This study examined possible links between the occurrence of prosodic changes to vocalizations and gestures and the use of problem behaviors by children with autism when attempting to repair communication breakdowns. The repair strategies of six children with autism aged 2-5 years and with fewer than 10 words or signs were analyzed. Mother-child…

The current study was designed to investigate whether reported [J. Learn. Disabil. 31 (1998) 286; J. Psycholinguist. Res. 22 (1993) 445] difficulties in language-impaired children's ability to identify vocal and facial cues to emotion could be explained at least partially by nonparalinguistic factors. Children with specific language impairment…

Research on graphing presents its results as if knowing and understanding were something stored in peoples' minds independent of the situation that they find themselves in. Thus, there are no models that situate interview responses to graphing tasks. How, then, we question, are the interview texts produced? How do respondents begin and end…

Music, as language, is a universal human trait. Throughout human history and across all cultures, individuals have produced and enjoyed music. Despite its ubiquity, music is rarely studied as a basic and distinct cognitive faculty. However, recent evidence suggests that music might well be distinct from other cognitive functions, in being…

This paper provides evidence for imitative abilities in neonatal chimpanzees ("Pan troglodytes"), our closest relatives. Two chimpanzees were reared from birth by their biological mothers. At less than 7 days of age the chimpanzees could discriminate between, and imitate, human facial gestures (tongue protrusion and mouth opening). By the time…

Hakoniwa (ha ko ne wa), or Sandplay therapy, is an action-oriented and artistic psychotherapy practiced in Japan and the West. In contrast to most Western psychotherapies, which emphasize verbal and direct expression, linear and cause-effect thinking, and a distinction between physical and mental well-being, Hakoniwa makes significant use of…

The auditing culture and its concomitant, "performativity", have been at the core of the on-going public sector reforms of the last twenty-five years or so. The advantages and limitations of performance indicators as a managerial technique of control have long been known. Considered from an organisational, social and political…

Background: Social understanding is often thought to be relatively "protected" in children with Down's syndrome (DS) and to underlie the outgoing personality characteristically attributed to them. This paper draws together findings from our studies of behaviours during object concept testing, generally considered a theoretically "pure" measure of…

Included herein is the conference proceedings of the 27th Annual Conference on the Teaching of Psychology: Ideas and Innovations, sponsored by the Psychology Department of the State University of New York at Farmingdale. The conference theme for 2013 was: The Science of Learning. The Conference featured a keynote address by Victor Benassi, Ph.D.…

The purpose of this study was to assess the effectiveness of a Social Story [TM] intervention in teaching a young child with hyperlexia to appropriately obtain the attention of his peers. The Social Story intervention consisted of verbal and visual cues incorporated into an age-appropriate storybook format. Attempting to obtain the attention of a…

Conjunction errors occur when participants incorrectly identify as "old" novel test stimuli created by recombining parts of two study stimuli (parent items). Prior studies have reported that the conjunction error rate is higher when parent items are studied together than when they are studied apart (a parent proximity effect). In several…

Right hemispheric dominance in unconscious emotional processing has been suggested, but remains controversial. This issue was investigated using the subliminal affective priming paradigm combined with unilateral visual presentation in 40 normal subjects. In either left or right visual fields, angry facial expressions, happy facial expressions, or…

Nonverbal communication is fundamental to any comprehensive examination of human interaction. This article presents an activity that can be easily applied by any instructor as a starting point for a discussion of nonverbal communication, or as a demonstration of learning points previously discussed. Instructors should have a slight background in…

The assessment of individual differences in facial expression recognition is normally required to address two major issues: (1) high agreement level (ceiling effect) and (2) differential difficulty levels across emotions. We propose a new assessment method designed to quantify individual differences in the recognition of the six basic emotions,…

The production of cohesive discourse, especially maintained reference, poses problems for early second language L2 speakers. This paper considers a communicative account of overexplicit L2 discourse by focusing on the interdependence between spoken and gestural cohesion, the latter being expressed by anchoring of referents in gesture space.…