This study examined syntactic comprehension in French children with dyslexia in both listening and reading. In the first syntactic comprehension task, a partial version of the Epreuve de Comprehension syntaxico-semantique (ECOSSE test; French adaptation of Bishop's test for receptive grammar test) children with dyslexia performed at a lower level…

Raven's Coloured Progressive Matrices (RCPM) is a standardised test that is commonly used to obtain a non-verbal reasoning score for children. As the RCPM involves the matching of a target to a pattern it is also considered to be a visuo-spatial perception task. RCPM is therefore frequently used in studies in Williams Syndrome (WS), in order to…

Owing to higher performance on the Raven's Progressive Matrices (RPM) than on the Wechsler Intelligence Scales (WIS), it has recently been argued that intelligence is underestimated in autism. This study examined RPM and WIS IQs in 48 individuals with autism, a mixed clinical (n = 28) and a neurotypical (n = 25) control group. Average RPM IQ was…

Background: Pragmatic assessment methods are very diverse and differ in informant type. Some rely on parents, others on teachers/professionals and some directly test pragmatic abilities in the children themselves. A widely used pragmatic parent questionnaire is the Children's Communication Checklist-2 (CCC-2). However, it is not known how scores…

Recent studies suggest motor skills are not entirely spared in individuals with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Previous reports demonstrated that young adults with ASD were able to land accurately on a target despite increased temporal and spatial variability during their movement. This study explored how a group of adolescents and young…

Inspired by a previous study of Korean deaf and hard of hearing adolescents, the researchers conducted a priming task of living-nonliving categorization with a sample of Chinese deaf and hard of hearing adolescents. The sample in this study had significantly lower accuracy levels for the thematically related items than for the taxonomically…

The contribution of lower level linguistic abilities (study 1) and a higher level capacity, namely the use of context, (study 2), on text comprehension was studied. Participants were 16 individuals with Down syndrome aged between aged between 8 years 11 months and 16 years 10 months, and 16 children with typical development, aged between 5 years…

Painful stiffening of the shoulder, "frozen shoulder" is a common cause of shoulder pain and disability. Continuous passive motion (CPM) is an established method of preventing joint stiffness and of overcoming it. A randomized, comparative prospective clinical trial was planned to compare the early response with different rehabilitation…

Background: Children with word-finding difficulties manifest a high frequency of word-finding characteristics in narrative, yet word-finding interventions have concentrated on single-word treatments and outcome measures. Aims: This study measured the effectiveness of a narrative-based intervention in improving single-word picture-naming and…

The present study was aimed at developing an attitude scale and then use it to reveal the attitude of mathematical gifted students' attitude towards mathematics. In the first phase of the study, an attitude-scale (AS) towards mathematics were designed using the psychometric approach. The AS was composed of seventeen items aimed to measure four…

Asperger's disorder is one of autistic spectrum disorders; sharing clinical features with autism, but without developmental delay in language acquisition. There have been some studies of intellectual functioning in autism so far, but very few in Asperger's disorder. In the present study, we investigated abstract reasoning ability, whose form of…

Background: Although it is widely recognized that substantial heterogeneity exists in the cognitive profiles of children with Developmental Coordination Disorder (DCD), very little is known about the language skills of this group. Aims: To compare the language abilities of children with DCD with a group whose language impairment has been well…

Recently this journal published a research article examining the effectiveness of three different tests in identifying ethnically diverse gifted and talented children (Lewis, DeCamp-Fritson, Ramage, McFarland, & Archwamety, 2007, Volume 15, Number 1, pp. 38-42). After examining the proportions of Caucasian and non-Caucasian children identified…

Semantic short-term memory (STM) patients have a reduced ability to retain semantic information over brief delays but perform well on other semantic tasks; this pattern suggests damage to a dedicated buffer for semantic information. Alternatively, these difficulties may arise from mild disruption to domain-general semantic processes that have…

Background: Children with specific language impairment (SLI) often experience difficulties in the recall and repetition of verbal information. Archibald and Gathercole (2006) suggested that children with SLI are vulnerable across two separate components of a tripartite model of working memory (Baddeley and Hitch 1974). However, the hierarchical…