Purpose: Processing real-world sounds requires acoustic and higher-order semantic information. We tested the theory that individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) show enhanced processing of acoustic features and impaired processing of semantic information. Methods: We used a change deafness task that required detection of speech and…

This study investigates how task-irrelevant auditory information is processed in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Eighteen children with ASD and 19 age- and IQ-matched typically developing (TD) children were presented with semantically-congruent and incongruent picture-sound pairs, and in separate tasks were instructed to attend to…

In light of the known visuoperceptual strengths and altered language skills in autism, we investigated the impact of problem content (semantic/visuospatial) combined with complexity and presence of lures on fluid reasoning in 43 autistic and 41 typical children (6-13 years old). Increased complexity and presence of lures diminished performance,…

Purpose: Verbal fluency tasks assess the ability to quickly and efficiently retrieve words from the mental lexicon by requiring subjects to rapidly generate words within a phonological or semantic category. This study investigated differences between cochlear implant users and normal-hearing peers in the clustering and time course of word…

Perceptual representations of objects and approximate magnitudes are often invoked as building blocks that children combine to acquire the positive integers. Systems of numerical perception are either assumed to contain the logical foundations of arithmetic innately, or to supply the basis for their induction. I propose an alternative to this…

Children interact with and learn about all types of sound sources, including dogs, bells, trains, and human beings. Although it is clear that knowledge of semantic categories for everyday sights and sounds develops during childhood, there are very few studies examining how children use this knowledge to make sense of auditory scenes. We used a…

School-aged and adolescent children continue to demonstrate improvements in how they integrate and comprehend real-time, auditory language over this developmental time period, which can have important implications for academic and social success. To better understand developmental changes in the neural processes engaged during language…

Purpose: Despite the apparent primacy of syntactic deficits, children with developmental language disorder (DLD) often also evidence lexical impairments. In particular, it has been argued that this population have difficulty forming lexical representations that are detailed enough to support effective spoken word processing. In order to better…

In this study, we investigated which componential skills can be distinguished in the second language (L2) development of 140 bilingual children with specific language impairment in the Netherlands, aged 6-11 years, divided into 3 age groups. L2 development was assessed by means of spoken language tasks representing different language skills…

Research into haptic picture perception has mostly concerned adult participants, and little is known about haptic picture perception in visually impaired and sighted children. In the present study, we compared 13 visually impaired children (early blind and low vision) aged 9-10 years and 13 agematched blindfolded sighted children on their ability…

Previous studies have shown that deficiencies in visuospatial perception and semantic processing in people with Williams syndrome (WS) are due to deficient central cohesiveness. Unlike previous studies that used abstract stimuli, this study used pictures to determine the relative ability of people with WS to integrate contextual information with…

Japan has been considered dyslexia-free because of the nature of the orthography, which consists of the visually simple kana syllabary and some thousands of visually complex, logographic kanji characters. It is true that few children struggle with learning kana, which provide consistent mappings between symbols and their pronunciation. Indeed,…

Word learning is a lifelong activity constrained by cognitive biases that people possess at particular points in development. Age of acquisition (AoA) is a psycholinguistic variable that may prove useful toward gauging the relative weighting of different phonological, semantic, and morphological factors at different phases of language acquisition…

The present study explores the relationship between basic auditory processing of sound rise time, frequency, duration and intensity, phonological skills (onset-rime and tone awareness, sound blending, RAN, and phonological memory) and reading disability in Chinese. A series of psychometric, literacy, phonological, auditory, and character…

After multiple reviews of the literature, which documented that multiple cognitive processes may be involved in mathematics ability and disability, Geary (1993) proposed a model that included three subtypes of math disability: Semantic, Procedural, and Visuospatial. A review of the extant literature produced three studies that examined Geary's…