In speech perception, children give particular patterns of weight to different acoustic cues (their cue weighting). These patterns appear to change with increased linguistic experience. Previous speech perception research has found a positive correlation between more analytical cue weighting strategies and the ability to consciously think about…

This article describes the use of touch as a strategy to teach children with multiple handicaps. Touch cues help children to anticipate events and to interpret information from the environment. Caregivers should first observe the child's existing repertoire of movements, and then create touch cues that build upon the child's preferred…

To Danesia, the donut shop across the street from her big urban high school stands for everything adults expect from her--and what they do not. It is the place that most kids go when they cut class, walking out the school doors without anybody caring that they are gone. Like Danesia, most high school students pick right up on what they are "meant"…

Charlotte, the author's 11-year-old daughter, was born with Down syndrome, and is currently attending the local middle school. In terms of her disability Charlotte is developing very well and has a reading age of 9+, however her maths skills age is approximately 4 years. It is not necessarily the case that if a child has good language and literacy…

This article first presents the theoretical grounding for both storytelling and the social construction of reality. A sequence of classroom-tested tools for combining stories with reality construction is then described. Two tools for framing reality are offered: One is an actual frame that students take out of the classroom to frame a scene in…

Every single young person who has grown up in America is only one major event or catastrophe away from falling over the edge into what most people would call "at-risk." The term "at-risk" refers to a wide range of factors that make it more difficult for a person to meet the developmental tasks of their age group. For students, a major…

The contribution of various educators, including William Holmes McGuffey, in developing a character education-based curriculum in the United States is discussed. The role of teachers in moral education of students too is described.

Two experiments were conducted to investigate the effects of multimodal information on learning performance and judgment of learning (JOL). Experiment 1 examined the effects of representation type (word-only versus word-plus-picture) and presentation channel (visual-only versus visual-plus-auditory) on recall and immediate-JOL in fixed-rate…

Current theories of environmental cognition typically differentiate between an online, transient, and dynamic system of spatial representation and an offline and enduring system of memory representation. Here the authors present additional evidence for such 2-system theories in the context of the disorientation paradigm introduced by R. F. Wang…

Fifteen children diagnosed with specific language impairment (SLI) and 15 typically developing (TD) children were tested for identification performance on 2 synthetic speech continual varying in formant transition durations (FTDs). One continuum varied from /ba/ to /wa/, and the other varied from /da/ to /ja/. Various d'-related measures from…

Previous research has suggested that children with specific language impairments (SLI) have deficits in basic speech perception abilities, and this may be an underlying source of their linguistic deficits. These findings have come from studies in which perception of synthetic versions of meaningless syllables was typically examined in tasks with…

Although developmental increases in the size of the position effect within a mispronunciation detection task have been interpreted as consistent with a view of the lexical restructuring process as protracted, the position effect itself might not be reliable. The current research examined the effects of position and clarity of acoustic-phonetic…

People with Williams syndrome are extremely sociable, empathic, and expressive in communication. Some researchers suggest they may be especially sensitive to perceiving emotional expressions. We administered the Faces and Paralanguage subtests of the Diagnostic Analysis of Nonverbal Accuracy Scale (DANVA2), a standardized measure of emotion…

How long does it take to form a durable representation in visual working memory? Several theorists have proposed that this consolidation process is very slow. Here, we measured the time course of consolidation. Observers performed a change-detection task for colored squares, and shortly after the presentation of the first array, pattern masks were…

As human beings, we can interact with our environment through the sense of touch, which helps us to build an understanding of objects and events. The implications of touch for cognition are recognized by many educators who advocate the use of "hands-on" instruction. But is it possible to know something more completely by touching it? Does touch…