Although it is commonly believed that language and culture are inexorably linked, the precise nature of this relationship remains elusive. This study investigated the hypothesis that a loss in language signals a loss in culture if language is considered a central value. This hypothesis was investigated by rating the Hindi and English proficiency…

A review of the literature reveals that obstacles to the successful transfer of basic skills, knowledge, and thinking skills during classroom instructional time differ depending on which of three components of expertise is entailed: conceptual understanding, domain-specific basic skills, or domain-specific strategies. This article, accordingly,…

Less is known about the effects of normal aging on speech output than other motor actions, because studies of communication integrity have focused on voice production and linguistic parameters rather than speech production characteristics. Studies investigating speech production in older adults have reported increased syllable duration (Slawinski,…

Studies of how children who are blind acquire and use language have focused less on cognitive compensations and more on delays in development. Vision is important in the establishment of early communicative patterns, and sighted children regularly use contextual visual information, such as a speaker's gestures and eye gaze, to make sense of speech…

Theory of mind (ToM)--our ability to predict behaviors of others in terms of their underlying intentions--has been thought to be universal and invariant across different cultures. However, several ToM studies conducted outside the Anglo-American cultural or linguistic boundaries have obtained mixed results. To examine the influence of…

This study investigated gender differences in communication effectiveness between popular and unpopular 5- to 7-year-old children. Because previous research suggests that there may be gender differences in how popular and unpopular children communicate with each other, 24 same-gender pairs (each containing a popular and an unpopular child) were…

The present study focused on age and SES differences in stress reactivity in response to cognitively challenging tasks. Specifically, we assessed within-person trajectories of cortisol, a steroid hormone released by the adrenal gland in response to stressors, before, during, and after exposure to cognitively challenging tasks. We extend the…

In the present experiment, the authors tested Mandarin and English listeners on a range of auditory tasks to investigate whether long-term linguistic experience influences the cognitive processing of nonspeech sounds. As expected, Mandarin listeners identified Mandarin tones significantly more accurately than English listeners; however,…

Global-local processing was examined in high-functioning children with autism and in groups of typically developing children. In experiment 1, the effects of structural bias were tested by comparing visual search that favored access to either local or global targets. The children with autism were not unusually sensitive to either level of visual…

Central coherence theory hypothesizes individuals with autism process information in a detail-focused fashion. The present study examined whether adolescents with an intellectual disability and comorbid autism spectrum disorder showed a weaker central coherence than age- and IQ-matched controls. The central coherence skills of 43 adolescents from…

Infants of 18 and 24 months acquiring English were tested in a preferential looking task on their ability to detect ungrammaticalities caused by manipulating a single function word in sentences. Infants heard grammatical sentences in which the determiner "the" preceded a target noun, as well as three ungrammatical conditions in which "the" was…

This study assessed the relation between mother mental state language and child desire language and emotion understanding in 15--24-month-olds. At both times point, mothers described pictures to their infants and mother talk was coded for mental and nonmental state language. Children were administered 2 emotion understanding tasks and their mental…

Proactive interference (PI) may influence the predictive utility of working memory span tasks. Participants in one experiment (N=70) completed Ravens Advanced Progressive Matrices (RAPM) and multiple versions of operation span and probed recall, modified for the type of memoranda (digits or words). Changing memoranda within- or across-trials…

To provide the first systematic test of whether young children will spontaneously perceive and imitate hierarchical structure in complex actions, a task was devised in which a set of 16 elements can be modelled through either of two different, hierarchically organized strategies. Three-year-old children showed a strong and significant tendency to…

Developmental dyslexia may affect as much as 15% of the population, but the aetiology of the disorder is still being debated. The cerebellar theory of dyslexia proposes that cerebellar dysfunction could lead to the myriad of symptoms seen in dyslexic individuals, both in literacy and non-literacy domains. The cerebellum is crucial to the fluent…