Sleep problems are a common occurrence among children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). In addition to the challenges that sleep problems present for children's neurodevelopment, learning, and daytime behaviors, sleep problems in children present significant challenges for the entire family. Research studies on behavioral interventions to…

This dissertation examines the participation of one Chinese teacher and five 13 to 15 year-old Chinese heritage students in a classroom in a Chinese community school during group discussions about narrative texts. In this study, the teacher used Collaborative Reasoning (CR) (Anderson, et al., 2001) to help the Chinese heritage students extend…

In providing children at risk for reading difficulties with the necessary skills to be successful readers in school age programs, early childhood educators in high-quality preschool programs facilitate the development of emergent literacy and oral language abilities through language-rich environments. However, most teachers in preschool settings…

Bipolar disorder is frequently clinically diagnosed in youths who do not actually satisfy Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (4th ed., text revision; DSM-IV-TR; American Psychiatric Association, 1994) criteria, yet cases that would satisfy full DSM-IV-TR criteria are often undetected clinically. Evidence-based assessment methods…

Nonmedical factors and diagnostic certainty contribute to variation in clinical decision making, but the process by which this occurs remains unclear. We examine how physicians' interpretations of patient sex-gender affect diagnostic certainty and, in turn, decision making for coronary heart disease. Data are from a factorial experiment of 256…

Purpose: This paper aims to report the results of a replication study of perceived managerial and leadership effectiveness within a Romanian public sector hospital, and to discuss the extent to which they are similar to and different from findings from equivalent studies carried out in two British NHS Trust hospitals. Design/methodology/approach:…

This study evaluates the necessity of training multiple versus single manipulative-imitations per object in order to establish generalized manipulative-imitation. Training took place in Croyden Avenue School's Early Childhood Developmental Delay preschool classroom in Kalamazoo, MI. Two groups of 3 children each were trained to imitate in order to…

Three experiments examined whether preschoolers recognize that the causal properties of objects generalize to new members of the same set given either deterministic or probabilistic data. Experiment 1 found that 3- and 4-year-olds were able to make such a generalization given deterministic data but were at chance when they observed probabilistic…

This short report draws attention to an interesting kind of configuration in the lexicon that seems to have escaped theoretical or systematic descriptive attention. These configurations, which we dub SEMPLATES, consist of an abstract structure or template, which is recurrently instantiated in a number of lexical sets, typically of different form…

Although the literature clearly demonstrates that repeated readings result in immediate effects on students' performance on the intervention materials as well as long-term benefits, data are less promising regarding its immediate generalization effects to similar materials. Using an alternating treatments design, the current study evaluated the…

Increased emotionality is a characteristic of human adolescence, but its animal models are limited. Here we report that generalization of auditory conditioned fear between a conditional stimulus (CS+) and a novel auditory stimulus is stronger in 4-5-wk-old mice (juveniles) than in their 9-10-wk-old counterparts (adults), whereas nonassociative…

The primary goal of the present study is to gain more insight into the phenomena of Expletive Negation. Chapter 1 starts with the observed hallmark properties of EN and theoretical backgrounds. In chapter 2, I show the pragmatic contribution of two scalar meanings of undesirability and unlikelihood. It is further shown that the base of scale…

Despite substantial correlational evidence of a relationship between morphological awareness and reading ability, there has been only limited intervention research conducted to document the effects of morphological awareness on various literacy outcomes, particularly reading comprehension, and almost no research comparing the relative…

To examine whether enantiomorphy (i.e., the ability to discriminate lateral mirror images) is influenced by the acquisition of a written system that incorporates mirrored letters (e.g., b and d), unschooled illiterate adults were compared with people reading the Latin alphabet, namely, both schooled literate adults and unschooled adults…

After questioning the practical significance of evidence that parenting influences brain development--while highlighting the scientific importance of such work for understanding "how" family experience shapes human development--this paper reviews evidence suggesting that brain structure and function are "chiselled" by parenting. Although the…