We examined whether perspective taking (or Theory of Mind) deficits that characterize autistic individuals predict whether they have trouble extricating themselves from situations in which police officers erroneously suspect them of a crime. Autistic and typically developing adults listened to scenarios in which they were placed in situations…

Background: Being aware of the different social expectations linked to the principal lifespan stages (i.e., childhood, adulthood, old age) is critical to an individual's inclusion in the community and to developing appropriate social behaviours. However, little research exists on this topic in the field of intellectual and developmental…

Purpose: Previous research has demonstrated that typically developing children, verbal children with a diagnosis of autism, children with Down syndrome, children with developmental language disorder, and children with dyslexia can all benefit from orthographic support during word learning tasks. This study sought to determine if minimally speaking…

Oral retelling portrays what one understands from reading or listening to a text. The retold stories of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often show macrostructural (overall story structure) difficulties. The study's purpose was to compare macrostructure oral story retelling, after reading (visual modality) or listening (auditory…

Universal autism screening is recommended by the American Academy of Pediatrics at 18 and 24 months. However, many children are not identified until after the age of 4 years, and some not until adulthood, either due to mild or no indication of symptoms early in development, or to co-occurring conditions which may overshadow autism symptoms. This…

In order to make appropriate educational recommendations, psychologists must understand how cognitive test scores influence specific academic outcomes for students of different ability levels. We used data from the WISC-V and WIAT-III (N = 181) to examine which WISC-V Index scores predicted children's specific and broad academic skills and if…

As we listen to speech, our ability to understand what was said requires us to retrieve and bind together individual word meanings into a coherent discourse representation. This so-called semantic unification is a fundamental cognitive skill, and its development relies on the integration of neural activity throughout widely distributed functional…

The reliability and validity of the Children's Social Understanding Scale (CSUS) was further assessed by examining fathers' as well as mothers' reports of children's social understanding, along with behavioural measures of children's mental state understanding. 112 families with children aged 38 to 64 months participated with both parents filling…

Despite the importance of expressive language for individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), expressive language assessments are not consistently included in ASD research and many studies do not adequately describe participants' verbal abilities. A valid and efficient measure of expressive language would facilitate consistent reporting…

Love has been thoroughly studied and a variety of definitions as well as types of love have been described in the literature. Given the data presenting natural language of love concept, the aim of the two present studies is to demonstrate a new technique which enables description of the structure of emotion concepts within love spectrum. This…

Formal thought organization obtained from free speech, a key feature for psychiatric evaluations, has been poorly investigated during typical development. Computational tools such as speech graph connectedness (LSC) currently allow for an accurate quantification in naturalistic settings. LSC's typical development is better predicted by years of…

In many autistic children, speech onset is delayed and expressive language emerges after 3 years of age. We qualitatively and quantitatively describe oral productions of autistic preschoolers, including many non- or minimally speaking, recorded during interactions with a caregiver and with an experimenter. Data clustering on manually coded oral…

School readiness is recognized as one of the key starting points for children's further success in their school work and in their subsequent career. However, many kindergarten teachers still miss and long for a comprehensive, reliable and standardized diagnostic tool which could help them recognize the level of children's school readiness. That is…

This study investigated the impact of second language (L2) lexical quality on L2 reading comprehension in bilingual primary education. The participating children were taught in the L2 English for 30-50% of the time and the remaining time in their L1 Dutch. Seventy-three pupils from four different schools were assessed in the L2 on vocabulary,…

Teachers in early childhood education (ECE) settings are central to providing children with high-quality experiences that promote both early development and long-term well-being; unfortunately, rates of teacher turnover are high in ECE settings. There are strong theoretical reasons to assume turnover is negatively linked with children's academic…