Purpose: This study was conducted to determine whether the perceptions of nasal consonants in children with normal hearing and children with cochlear implants were predicted by the discontinuity hypothesis. Methods: Four groups participated: 8 adults, 8 children with normal hearing (ages 5-7 years), 8 children with normal hearing (ages 3.5-4…

Infants require locomotor experience to behave adaptively at a drop-off. However, different experimental paradigms (visual cliff and actual gaps and slopes) have generated conflicting findings regarding what infants learn and the specificity of their learning. An actual, adjustable drop-off apparatus was used to investigate whether learning to…

Three-dimensional (3D) object completion, the ability to perceive the backs of objects seen from a single viewpoint, emerges at around 6 months of age. Yet, only relatively simple 3D objects have been used in assessing its development. This study examined infants' 3D object completion when presented with more complex stimuli. Infants…

Purpose: The study addressed three research questions: Does lipreading improve between the ages of 7 and 14 years? Does hearing loss affect the development of lipreading? How do individual differences in lipreading relate to other abilities? Method: Forty children with normal hearing (NH) and 24 with hearing loss (HL) were tested using 4…

More than a century ago, Galton and Spearman suggested that there was a functional relationship between sensory discrimination ability and intelligence. Studies have since been able to confirm a close relationship between general discrimination ability (GDA) and IQ. The aim of the present study was to assess whether this strong relationship…

In human adults, visual dominance emerges in several multisensory tasks. In children, auditory dominance has been reported up to 4 years of age. To establish when sensory dominance changes during development, 41 children (6-7, 9-10, and 11-12 years) were tested on the Colavita task (Experiment 1) and 32 children (6-7, 9-10, and 11-12 years) were…

Purpose: To examine whether semantic access by speech requires attention in children. Method: Children ("N" = 200) named pictures and ignored distractors on a cross-modal (distractors: auditory-no face) or multimodal (distractors: auditory-static face and audiovisual- dynamic face) picture word task. The cross-modal task had a low load,…

Audiovisual speech consists of overlapping and invariant patterns of dynamic acoustic and optic articulatory information. Research has shown that infants can perceive a variety of basic auditory-visual (A-V) relations but no studies have investigated whether and when infants begin to perceive higher order A-V relations inherent in speech. Here, we…

The current study investigated early temperament in 54 infants at familial high-risk of ASD and 50 controls. Parental report of temperament was assessed around 7, 14 and 24 months of age and diagnostic assessment was conducted at 3 years. The high-risk group showed reduced "Surgency" at 7 and 14 months and reduced "Effortful Control" at 14 and 24…

Autism is currently one of the most prominent and widely discussed human conditions. Its increased prevalence has intensified the demand for effective educational and therapeutic services, and intervention science is providing mounting evidence about practices that positively impact outcomes. The purpose of this report is to describe a set of…

While much developmental research has focused on the strategies that children employ to recognize faces, less is known about the principles governing the organization of face exemplars in perceptual memory. In this study, we tested a novel, child-friendly paradigm for investigating the organization of face, bird and car exemplars. Children ages…

Available evidence indicates that experience with one face from a specific age group improves face-processing abilities if acquired within the first 3 years of life but not in adulthood. In the current study, we tested whether the effects of early experience endure at age 6 and whether the first 3 years of life are a sensitive period for the…

Purpose: To establish the age at which children can complete tests of spatial listening and to measure the normative relationship between age and performance. Method: Fifty-six normal-hearing children, ages 1.5-7.9 years, attempted tests of the ability to discriminate a sound source on the left from one on the right, to localize a source, to track…

This study investigates the role of perception and sensory motor learning on speech production in L2. Compared to natural language learning, acoustic input in formal adult instruction is deprived of multiple sensory motor cues and lacks the imitation component. Consequently, it is possible that inaccurate pronunciation results from training.…

This study investigates children's metarepresentational competence (MRC) with regard to listening to and making sense of simple sonic stimuli. Using diSessa's (2002) seminal work on MRC in mathematics and sciences as background, it aims to assess the relative importance children attribute to several criteria for representational adequacy…