Background: Investigations using eye-tracking have reported reduced fixations to salient social cues such as eyes when participants with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) view social scenes. However, these studies have not distinguished different cognitive phenotypes. Methods: The eye-movements of 28 teenagers with ASD and 18 typically developing…

Students in Room 501 were exploring and negotiating their lives as transnational citizens. In a globalized world of instantaneous information and communication, Latino students are shaping, morphing, and evolving into a new generation. This study highlights one group of students who were aspiring toward middle class, which is not the typical…

This chapter explores paths toward emotion-focused coping among typically developing young children and their more or less average parents--portraying characteristic developmental patterns, demands, and stresses. Emotion-focused coping strategies are effortful and aim to decrease negative emotions in stress-inducing interpersonal contexts. The…

This study applies the Phonological Mean Length of Utterance measurement (PMLU; Ingram & Ingram, 2001; Ingram, 2002) to the data of five children acquiring Finnish and evaluates their phonological development longitudinally at four different age points: 2;0, 2;6, 3;0, and 3;6. The children's results on PMLU and related measures are discussed…

Children's ability to exercise selective trust is crucial for the development of their knowledge and successful socialization. For speakers of some languages, evidentials, which are grammatical source-of-knowledge markers, could provide valuable support of these processes. Focusing on Bulgarian, this chapter situates children's use of evidentials…

Forty children, aged 1 ; 8-2 ; 0, participated in one of three training conditions meant to enhance their comprehension of the spatial term "under": the +Gesture group viewed a symbolic gesture for "under" during training; those in the +Photo group viewed a still photograph of objects in the "under" relationship; those in the Model Only group did…

It is generally accepted that the presence of a second language (L2) has an impact on the neuronal substrates build up and used for language processing; the influence of the age of L2 exposure, however, is not established. We tested the hypothesis that the age of L2 acquisition has an effect on the cortical representation of a multilingual…

This study describes the development of emerging intonation in six children who had received a cochlear implant (CI) before the age of 3 years. At the time their implant was activated, the children ranged in age from 11-37 months. Spontaneous longitudinal speech samples were recorded from 30-minute sessions in which the child interacted with his…

Background: Mothers' synchronous playtime behaviors have been linked to language development in children with autism (Siller & Sigman, 2002, 2008). This study sought to explain individual differences in maternal synchrony in order to improve parent-training programs targeting communication skills in children with autism. Methods: Participants were…

This article presents the concept of heritage literacy, a decision-making process by which people adopt, adapt, or alienate themselves from tools and literacies passed on between generations of people. In an auto-ethnographic study, four generations of a single family and Amish participants from the surrounding community were interviewed to…

Studies of English and German find that children tend to acquire word-final consonant clusters before word-initial consonant clusters. This order of acquisition is generally attributed to articulatory, frequency and/or morphological factors. This contrasts with recent experimental findings from French, where two-year-olds were better at producing…

The early noncry vocalizations of infants are salient social signals. Caregivers spontaneously respond to 30%-50% of these sounds, and their responsiveness to infants' prelinguistic noncry vocalizations facilitates the development of phonology and speech. Have infants learned that their vocalizations influence the behavior of social partners? If…

In this article I discuss the selection and assembly of formal features in second language acquisition. Assembling the particular lexical items of a second language (L2) requires that the learner reconfigure features from the way these are represented in the first language (L1) into new formal configurations on possibly quite different types of…

This study examines whether orthographic processing transfers across languages to reading when the writing systems under acquisition are sufficiently related. We conducted a study with 76 7-year-old English-first-language children in French immersion. Measures of English and French orthographic processing (orthographic choice tasks) and…

We explored children's early interpretation of numerals and linguistic number marking, in order to test the hypothesis (e.g., Carey (2004). Bootstrapping and the origin of concepts. "Daedalus", 59-68) that children's initial distinction between "one" and other numerals (i.e., "two," "three," etc.) is bootstrapped from a prior distinction between…