Previous research has demonstrated that infants under 17 months have difficulty learning novel words in the laboratory when the words differ by only one consonant sound, irrespective of the magnitude of that difference. The current study explored whether 15-month-old infants can learn novel words that differ in only one vowel sound. The rich…

Physiologic reactivity to racially rejecting images was assessed in 35 young adults (10 males, 25 female) from African-American backgrounds using the startle probe paradigm. In a laboratory setting, participants viewed 16 images depicting racial rejection, racial acceptance, nonracial negative, and nonracial positive themes. While viewing these…

A multiple-probe design was used to evaluate the effects of training on three children functioning on the higher end of the autism spectrum who were individually taught to answer each of three types of inferential "why" questions: (a) questions based on a three-card picture sequence, (b) questions based on a verbally presented brief…

The authors investigated whether intensive musical experience leads to enhancements in executive processing, as has been shown for bilingualism. Young adults who were bilinguals, musical performers (instrumentalists or vocalists), or neither completed 3 cognitive measures and 2 executive function tasks based on conflict. Both executive function…

We compared processing of non-verbal auditory stimuli by dyslexic and non-dyslexic children using electrophysiological methods. The study included 39 children (17 with dyslexia plus 22 controls) assessed via frontal, central, parietal, and temporal electrodes. As an extension of previous P300 event-related potential studies, we analysed variations…

Objective: To examine the underlying mechanisms of adults' intended caregiving responses to cry sounds in a behavioral genetic design and to investigate the role of cry pitch and perceived urgency in sensitive and harsh caregiving responses. Methods: The sample consisted of 184 adult twin pairs (18-69 years), including males and females, parents…

Epidemiological research was used to develop the Speech Disorders Classification System (SDCS). The SDCS is an important speech diagnostic paradigm in the field of speech-language pathology. This paradigm could be expanded and refined to also address treatment while meeting the standards of evidence-based practice. The article assists that process…

This study investigated the mental representation of music notation. Notational audiation is the ability to internally "hear" the music one is reading before physically hearing it performed on an instrument. In earlier studies, the authors claimed that this process engages music imagery contingent on subvocal silent singing. This study refines the…

Two experiments investigate whether native speakers of French can use a noun's phonological ending to retrieve its gender and that of a gender-marked element. In Experiment 1, participants performed a gender decision task on the noun's gender-marked determiner for auditorily presented nouns. Noun endings with high predictive values were selected.…

In manual search tasks designed to assess infants' knowledge of the object concept, why does search for objects hidden by darkness precede search for objects hidden by visible occluders by several months? A graded representations account explains this decalage by proposing that the conflicting visual input from occluders directly competes with…

Our motor and perceptual representations of actions seem to be intimately linked and the human mirror neuron system (MNS) has been proposed as the mediator. In two experiments, we presented biological or non-biological movement stimuli that were either congruent or incongruent to a required response prompted by a tone. When the tone occurred with…

Three eye movement studies with novel lexicons investigated the role of semantic context in spoken word recognition, contrasting 3 models: restrictive access, access-selection, and continuous integration. Actions directed at novel shapes caused changes in motion (e.g., looming, spinning) or state (e.g., color, texture). Across the experiments,…

The current study aimed to identify specific stimuli associated with music that served as an establishing operation (EO) for the problem behavior of a 6-year-old child with a diagnosis of autism. Specific EOs for problem behavior evoked by auditory stimulation could be identified. A differential negative reinforcement procedure was implemented for…

The influence of phonological similarity on bilingual language processing was examined within and across languages in three experiments. Phonological similarity was manipulated within a language by varying neighborhood density, and across languages by varying extent of cross-linguistic overlap between native and non-native languages. In Experiment…

Why are students silent? Using written reflections and interviews, Mary M. Reda examines students' perceptions of speaking and being silent in a first-year composition classroom, and explores how their teachers, classroom relationships, and their own sense of identity shape their decisions to speak or be silent. By challenging many firmly held…