A series of studies on newborns' abilities for recognizing speaking faces has been performed in order to identify the fundamental cues of social cognition. We used audiovisual dynamic faces rather than photographs or patterns of faces. Direct eye gaze and speech addressed to newborns, in interactive situations, appear to be two good candidates for…

Interactive silences are important strategies that can be implemented by practitioners and parents of children with hearing loss who are learning a spoken language. Types of adult self-controlled pauses and evidence pertaining to the function of those pauses are discussed, followed by a review of advantages to justify implementation of these…

An experiment investigated the effect of tonal language background on discrimination of pitch contour in short spoken and musical items. It was hypothesized that extensive exposure to a tonal language attunes perception of pitch contour. Accuracy and reaction times of adult participants from tonal (Thai) and non-tonal (Australian English) language…

We used a false-biofeedback methodology to manipulate physiological arousal in order to induce affective states that would influence learners' metacognitive judgments and learning performance. False-biofeedback is a method used to induce physiological arousal (and resultant affective states) by presenting learners with audio stimuli of false heart…

This exploratory study examined the effects of Interactive Metronome (IM) when integrated with a traditional language and reading intervention on reading achievement. Forty-nine school-age children with language and reading impairments were assigned randomly to either an experimental group who received the IM treatment or to a control group who…

This study used the modality shift experiment, a relatively simple reaction time measure to visual and auditory stimuli, to examine attentional shifting within and across modalities in 33 children and 42 adults with high-functioning autism as compared to matched numbers of age- and ability-matched typical controls. An exaggerated "modality shift…

One of the purposes of Rhythmic Auditory Stimulation (RAS) is to improve the control of dysfunctional movement patterns. This study aimed to extend the line of research by focussing on secondary students with mental retardation and cerebral palsy. According to the study's assumption, cadence can be controlled through a stable and low signal…

Unexpected and task-irrelevant sounds can capture our attention and may cause distraction effects reflected by impaired performance in a primary task unrelated to the perturbing sound. The present auditory-visual oddball study examines the effect of the informational content of a sound on the performance in a visual discrimination task. The…

Data on emotion processing by individuals with ASD suggest both intact abilities and significant deficits. Signal intensity may be a contributing factor to this discrepancy. We presented low- and high-intensity emotional stimuli in a face-voice matching task to 22 adolescents with ASD and 22 typically developing (TD) peers. Participants heard…

The current research challenges the common view that positive affect and negative affect generate a broadened or narrowed attentional focus, respectively. Contrary to this view, two studies found that the link between affect and attentional focus as measured by a traditional flanker task (Study 1) and a modified flanker task (Study 2) reflects…

The potential role of orthographic representations on spoken word production was investigated with speakers of Chinese, a non-alphabetic and orthographically non-transparent language. Using the response generation procedure, we obtained the well-known facilitation from word-initial phonological overlap, but this effect was unaffected by whether or…

The role of memory in behavioral distraction by auditory attentional capture was investigated: We examined whether capture is a product of the novelty of the capturing event (i.e., the absence of a recent memory for the event) or its violation of learned expectancies on the basis of a memory for an event structure. Attentional capture--indicated…

We evaluated the effects of 3 types of noncontingent auditory stimulation (music, white noise, recordings of vocal stereotypy) on 2 children with autism who engaged in high rates of vocal stereotypy. For both participants, the music condition was the most effective in decreasing vocal stereotypy to near-zero levels, resulted in the highest parent…

We examined the emergence of listener responses following intraverbal training in four children with autism. Intraverbal training consisted of a transfer-of-control procedure in which the participants were taught to answer questions in the form of "What is the state bird of [name of state]" using either picture prompts (tact-to-intraverbal…

Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) perform worse than controls when listening to speech in a temporally modulated noise (Alcantara, Weisblatt, Moore, & Bolton, 2004; Groen et al., 2009). The current study examined whether this is due to poor auditory temporal-envelope processing. Temporal modulation transfer functions were measured in…