The current studies used a syntactic priming paradigm with 3- and 4-year-old children. In Experiment 1, children were asked to describe a series of drawings depicting transitive and dative relations to establish baseline production levels. In Experiment 2, an experimenter described a similar series of drawings using one of two syntactic forms…

Teenagers with mental retardation and two groups of children without mental retardation matched on MA or CA carried out mental rotation tasks of unfamiliar stimuli. Three shapes composed of four arms were used. For each shape, there was a version with a salient feature (F+), and a version with no salient feature (F-). Results showed that teenagers…

Recent studies reveal that naming has powerful conceptual consequences within the first year of life. Naming distinct objects with the same word highlights commonalities among the objects and promotes object categorization. In the present experiment, we pursued the origin of this link by examining the influence of words and tones on object…

Auditory stream segregation (or streaming) is a phenomenon in which 2 or more repeating sounds differing in at least 1 acoustic attribute are perceived as 2 or more separate sound sources (i.e., streams). This article selectively reviews psychophysical and computational studies of streaming and comprehensively reviews more recent…

Eye-tracking and gating experiments examined reference comprehension with fluent (Click on the red. . .) and disfluent (Click on [pause] thee uh red . . .) instructions while listeners viewed displays with 2 familiar (e.g., ice cream cones) and 2 unfamiliar objects (e.g., squiggly shapes). Disfluent instructions made unfamiliar objects more…

Reactions to stimuli that were shortly before presented as distractors are usually slowed down; this phenomenon is known as negative priming. Negative priming is an accepted index for tapping into selective control mechanisms. Although this effect is well established for adults, it has been claimed that children do not show negative priming.…

The importance of phonological syllables in recognition and pronunciation of visual words has been demonstrated in languages with a high degree of spelling-sound correspondence. In Spanish, multisyllabic words with frequent first syllables are named more quickly than those with less frequent first syllables, but receive slower lexical decisions.…

In typical interactions, speakers frequently produce utterances that appear to reflect beliefs about the common ground shared with particular addressees. Horton and Gerrig (2005a) proposed that one important basis for audience design is the manner in which conversational partners serve as cues for the automatic retrieval of associated information…

Least-to-most prompting hierarchies (e.g., progressing from verbal to modeled to physical prompts until the target response occurs) may be ineffective when the prompts do not cue the individual to attend to the relevant stimulus dimensions. In such cases, emission of the target response persistently requires one or more of the higher level…

The single-stimulus (SS) preference assessment procedure has been described as more appropriate than the paired stimulus (PS) procedure for "lower functioning" individuals, but this guideline's vagueness limits its usefulness. We administered the SS and PS preference assessment procedures with food items to seven individuals with severe…

This research focuses on the relation between color and psychological functioning, specifically, that between red and performance attainment. Red is hypothesized to impair performance on achievement tasks, because red is associated with the danger of failure in achievement contexts and evokes avoidance motivation. Four experiments demonstrate that…

We hypothesized that the right hemisphere would be superior to the left hemisphere in remembering having seen a specific picture before, given its superiority in perceptually encoding specific aspects of visual form. A large set of pictures (N=1500) of animals, human faces, artifacts, landscapes, and art paintings were shown for 2 s in central…

The effects of signaling the return of items or attention during treatment with noncontingent reinforcement were examined. First, functional analyses showed that the problem behavior exhibited by 2 teenagers with developmental disabilities was sensitive to social positive reinforcement. Next, delivery of the stimulus that maintained problem…

We examined the effects of presession levels of attention (no attention vs. continuous attention) during subsequent alone and attention-extinction conditions for an individual with severe disabilities and problem behavior. A prior functional analysis indicated that attention was a primary maintaining variable for problem behavior. Experimental…

Leisure items are commonly used as reinforcers in behavior-analytic applications. However, a defining feature of autism is the occurrence of stereotypy, and individuals with autism often engage leisure items in a stereotyped manner. The opportunity for stereotyped interaction may be the only aspect of a contingent stimulus that makes it a…