It is possible that statistical learning (SL) plays a role in almost every mental activity. Indeed, research on SL has grown rapidly over recent decades in an effort to better understand perception and cognition. Yet, there remain gaps in our understanding of how SL operates, in particular with regard to its (im)mutability. Here, we investigated…

This study investigated peripheral vision (at least 30[degrees] eccentric to fixation) development in profoundly deaf children without cochlear implantation, and compared this to age-matched hearing controls as well as to deaf and hearing adult data. Deaf and hearing children between the ages of 5 and 15 years were assessed using a new,…

The ability to infer the referential intentions of speakers is a crucial part of learning a language. Previous research has uncovered various contextual and social cues that children may use to do this. Here we provide the first evidence that children also use speech disfluencies to infer speaker intention. Disfluencies (e.g. filled pauses "uh"…

Background: Despite previous efforts to understand temperament in children with intellectual disability (ID), and how child temperament may affect parents, the approach has so far been unidimensional. Child temperament has been considered in relation to diagnosis, with the inherent risk of overlooking individual variation of children's temperament…

Throughout middle-childhood, inhibitory processes, which underlie many higher order cognitive tasks, are developing. Little is known about how inhibitory processes change as a task becomes conceptually more difficult during these important years. In adults, as Go/NoGo tasks become more difficult there is a systematic decrease in the P3 NoGo…

The modern ideal of international cooperation, which it is desired to incorporate in the future education of the young, is based on the two main principles of solidarity and justice. In this essay, the author discusses two aspects on the problem of solidarity: (1) moral aspect; and (2) intellectual aspect. In connection with the moral aspect, the…

Self-produced locomotion is regarded as a setting event for other developmental transitions in infancy with important implications for socioemotional development and parent-child interaction. Using an age-held-constant design, this study examined changes in reported infant behaviour and maternal proactive/reactive control and compared them with…

The wide variation in prevalence of dysgraphic handwriting (5-33%) is of clinical importance, because poor handwriting has been identified as one of the most common reasons for referring school-age children to occupational therapy or physiotherapy, and is included as an criterion for the diagnosis of Developmental Coordination Disorder. This study…

This paper introduces the characteristics of early childhood care and education (ECCE) assessment and identifies current challenges and changes in the assessment of ECCE in Japan. There are differences in assessment between ECCE and elementary school education. Assessment in ECCE is used to focus on making better plans, improving the understanding…

The purpose of this research was to replicate and extend some of the findings of Hart and Risley using automatic speech processing instead of human transcription of language samples. The long-term goal of this work is to make the current approach to speech processing possible by researchers and clinicians working on a daily basis with families and…

Approximately 300,000 child soldiers serve in various armed groups around the world, and become directly implicated in the perpetration of kidnappings, killings, and torture. Considering that children construct moral concepts and a sense of themselves as moral beings in the context of their everyday interactions with others, the concern with how…

In the United States, for typically developing children, age has historically been the most common factor determining when a child starts formal schooling. Recently, there has been increased emphasis on other indicators of being ready for school. Beginning with Head Start in 1965 and mushrooming into state-funded prekindergarten programs in most…

Competence in many domains rests on children developing conceptual and procedural knowledge, as well as procedural flexibility. However, research on the developmental relations between these different types of knowledge has yielded unclear results, in part because little attention has been paid to the validity of the measures or to the effects of…

Recent studies show that both adults and young children possess powerful statistical learning capabilities to solve the word-to-world mapping problem. However, the underlying mechanisms that make statistical learning possible and powerful are not yet known. With the goal of providing new insights into this issue, the research reported in this…

Onesimo Giron had always been admired in his community for his generosity, compassion, happy disposition, and willingness to help others. He was deaf from birth and had faced a variety of challenges throughout his life. Even so, he had forged a place for himself as a dedicated husband, father, a wonderful gardener and a valued family and community…