This study investigated the perception of emotions and the social skills of 60 eighth-graders, half with and half without learning disabilities (LD). Results indicated that the performance of LD adolescents was significantly poorer than peers in the perception of emotion via either auditory, visual, or combined auditory-visual modes. Although both…

A study found that 13 low-functioning children (ages 3-7) with pervasive developmental disorder (PDD) showed fewer social initiatives than 19 high-functioning children with PDD, 19 children with language disorders, and 19 controls. Higher-functioning children with PDD differed from non-PDD controls in levels of visual checking and of returning…

Three experiments tested whether it is possible to teach college students who are not trained investigators to comprehend information regarding knowledge of conservation problems and mathematical equivalence conveyed through children's hand gestures. Findings suggest that instructing adults to attend to gesture enhances their assessment of…

Examined potential effects of early exposure to sign language on the use of communicative gestures by a bilingual hearing child of deaf parents. Data were analyzed to identify types and tokens of communicative gestures, words, signs, and the ways in which they were combined. (Author/VWL)

Receptive language, prelinguistic communication, maternal responses, vocabulary level, and expressive language were measured at six-month intervals for 58 young children with disabilities or developmental delays and their primary caretakers. Results supported the importance of caregivers responding differentially to preintentional and intentional…

Investigates the relationship between nonverbal behaviors of immediacy and dominance on teachers' initial impressions of trust toward a supervisor. Notes that supervisor immediacy resulted in higher perceptions of trust than supervisor dominance, and immediacy also rated higher on measures of appropriateness and effectiveness than dominance.…

Three questions were asked that explored the linguistic fine-tuning hypothesis and how parents might model language: (i) do parents significantly tune to their children's productive language or non-verbal cognition during play? (ii) is the level of the linguistic tuning different in the Down syndrome (DS) population compared to a typically…

Children who are congenitally deafblind face barriers to the development of early communication functions, including limited access to social and context cues that support the identification of functions expressed by others. This study addresses two research questions: What functions of communication will teachers express when interacting with…

In this article, Mary Kellett, of the Children's Research Centre at the Open University, draws on case study evidence to illustrate how an 11-year-old girl's quality of life was transformed in the last few months before she died when an Intensive Interaction intervention approach was adopted. The study raises issues about the way we respond to…

This observation study examined the nonverbal behavior of anxious and nonanxious foreign language learners during a videotaped oral foreign language exam. Focusing primarily on the kinesic signals found in facial expressions, gazing behavior, body movement and gesture, and posture, it was discovered that anxious learners manifested limited facial…

We examine the influence of inferring interlocutors' referential intentions from their body movements at the early stage of lexical acquisition. By testing human participants and comparing their performances in different learning conditions, we find that those embodied intentions facilitate both word discovery and word-meaning association. In…

Flow experience is an optimal state determined by an individual's perception of high skill and high challenge for a given task. In this study, young children's flow experience is examined in four naturally occurring music learning environments: infants and two-year-olds in childcare settings, and school-age children in Suzuki violin and Dalcroze…

Background: The development of communication skills in children with severe disabilities partly depends on the responsivity of partners to all forms of communicative behaviour. This study explored the behaviours that parents interpret as communicative. Method: Parents of 10 children aged 4 to 9 years were interviewed about the forms of…

When a behavior disappears and then resurfaces, developmental psychologists typically look more closely at the behavior to figure out what is different before and after--that is, they increase the grain with an eye toward discovering how the system that generates that behavior has changed. But what ought to count as a U-shaped phenomenon? How…

This article describes the use of microanalysis of videotapes to look at nonverbal elements (such as smiles, facial expressions, eye gaze, touch, and head and body movements toward and away from the other) to determine the caregiver-infant interactive (regulatory) experience. Video microanalysis of face-to-face play by infants and parents…