How do children learn to communicate, and what do they learn? Traditionally, most theories have taken an associative, compositional approach to these questions, supposing children acquire an inventory of form-meaning associations, and procedures for composing / decomposing them; into / from messages in production and comprehension. This paper…

Young children are sensitive to both numerical and spatial magnitude cues early in development, but many questions remain about how children's attention to magnitudes relates to their early math achievement. In two studies, we tested three hypotheses related to the flexible attention to magnitudes (FAM) account, which suggests that young…

Failure to learn and generalize abstract relational rules has critical implications for education. In this study, we aimed to determine which training conditions facilitate relational transfer in a relatively simple (patterning) discrimination versus a relatively complex (biconditional) discrimination. The amount of training participants received…

Building conceptual knowledge that generalizes to novel situations is a key function of human memory. Category-learning paradigms have long been used to understand the mechanisms of knowledge generalization. In the present study, we tested the conditions that promote formation of new concepts. Participants underwent 1 of 6 training conditions that…

Humans perceptually extract quantity information from our environments, be it from simple stimuli in isolation, or from relational magnitudes formed by taking ratios of pairs of simple stimuli. Some have proposed that these two types of magnitude are processed by a common system, whereas others have proposed separate systems. To test these…

Most verbal behavior curricula for children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) focus on teaching multiple mands during the early stages of training (e.g., picture exchange communication system; Bondy & Frost, 1994). However, few, if any, of those curricula train children with ASD to differentially mand only for reinforcers that are reasonable…

To learn a language infants must learn to link arbitrary sounds to their meaning. While words are the clearest example of this link, they are not the only component of language; morphological regularities (e.g., the plural -s suffix in English) carry meaning as well. Comprehensive theories of language acquisition must account for how infants build…

Purpose: Published data indicate nearly adultlike frequency discrimination in infants but large child -adult differences for school-age children. This study evaluated the role that differences in measurement procedures and stimuli may have played in the apparent nonmonotonicity. Frequency discrimination was assessed in preschoolers, young…

Here we report, for the first time, a relationship between sensitivity to amplitude envelope rise time in infants and their later vocabulary development. Recent research in auditory neuroscience has revealed that amplitude envelope rise time plays a mechanistic role in speech encoding. Accordingly, individual differences in infant discrimination…

Interleaving examples of to-be-learned categories, rather than blocking examples by category, frequently enhances category induction. The presently dominant theory is that interleaving promotes discriminative-contrast, and suggests that category similarity structure modulates this interleaving benefit: that blocking should benefit learning when…

Distinguishing safety from danger is necessary for survival, but is aberrant in individuals with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). While PTSD is more prevalent in women than men, research on sex differences in safety learning is limited. Here, female rats demonstrated greater fear discrimination than males in a CS+/CS- paradigm. To determine…

Children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) often emit errors during the establishment of conditional discriminations. These children may not respond to more traditional error-correction procedures, such as least-to-most prompting. In this study, we compared two other types of error-correction procedures, namely embedding an identity-matching…

One of the most fundamental strategies in mathematics instruction is practice problems because teachers know that practicing a skill improves performance. At the same time, teachers also know that just because students can correctly answer practice problems does not mean they fully understand the concept or how to apply a formula--especially not…

Introduction: This article describes the development and initial assessment of a set of tactile crayons that can produce different textured lines and areas on standard paper. Method: An assessment of the need for tactile crayons was performed through the use of surveys and focus groups from which a set of six tactile crayons was developed.…

The present study examined mnemonic discrimination in 5- and 6-yr-old children, 8- and 9-yr-old children, 11- and 12-yr-old children, and young adults. Participants incidentally encoded pictorial stimuli and subsequently judged whether targets (i.e., repeated stimuli), lures (i.e., mnemonically related stimuli), and foils (i.e., novel stimuli)…