People have greater difficulty reading academic textbooks on screen than on paper. One notable problem is that they cannot construct an effective cognitive map because of the lack of contextual information cues and ineffective navigational mechanisms in e-books. To support the construction of cognitive maps, this paper proposes the visual cue map,…

Emotional cues contain important information about the intentions and feelings of others. Despite a wealth of research into children's understanding of facial signals of emotions, little research has investigated the developmental trajectory of interpreting affective cues in the voice. In this study, 48 children ranging between 5 and 10 years were…

Some syllables are louder, longer and stronger than other syllables at the lexical level. These prominent prosodic characteristics of certain syllables are captured by suprasegmental features including fundamental frequency, duration and intensity. A language like English uses fundamental frequency, duration and intensity to distinguish stressed…

Social skills instruction is as important for many students with disabilities as instruction in core academic subjects. Frequently, students with autism require individualized social skills instruction to experience success in general education settings. Literacy-based behavioral Interventions (LBBIs) are an effective intervention that instructors…

This study examined the influence of prompt characteristics on the averages of all scores given to test taker responses on the TOEFL iBT[TM] integrated Read-Listen-Write (RLW) writing tasks for multiple administrations from 2005 to 2009. In the context of TOEFL iBT RLW tasks, the prompt consists of a reading passage and a lecture. To understand…

A multiple-baseline design across participants was utilized to investigate the effects of a visual cueing system (VCS) on the ability of three children with Autism Spectrum Disorders to retell the events of their school day. The VCS comprised consistent pictures but text that changed to reflect each day's activities. The participants utilized the…

In the task switch paradigm, a switch of task is typically accompanied by a change in task cue. It has been proposed that the performance deficit usually observed when switching tasks is actually the result of changing cues. To test this possibility, we used a 2:2 cue-task mapping in which each cue indicated 2 different tasks. With advance…

Background: Several models of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) propose abnormalities in the response to behavioural contingencies. Using event-related potentials (ERPs), the present study investigated the monitoring and subsequent evaluation of performance feedback resulting in either reward or punishment in children with ADHD (N =…

Children look longer at a familiar object when presented with either correct pronunciations or small mispronunciations of consonants in the object's label, but not following larger mispronunciations. The current article examines whether children display a similar graded sensitivity to different degrees of mispronunciations of the vowels in…

de Hevia and Spelke (de Hevia and Spelke (2009). Spontaneous mapping of number and space in adults and young children, "Cognition, 110", 198-207) investigated the mapping of number onto space. To this end, they introduced a non-symbolic flanker task. Here subjects have to bisect a line that is flanked by a 2-dot and a 9-dot array. Similar to the…

Accurately aligning to a crosswalk is an important component of safe street crossing for pedestrians who are blind. Six alignment cues were evaluated in a simulated crosswalk environment in which the angle of the crosswalk was not always in line with the slope of the ramp. The effectiveness of each cue is reported and implications are discussed.…

Five cues were evaluated with respect to their usefulness in directing the headings of pedestrians who were blind during street crossings. The study was conducted at a simulated crosswalk, with the angle of the crosswalk varied relative to the approach and direction of the slope of the ramp. Three cues worked well over the distance equivalent to…

It is well established that 2-year-olds attribute a novel label to an object's global shape rather than local features (i.e., parts). Although recent studies have found that younger infants also attend to global rather than local features when given a label, the test stimuli in these experiments confounded parts and shape by varying both or…

Responses to threat occur via two known independent processing routes. We propose that early, reflexive processing is predominantly tuned to the detection of congruent combinations of facial cues that signal threat, whereas later, reflective processing is predominantly tuned to incongruent combinations of threat. To test this prediction, we…

Do Slovak-German bilinguals apply native Slovak phonological and lexical knowledge when segmenting German speech? When Slovaks listen to their native language, segmentation is impaired when fixed-stress cues are absent (Hanulikova, McQueen & Mitterer, 2010), and, following the Possible-Word Constraint (PWC; Norris, McQueen, Cutler & Butterfield,…