This study explored differences among 10 children with Central Auditory Processing Disorder (CAPD), 10 age-matched peers, and 10 young adults, by examining vocal reaction time when presented with printed one- and two-syllable words. Children with CAPD produced significantly more errors than their peers or adults, specifically for long-delay…

Analysis of the discourse of eight- and nine-year-old children with emotional disturbances as compared with that of non-emotionally disturbed peers found significant differences between the groups. The analysis focused on mean length of utterances and discourse error patterns. (MSE)

A study involving 26 Taiwanese children (ages 6-12) with autism and 52 controls found scores on the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test were significantly higher for controls for categories completed and percent conceptual level. Scores on perseverative responses, perseverative errors, and non-perseverative errors were higher for those with autism.…

This study examined ten children with specific language impairment (SLI), 16 normally developing children, and ten adults for the production of novel root compounds. The participants were asked to invent names for pictures of 24 pairs of contrasting, novel objects. For half of the pictures, the context supported a grammatical novel root compound,…

This pilot study was designed to examine mental rotation ability in individuals with Down syndrome. 7 individuals with Down syndrome (mean mental age = 8.18 +/- 2.73 years; mean chronological age = 29.8 +/- 5.4 years) and a group of 9 typically developing children, matched for mental age, (mean mental age = 8.40 +/- 1.73 years; mean chronological…

This study examined developmental changes in concept formation, rule switching, and perseverative behaviors of children in the WCST by altering visual features of the test and using a new test score--the "zigzag" error score--which shows the number of shifts made between two incorrect concepts or rules. Instead of the original four 3-dimensional…

This Commentary supports Gathercole's (2006) proposal on a double deficit in children with specific language impairment (SLI). The author suggests that these children have a limited phonological storage combined with a particular problem of processing novel speech stimuli. According to Gathercole, there are three areas of skill contributing to…

Background: It has been repeatedly found that performance of children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is more impaired when a long inter-stimulus interval (ISI) is used than when a short ISI is used. According to the cognitive-energetic model, this may reflect difficulty in remaining in an optimal motor activation state…

Productive errors in the Spanish of 3 Spanish-speaking children and 115 adults learning Spanish as a second language are analyzed. The errors are organized into three categories--lexical, morphological, and syntactic--and each category is further divided according to the type of cognitive error-processing strategy shown: simplification, reduction…

This paper presents a framework for conceptualizing the different ways in which instructions in experimental tasks may be misunderstood. Five possible types of misunderstandings are identified and discussed: (1) misunderstanding of a particular term in the instructions; (2) misinterpretation of a task because the instructions are difficult to…

Describes a part of a study on children's acquisition of Warlpiri, an aboriginal language spoken in central Australia, which aimed to find out at what age the children respond consistently to particular word orders and case frames for simple transitive sentences. Makes comparisons with the acquisition of Turkish transitive clauses. (SED)

Examined how object shape, taxonomic relatedness, and prior lexical knowledge influenced children's overextensions (e.g., referring to pomegranates as apples). Researchers presented items that disentangled the three factors and used a novel comprehension task where children could indicate negative exemplars. Error patterns differed by task and by…

Examined phonological processing in a Chinese reading test and on several phonological processing tasks. Found that younger normal and poor readers of Chinese made more semantic and visual errors, whereas older and normally achieving children made more phonologically related errors. Normally achieving readers also performed better than poor…

There has been little or no research on Vietnamese phonological development, let alone on phonological disorders of Vietnamese-speaking children. The goal of this study is to evaluate the sound systems of monolingual Vietnamese-speaking children with phonological impairment. Independent and relational analyses of four children (ages 4;4 to 5;5)…