When recalling key term definitions from class materials, students may recall entirely incorrect definitions, yet will often claim that these commission errors are entirely correct; that is, they are overconfident in the quality of their recall responses. We investigated whether this overconfidence could be reduced by providing various standards…

Bruxism, forceful grinding of one's teeth together, can produce destructive outcomes such as wear on the teeth and damaged gums and bone structures. The current study implemented a multicomponent intervention that consisted of vocal and physical cues to decrease rates of bruxism. A partial component analysis suggested that the vocal cue was only…

The present research used pigeons in a three-key operant chamber and varied procedural features pertaining to both initial and terminal links of concurrent chains. The initial links randomly alternated on the side keys during a session, while the terminal links always appeared on the center key. Both equal and unequal initial-link schedules were…

Recognizing word boundaries in continuous speech requires detailed knowledge of the native language. In the first year of life, infants acquire considerable word segmentation abilities. Infants at this early stage in word segmentation rely to a large extent on the metrical pattern of their native language, at least in stress-based languages. In…

The authors examined cue competition effects in young children using the blicket detector paradigm, in which objects are placed either singly or in pairs on a novel machine and children must judge which objects have the causal power to make the machine work. Cue competition effects were found in a 5- to 6-year-old group but not in a 4-year-old…

We assessed the effect of specificity of speaker information about an object on three-year-olds' word mappings. When children heard a novel label followed by specific information about an object at exposure, children subsequently mapped the label to that object at test. When children heard only specific information about an object at exposure,…

Purpose: Acquisition of prosodic control appears to evolve across development with younger children relying on durational cues and older children utilizing a broader spectrum of cues including fundamental frequency, intensity, and duration. This study aimed to determine whether unfamiliar listeners could identify prosodic contrasts produced by 4-,…

This paper reports the findings of an investigation aimed at gaining a clearer understanding of the nature of vocabulary difficulties associated with dyslexia and associated risk status. Three studies were conducted to examine preschoolers' access and mastery of syntactic- and phonological-based processes believed to support word learning. Results…

Previous research suggests individuals with autism may be less influenced by a three-dimensional interpretation when copying line drawings (Sheppard et al. "J Autism Dev Disord" 37:1913-1924, 2007). The current research aimed to determine whether this reduced dimensionality effect extends to drawings of an actual object. Twenty-four children and…

In a study of optical cues to the visual perception of stress, three American English talkers spoke words that differed in lexical stress and sentences that differed in phrasal stress, while video and movements of the face were recorded. The production of stressed and unstressed syllables from these utterances was analyzed along many measures of…

A number of studies have investigated infants' abilities to extract and discriminate number from multimodal events. These results have been mixed for several possible reasons, including aspects of the experimental design that provide perceptual cues that are unrelated to number, and are known to influence looking preferences. This experiment used…

One explanation for the inconsistencies in research examining the sentence comprehension abilities of the right hemisphere (RH) is the presence of confounding variables that have generally served to disadvantage the processing capacities of the RH. As such, the present study aimed to investigate hemispheric differences in the use of message-level…

It is well-established that linguistic processing is primarily a left-hemisphere activity, while emotional prosody processing is lateralized to the right hemisphere. Does attention, directed at different regions of the talker's face, reflect this pattern of lateralization? We investigated visuospatial attention across a talker's face with a…

It has recently been shown that interhemispheric communication is needed for the processing of foveally presented words. In this study, we examine whether the integration of information happens at an early stage, before word recognition proper starts, or whether the integration is part of the recognition process itself. Two lexical decision…

We examined the effect of an irrelevant visual transient on the decision where to look for a hidden object. Participants also performed a conventional "inhibition of return" localization task. In Experiments 1 and 2 the two tasks were blocked and in Experiments 3 and 4 they were randomly interleaved. In every experiment there was a bias to select…