Purpose: Effects of clicks and tonebursts on early and late auditory middle latency response (AMLR) components were evaluated in young and older cigarette smokers and nonsmokers. Method: Participants ( n = 49) were categorized by smoking and age into 4 groups: (a) older smokers, (b) older nonsmokers, (c) young smokers, and (d) young nonsmokers.…

Trends in sources of cigarettes among adolescents were assessed using data from a teen cohort (2000-2006). Five sources--bought from store, got from other teen, stole from others, bought from others, and got from an adult--were measured over time by age. The most common source among all ages was other teens. Fewer teens bought cigarettes from…

Purpose: The authors examined whether school-age children with a history of specific language impairment (H-SLI), their peers with typical development (TD), and adults differ in sensitivity to audiovisual temporal asynchrony and whether such difference stems from the sensory encoding of audiovisual information. Method: Fifteen H-SLI children, 15…

Deaf learners frequently demonstrate significantly less vocabulary knowledge than hearing age-mates. Studies involving other domains of knowledge, and perhaps deaf learners' academic performance, indicate similar lags with regard to world knowledge. Such gaps often are attributed to limitations on deaf children's incidental learning by…

Background: Language impairment (LI) in the preschool years is known to vary over time. Stability in the diagnosis of LI may be influenced by children's individual variability, the measurement error of commonly used assessment instruments and the cut-points used to define impairment. Aims: To investigate the agreement between two different…

Background: Response inhibition, working memory, and response variability are possible endophenotypes of ADHD based on their association with the disorder and evidence of heritability. One of the critical although rarely studied criteria for a valid endophenotype is that it persists despite waxing and waning of the overt manifestations of the…

Test anxiety which implies excessive worry about doing well on a test by students no matter the level can become a major hindrance on test performance and can cause extreme nervousness and memory lapses among other symptoms. This study x-rayed and investigated the level of test anxiety among students in tertiary institutions using Alvan Ikoku…

James R. Flynn is an accidental IQ specialist. In the early 1980s, the American-born political scientist thought he might spend a few pages in a planned book on "how to defend humane ideals" grappling with the argument that the gap in IQ scores between blacks and whites was genetically rooted. It was not his first foray into that subject, but this…

Purpose: Previous research has demonstrated that children weight the acoustic cues to many phonemic decisions differently than do adults and gradually shift those strategies as they gain language experience. However, that research has focused on spectral and duration cues rather than on amplitude cues. In the current study, the authors examined…

Adolescent rats exhibit impaired extinction retention compared to pre-adolescent and adult rats. A single nonreinforced exposure to the conditioned stimulus (CS; a retrieval trial) given shortly before extinction has been shown in some circumstances to reduce the recovery of fear after extinction in adult animals. This study investigated whether a…

Purpose: To evaluate child-adult differences for consonant identification in a noise or a 2-talker masker. Error patterns were compared across age and masker type to test the hypothesis that errors with the noise masker reflect limitations in the peripheral encoding of speech, whereas errors with the 2-talker masker reflect target-masker…

As the workforce ages it becomes important to examine if there is misperception of creativity and age in work contexts. A laboratory experiment examined perceptions of the creativity of a team with both young and old workers and of a team composed entirely of young workers. Scripted videos portrayed such teams engaged in designing an outdoor…

A review of hospital records was conducted for children evaluated for autism spectrum disorders who completed both the Leiter International Performance Scale-Revised (Leiter-R) and Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scales, 5th Edition (SB5). Participants were between 3 and 12 years of age. Diagnoses were autistic disorder (n = 26, 55%) and pervasive…

The current study examines the developmental trajectory of banging movements and its implications for tool use development. Twenty (6- to 15-month-old) infants wore reflective markers while banging a handled cube; movements were recorded at 240 Hz. Results indicated that through the second half-year, banging movements undergo developmental changes…

Purpose: The study was aimed at characterizing age-related changes in speech motor performance on a nonword repetition task as a function of practice and nonword length and complexity. Method: Nonword repetition accuracy, lip aperture coordination, and nonword production durations were assessed on 2 consecutive days for 16 young and 16 elderly…