Weekly observations documented developmental changes in mother-infant face-to-face communication between birth and 3 months. Developmental trajectories for each dyad of the duration of infant facial expressions showed a change from the dominance of Simple Attention (without other emotion expressions) to active and emotionally positive forms of…

The emotion understanding of children with language impairment (LI) was examined in two studies employing emotion-recognition tasks selected to minimize reliance on language skills. Participants consisted of 43 children with LI and 43 typically developing, age-matched peers, sampled from the age ranges of 5 to 8 and 9 to 12 years. In the first…

This study documents the communication strengths of 14 adults who resided in community group-home settings through the use of staff informant reports. These participants had as many as 12 different communication forms (e.g., reaching gestures, body orientation, facial expression, leading gestures, eye gaze, vocalizations) and 11 different…

When writers plan a document together, they rely on gestures as well as speech and writing in constructing a common representation of their group document. This case study of a student technical writing group explores how group members used gestures to create a conversational interaction space that they then treated like a physical text that they…

Attachment researchers claim that individual differences in how adults talk about their early memories reflect qualitatively distinct organizations of emotion regarding childhood experiences with caregivers. Testing this assumption, the present study examined the relationship between attachment dimensions and physiological, facial expressive, as…

Backround: The ability to repair communicative breakdown is an important pragmatic language skill, yet very little is known about it in the population of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Previous investigations have shown that people with ASD, across a variety of ages and language levels, recognized communicative breakdown and…

The impact of addictions counselors' interactional style (confrontational vs. motivational), recovery status (recovering vs. nonrecovering), and nonverbal behavior (facilitative vs. neutral) on 116 clients' perceptions of addictions counselor credibility was examined in a fully crossed factorial design. Significant results were found, and…

Background: Intact emotion processing is critical for normal emotional development. Recent advances in neuroimaging have facilitated the examination of brain development, and have allowed for the exploration of the relationships between the development of emotion processing abilities, and that of associated neural systems. Methods: A literature…

Although the written resume is one of the more important documents in a student's arsenal of employment materials, most business people are equally interested in how well applicants can "orally" present their experience and education. Students who can effectively present their resume not only exhibit strong communication skills in employment…

Lay people and scientists alike assume that, especially for young children, facial expressions are a strong cue to another's emotion. We report a study in which children (N=120; 3-4 years) described events that would cause basic emotions (surprise, fear, anger, disgust, sadness) presented as its facial expression, as its label, or as its…

Recent data indicate that the familiarity and the emotional expression of faces occur at an early stage of information processing. The goal of the present study was to determine whether these two aspects interact at the structural encoding stage as reflected by the N170 component of event-related potentials in tasks requiring the subjects either…

The ability to understand references to the absent enables conversation to move beyond the here-and-now to matters distant in both space and time. Such understanding requires appreciating the relation between language and communicative intent: one must recognize speakers' intentions to use language to converge on a shared conversational focus that…

The origin and functions of the hand and arm gestures that accompany speech production are poorly understood. It has been proposed that gestures facilitate lexical retrieval, but little is known about when retrieval is accompanied by gestural activity and how this activity is related to the semantics of the word to be retrieved. Electromyographic…

The current study investigated initiating and following declarative joint attention, and initiating requesting joint attention in a group of preschool children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and an age-matched control group. Different forms of joint attention were elicited while children interacted with their mothers. Temporal coordination of…

Joint attention, a foundational nonverbal social-communicative milestone that fails to develop naturally in autism, was promoted for three toddlers with early-identified autism through a parent-mediated, developmentally grounded, researcher-guided intervention model. A multiple baseline design compared child performance across four phases of…