Background: Due to long waiting lists for services, many adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities in the United States have unmet service needs. Little research, however, has identified the characteristics of caregivers and individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities that relate to the unmet service needs among…

In physical education (PE), children frequently participate in teams and the exchanges that transpire shape their perspectives and subsequently, influence learning. While Sport Education is one pedagogical model designed to enhance social exchanges through team membership, we previously identified the need for additional research to monitor these…

Well-being indicates that one is doing well emotionally and feeling comfortable with oneself as a person. A low level of well-being signals that a child is not succeeding in fulfilling his/her fundamental needs, such as eating, being hugged, physical contact, a more or less predictable environment, feeling accepted and feeling like he or she is a…

This article examines episodes of potential student conflict in a Swedish special support classroom in which teachers deploy a particular type of directive in the form of a negative imperative: "bry dig inte" (Eng. "don't mind …; don't bother …"). The analyses of three such extended episodes, by use of a conversation analytic…

Purpose: Marital dissatisfaction and conflict often increase for couples after the birth of a child and are evident in fewer positive family interactions and more negative family interactions. Because exercise is known to increase positive emotions and decrease negative emotions, the current study examined the extent to which higher levels of…

Background & Aims: We evaluated a structured intervention programme aimed at preparing adolescents with developmental language disorders for job interviews. Our primary outcome measures included change in ratings of verbal and non-verbal social communication behaviours evident during mock interviews. Methods & Procedures: In study 1, 12…

Symbolic competence, "the ability to actively manipulate and shape one's environment on multiple scales of time and space" (Kramsch & Whiteside, 2008, p. 667), offers researchers and educators the ability to understand how learners position themselves. This positioning involves a vying for semiotic resources as a means to question…

It is understood that, for mentally disabled people, it is hard to generalize skills and concepts from one setting to another. One approach to teach generalization is solving the problems related to their daily lives, which helps them to reinforce some of their behaviors that would occur in the natural environment. The aim of this study is to…

Nonverbal communication takes place in specific cultural contexts and is influenced by cultural norms. Cultural norms are "social rules for what certain types of people should and should not do" (Hall, 2005). Different cultures might have different norms for nonverbal behaviors in specific social, relational, and geographical contexts.…

Adults' gestures support children's learning in problem-solving tasks, but gestures may be differentially useful to children of different ages, and different features of gestures may make them more or less useful to children. The current study investigated parents' use of gestures to support their young children (1.5-6 years) in a block puzzle…

The "gaze aversion hypothesis", suggests that people with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) avoid mutual gaze because they experience it as hyper-arousing. To test this hypothesis we showed mutual and averted gaze stimuli to 23 mixed-ability preschoolers with ASD ("M" Mullen DQ = 68) and 21 typically-developing preschoolers, aged…

This paper examines the significance of a "look" in infant-teacher dialogues in an early education and care centre in New Zealand. Drawing on Bakhtin's principle of "visual surplus" video recordings of two infants', aged under 1 year of age, interactions with their teacher and teacher interpretations of these interactions were…

Retrospective video analyses indicate that disruptions in gesture use occur as early as 9-12 months of age in infants later diagnosed with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). We report a prospective study of gesture use in 42 children identified as at-risk for ASD using a general population screening. At age 13-15 months, gestures were more disrupted…

The question of the relationship between gesture production and mental models was explored in three experiments focusing on inference making when learning from reading a scientific text. Participants engaged in one-on-one interviews after reading an illustrated tutorial on the human circulatory system. Participants gestured more frequently when…

Purpose: As a recognized indicator of language impairment, nonword repetition has unique potential for distinguishing language impairment from difficulties due to limited experience and knowledge of a language. This study focused on a new Crosslinguistic Nonword Repetition framework, comprising 3 tests that vary the phonological characteristics of…