Extended reality technologies such as headset-based augmented reality (AR) unlock unique opportunities to integrate gestures into the collaborative problem-solving process. The following qualitative study documents the collection and analysis of group interaction data in an astronomy sky simulation across AR and tablet technologies in a classroom…

Which behavioral and visual information do teachers rely on when judging relevant characteristics of their students and which cues should they rely on? Drawing on Brunswik's Lens Model (Perception and the representative design of psychological experiments, University of California Press, 1956. https://doi-org.bibliotheek.ehb.be/10.1525/9780520350519), we…

This preliminary study aimed to examine improvement in eye contact among children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) following an innovative technological intervention integrated with meta-cognitive guidance. Eighteen ASD participants, ages 5-9 years, were divided into two equal intervention groups--one received metacognitive guidance, and one…

Background: Though pedagogical artificial agents are expected to play a crucial role in the years to come, earlier studies provide inconsistent results regarding their effect on learning. This might be because their potential for exhibiting subtle nonverbal behaviours we know from human teachers has been untapped. What is more, there is little…

The process of spoken word recognition is influenced by both bottom-up sensory information and top-down cognitive information. These cues are used to process the phonological and semantic representations of speech. Several studies have used EEG/ERPs to study the neural mechanisms of children's spoken word recognition, but less is known about the…

Objectives: The present study evaluated a new smartphone-based program to help 12 participants with intellectual disability plus visual and motor impairments to self-regulate their stimulation input (thus avoiding their dependence on staff) through simple non-verbal responses. Method: Nonconcurrent multiple baseline designs across participants…

Purpose: Thirty percent of children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) do not develop spoken language. To provide a means of communication for this subset of the population, augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) systems are often utilized. Low-tech options have traditionally been delivered through the in-person modality.…

When people talk, they move their hands to enhance meaning. Using accelerometry, we measured whether people spontaneously use their artificial limbs (prostheses) to gesture, and whether this behavior relates to everyday prosthesis use and perceived embodiment. Perhaps surprisingly, one- and two-handed participants did not differ in the number of…

Recent evidence suggests that deaf children with CIs exposed to nonnative sign language from hearing parents can attain age-appropriate vocabularies in both sign and spoken language. It remains to be explored whether deaf children with CIs who are exposed to early nonnative sign language, but only up to implantation, also benefit from this input…

Purpose: This study reports a secondary analysis of the nature of communicative functions and modalities used in initiations and responses of minimally verbal preschoolers with severe autism spectrum disorder (ASD) from a previously published study (Thiemann-Bourque, Feldmiller, Hoffman, & Johner, 2018). This analysis focused on the final…

Nonvocal alert patients in the intensive care unit (ICU) setting often struggle to communicate due to inaccessible or unavailable tools for augmentative and alternative communication. Innovation of a hand-operated non-touchscreen communication system for nonvocal ICU patients was guided by design concepts including speech output, simplicity, and…

Emotional understanding plays an important role in the physical and mental health of children. To determine whether the development of emotional understanding is delayed in children with a cochlear implant (CI), 30 children with a CI and 30 matched children with typical hearing aged between 3 and 9 years old completed three tasks (facial…

For children with normal hearing (NH), early communication skills predict vocabulary, a precursor to grammar. Growth in early communication skills of infants with cochlear implants (CIs) was investigated using the Early Communication Indicator (ECI), a play-based observation measure. Multilevel linear growth modelling on data from six ECI sessions…

Enabling functional communication is critical for accessibility in school and society for all pupils. This systematic review analyzed the results of educational studies on developing communication skills for learners ([less than or equal to]21 years) with autism spectrum disorder and comorbid intellectual disability. Systematic database searches…

The paper presents an application for interactive sonification of images intended for use on mobile devices in education of blind children at elementary school level. The paper proposes novel sonification algorithms for converting colour and grayscale images into sound. The blind user can interactively explore image content through multi-touch…