group were…

The optimal practice of medicine includes integrating individual clinical expertise with the best available clinical evidence from systematic research. This article reviews nine treatment modalities used for children who have cerebral palsy (CP), including hyperbaric oxygen, the Adeli Suit, patterning, electrical stimulation, conductive education,…