The authors tested whether students can be taught to better understand conventional representations in diagrams, photographs, and other visual representations in science textbooks. The authors developed a teacher-delivered, workbook-and-discussion-based classroom instructional method called Conventions of Diagrams (COD). The authors trained 1…

Objective: To examine whether cognitive enhancement can be delivered through play to preschoolers with ADHD and whether it would affect severity of ADHD symptoms. Method: Twenty-nine 4- and 5-year-old children and their parents participated in separate group sessions (3-5 children/group). Child groups were introduced games designed to enhance…

Speakers employ acoustic cues (pitch accents) to indicate that a word is important, but may also use visual cues (beat gestures, head nods, eyebrow movements) for this purpose. Even though these acoustic and visual cues are related, the exact nature of this relationship is far from well understood. We investigate whether producing a visual beat…

This study investigated the effects of first language prosodic transfer on the perception and production of English lexical stress and the relation between stress perception and production by second language learners. To test the effect of Thai tonal distribution rules and stress patterns on native Thai speakers' perception and production of…

The Individuals with Disabilities Improvement Act and No Child Left Behind Act broadened the roles of occupational therapists (OTs) and physical therapists (PTs) to include therapist participation in early intervening services including response to intervention (RTI). This case report describes one school district's inclusion of OT and PT in the…

This study evaluates the utility of perioperative spectral and cepstral acoustic analyses to monitor voice change after thyroidectomy. Perceptual and acoustic analyses were conducted on speech samples (sustained vowel /[alpha]/ and CAPE-V sentences) provided by 70 participants (36 women and 34 men) at four study time points: prior to thyroid…

Quality of mothering relies on the integrity of multiple physiological and behavioral systems and on two maternal factors, one proximal and one distal, that have a great impact on how a mother mothers: postpartum depression and early experiences. To mother appropriately requires the action of systems that regulate sensation, perception, affect,…

Adult second-language (L2) learners' perception of L2 phonetic segments is influenced by first-language phonological and phonetic properties. It was recently proposed that L2 vocabulary size in adult learners is related to changes in L2 perception (perceptual assimilation model), analogous to the emergence of first-language phonological function…

This paper reports on a clinical trial evaluating outcomes of a frequency-lowering technique for adolescents and young adults with severe to profound hearing impairment. Outcomes were defined by changes in aided thresholds, speech perception, and acceptance. The participants comprised seven young people aged between 13 and 25 years. They were…

Investigations of bimanual movements have shed considerable insight on the constraints underlying our ability to perform coordinated actions. One prominent limitation is evident when people are required to produce reaching movements in which the two trajectories are of different amplitudes and/or directions. This effect, however, is only obtained…

Object substitution masking is a form of visual backward masking in which a briefly presented target is rendered invisible by a lingering mask that is too sparse to produce lower image-level interference. Recent studies suggested the importance of an updating process in a higher object-level representation, which should rely on the processing of…

The current study investigated the perception of intrapersonal, interpersonal, and tool-based grasping possibilities. In Experiment 1, participants judged whether they would grasp planks of wood-presented in ascending, descending, and random orders of length-using one hand (1H), two hands (2H), or with a tool that extended their reach (TH). In…

Even congenitally blind persons can picture things they have never seen, through an intuitive sense of perspective. (Author/BB)

Speech perception requires the integration of information from multiple phonetic and phonological dimensions. Numerous studies have investigated the mapping between multiple acoustic-phonetic dimensions and single phonological dimensions (e.g., spectral and temporal properties of stop consonants in voicing contrasts). Many fewer studies have…