Briefly reviews current knowledge about the nature of limits of intersubjectivity (ability to acquire and manage representations of self and other through social experience) in autistic children. Describes an observational study of verbal autistic children indicating the presence of intersubjectivity, but with little of the verbal social…

The rapid, disjointed, and vivid style of Sesame Street may impede rather than promote progress toward literacy and the development of voluntary attention. It robs children of the ability to create mental pictures. Contends that it is a failure as an instructional medium. (DM)

Ten children (ages 5-6) and 10 adults participated in discrimination and selective adaptation speech perception tasks using a synthetic consonant-vowel continuum. Results support hypotheses of sensory processing differences in younger, normally developing children compared with adults and show that such abilities appear to be related to speech…

Emphasizes the role that motor development may play in determining developmental sequences in other domains, such as haptic or tactile perception and depth perception. Maintains that there is a high degree of fit between the developmental sequence in which certain perceptual sensitivities unfold and the ages at which the corresponding motor…

Kindergartners and second, fourth, and sixth graders were shown a series of pictures that depicted an object with increasing completeness and were asked to identify the object. Found that, with increasing age, children correctly identified the object earlier in the sequence and that reaction time was longest for second graders. (BC)

Demonstrates the need for a process-oriented, constructivist approach to understanding infants' categorization abilities. Suggests that emphasizing the distinction between perceptual and conceptual categorization has been an obstacle to forging an approach. Proposes a more microanalytic consideration of features available to infants at different…

Examined degree to which analytic and holistic modes of processing play a role in children's and adults' categorization of faces. Found a developmental trend from analytic to holistic processing and an effect of face inversion with increasing age. Seven-year-olds processed faces comparably to nonfacial visual stimuli, whereas a growing proportion…

This article discusses findings concerning the plasticity of auditory cortical processing mechanisms in adults, including the effects of restricted cochlear damage or behavioral training with acoustic stimuli on the frequency selectivity of auditory cortical neurons and evidence for analogous injury- and use-related plasticity in the adult human…

A bird study found that with sufficient time and training after hair cell and hearing loss and hair cell regeneration, the mature avian auditory system can accommodate input from a newly regenerated periphery sufficiently to allow for recognition of previously familiar vocalizations and the learning of new complex acoustic classifications.…

Trained 1- to 3-year-olds to touch a video screen displaying a unique target and appearing among varying numbers of distracters; correct responses triggered a sound and four animated objects on the screen. Found that children's reaction time patterns resembled those from adults in corresponding search tasks, suggesting that basic perceptual…

This study compiled a comprehensive early auditory processing skills assessment battery and evaluated the battery to toddlers with (n=8) and without (n=9) early recurrent otitis media. The assessment battery successfully distinguished between normal and deficient early auditory processing development in the subjects. The study also found parents…

Assessed development of infants' sensitivity to two nested amodal temporal relations in audible and visible events. Found that sensitivity to synchrony was present by 4 weeks, remaining stable across age. Sensitivity to composition emerged by 7 weeks, increasing dramatically with age. Noted pattern of increasing specificity in perception…

A fundamental question of perceptual development concerns how infants come to perceive partly hidden objects as unified across a spatial gap imposed by an occluder. Much is known about the time course of development of perceptual completion during the first several months after birth, as well as some of the visual information that supports unity…

A word may mean different things in different contexts. The current study explored the changing denotations of spatial terms, focusing on how the distance inferred from a spatial description varied as a function of the size of the objects being spatially related. We examined both terms that explicitly convey distance (i.e., topological terms such…

The impact of 2 types of learning experiences on children's perception of multimodal emotion cues was examined. Children (aged 7-12 years) were presented with conflicting facial and vocal emotions. The effects of familiarity were tested by varying whether emotions were presented by familiar or unfamiliar adults. The salience of particular…