The second article in a two-part series (Hustad and Beukelman, 2001) reports on a study that examined effects of experimentally imposed topic cues, alphabet cues, and combined cues on listener comprehension of severely dysarthritic speech. Consistent with earlier intelligibility results, combined cues resulted in higher comprehension. Findings…

Examined covert attention shifts in infants with event-related potentials (ERPs). Found that reaction time to localize target showed covert attention shifts. There was a larger P1 ERP component on valid trials than on invalid trials or on no-cue control trials. Pre-saccadic ERP potentials in response to target were larger when target was in cued…

This study investigated novel word acquisition by 18- and 24-month-old children in the context of adult referential behavior independent of variations in salience. Findings suggest that 24-month olds use referential intent of the speaker to learn new words, but when learning, they may have a less secure grasp on the meaning of speakers'…

Examined in two studies referential understanding in 12- and 18-month-olds' responses to another's emotional outburst. Found that infants relied on the presence versus absence of referential cues to determine whether an emotional message should be linked with a salient object and they actively consulted referential cues to disambiguate the…

Real-time spectrographic displays (SDs) have been used in speech training for more than 30 years with adults and children who have severe and profound hearing impairments. Despite positive outcomes from treatment studies, concerns remain that the complex and abstract nature of spectrograms may make these speech training aids unsuitable for use…

This paper discusses challenging features of interviewing young children for a range of purposes. Research with young children is discussed as well as other forms of interviewing by practitioners in a range of fields. Processes in establishing the interview purpose include defining some ground rules for the young client, managing the physical…

We have recently demonstrated that pre-training of additivity (the outcome of two causal cues is larger than one causal cue) greatly enhances blocking. This manipulation could work by removing a ceiling effect on the outcome, as proposed by Cheng (1997). Alternatively, it could remove the logical ambiguity associated with blocking under…

Human observers demonstrate impressive visual sensitivity to human movement. What defines this sensitivity? If motor experience influences the visual analysis of action, then observers should be most sensitive to their own movements. If view-dependent visual experience determines visual sensitivity to human movement, then observers should be most…

This study examined mother-child verbal exchanges during phonological awareness (PA) tasks embedded into storybook reading sessions. The aims of the research were (a) to determine how mothers scaffolded their children's task performance, (b) to characterize the stability of maternal scaffolding over four sessions, and (c) to study the relation…

The aim of this experiment was to investigate the use of orthographic analogies in conditions that involved making sense of print (picture-word matching) and pronouncing print (reading aloud) for readers with dyslexia. An adapted version of the classic clue-word paradigm developed by Goswami was used. Participants were 40 readers with dyslexia and…

A meta-analysis of the available judgment and memory data on the sleeper effect in persuasion is presented. According to this effect, when people receive a communication associated with a discounting cue, such as a noncredible source, they are less persuaded immediately after exposure than they are later in time. Findings from this meta-analysis…

In two studies, the reason that infants in a novel situation look to adults was assessed. In Study 1, 10- and 13-month-old infants encountered a visual cliff that was deep (56 cm) or ambiguous (20 cm). Infants crossed the ambiguous cliff reliably faster than the deep cliff, and the first looks to mother of infants in the deep cliff condition were…

Phillips, Wellman, and Spelke (2002) provided experimental evidence indicating that by the age of 12 months infants use information about an adult's gaze-direction and emotional expression to predict action. We investigate the generality of this ability, using Phillips et al.'s paradigm across different referential gestures. If infants have a rich…

Little is known about the acoustic cues infants might use to selectively attend to one talker in the presence of background noise. This study examined the role of talker familiarity as a possible cue. Infants either heard their own mothers (maternal-voice condition) or a different infant's mother (novel-voice condition) repeating isolated words…

Observing averted eye gaze results in the automatic allocation of attention to the gazed-at location. The role of the orientation of the face that produces the gaze cue was investigated. The eyes in the face could look left or right in a head-centred frame, but the face itself could be oriented 90 degrees clockwise or anticlockwise such that the…