Social communication is one of the key components of successful interaction. People with autism can have significant challenges with social communication, resulting in some of the highest rates of depression and anxiety. In fact, young adults with autism have suicide rates that are 28 times higher than the general population. Thus, supporting…

The presence of Animated Pedagogical Agents (APAs) in education is increasing day-by-day. They are being used in online courses as well as research studies. Therefore, there is a need to study ways in which lectures can quickly be created using APAs. Gestures are an inseparable part of an APA's communication with users. Gestures generated…

In everyday communication, not only do speakers describe, but they also depict. When depicting, speakers can take on the role of other people and quote their speech or imitate their actions. In previous work, we developed a paradigm to elicit depictions in speakers. Here we apply this paradigm to signers to explore depiction in the manual…

The deep comprehension of a text is tantamount to the construction of an articulated mental model of that text. The number of correct recollections is an index of a learner's mental model of a text. We assume that another index of comprehension is the timing of the gestures produced during text recall; gestures are simultaneous with speech when…

Effects of asking children to communicate through their drawings have been investigated using animate rather than inanimate drawing topics. The present study investigated the impact of a communication context on children's drawings of topics with contrasting animism. Three hundred and twenty-two children, 156 boys and 166 girls aged 6-11 years…

The family environment shapes children's social information processing and emotion regulation. Yet, the long-term effects of early family systems have rarely been studied. This study investigated how family system types predict children's attentional biases toward facial expressions at the age of 10 years. The participants were 79 children from…

The theory of natural pedagogy has proposed that infants can use ostensive signals, including eye contact, infant-directed speech, and contingency to learn from others. However, the role of bodily gestures, such as hand-waving, in social learning has been largely ignored. To address this gap in the literature, this study sought to determine…

An important factor that may be missing from recent attempts to counter, resist, and/or reconceptualize the neoliberal framing of the early education process is the actions of children, particularly those that reinforce the neoliberal assemblage of schooling they learn through their interactions with their teacher in school. This article begins to…

Infants' pointing is associated with concurrent and later language development. The communicative intention behind the point -- i.e., imperative versus declarative -- can affect both the nature and strength of these associations, and is therefore a critical factor to consider. Parents' pointing is associated with both infant pointing and infant…

In the last few years, engaging students to create digital games has been a pole of attraction for many teachers and researchers, resulting in highly positive learning experiences and promoting their thinking skills, e.g., programming and computational thinking (CT) skills. Researchers have already stated about the need for further research not…

Strategy use is a critical competence for academic achievement and problem solving in globalised and information-based knowledge economies. It involves skills such as synthesising information from task source materials and elaborating on interlocutors' viewpoints during integrated group discussions. However, evidence from empirical studies on this…

This study examined psychometric characteristics of the Diagnostic Analysis of Nonverbal Accuracy--Second Edition (DANVA-2) in 121 children, ages 6 to 13 years, with high-functioning autism spectrum disorder (HFASD). Internal consistency for adult and child faces subtests were 0.70 and 0.75, respectively. Immediate test-retest reliability in the…

This study diagnoses how the plurilingual repertoires of mature students (MS) in higher education (HE) are constructed throughout their lives. It addresses the main characteristics of MS; the contexts in which they move throughout their lives, and the situations they contact with languages. Data were collected by means of a questionnaire, mostly…

Temporal differences of neurodevelopmental milestones' achievement are commonly taken into account in preterm infant assessment during the first year of life, especially when minor or none neurological signs arise from clinical examination. The influence of gender on neurodevelopment in preterm infants was examined by a milestones-based…

Recent research suggests that infants prefer prosocial behaviour. However, some studies have failed to report this preference, raising the question of which specific parameters allow it to be observed. We attempted to answer this question by investigating whether the preference varies (1) with age (by testing infants aged 6, 12 and 18 months), (2)…