Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are often described as visual learners. We tested this assumption in an experiment in which 25 children with ASD, 19 children with global developmental delay (GDD), and 17 typically developing (TD) children were presented a series of videos via an eye tracker in which an actor instructed them to…

Environmental, organizational and attitudinal obstacles continue to prevent people with vision loss from meaningfully engaging in dance education and performance. This article addresses the societal disabilities that handicap access to dance education for the blind. Although much of traditional dance instruction relies upon visual cuing and…

This paper includes two interrelated studies. The first production study investigates the timing patterns of English as spoken by Chinese learners with different dialect backgrounds. The second comprehension study explores native and non-native speakers' assessments of the intelligibility of Chinese-accented English, and examines the effects of…

This study examines whether deficits in visual information processing in autism-spectrum disorder (ASD) can be offset by the recruitment of brain structures involved in selective attention. During functional MRI, 12 children with ASD and 19 control participants completed a selective attention one-back task in which images of faces and houses were…

The self-teaching hypothesis suggests that knowledge about the orthographic structure of words is acquired incidentally during reading through phonological recoding. The current study assessed whether visual processing skills during reading further contribute to orthographic learning. French children were asked to read pseudowords. The whole…

Processing fluency has been shown to have wide-ranging effects on disparate evaluative judgments, including judgments of liking and familiarity. One account of such effects is the hedonic marking hypothesis (Winkielman, Schwarz, Fazendeiro, & Reber, 2003), which posits that fluency is directly linked to affective preferences via a positive…

The 2014 INPE McLaughlin Lecture explores the emergent concept of the "postliberal" and the increasing frequency of its formal and informal uses in the languages of educational theory and practice. It traces the origins of the term "postliberal" to certain strains of modern Christian theology, maps its migration into liberal…

The ability to navigate new environments has a significant impact on the daily life and independence of people with learning difficulties. The aims of this study were to investigate the development of route learning in Down syndrome (N = 50), Williams syndrome (N = 19), and typically developing children between 5 and 11 years old (N = 108); to…

This mixed-methods study examined the beliefs and performance of 10 adult Japanese speakers of English regarding the phenomenon of contraction in spoken English. Over the course of three months, a collective case study approach involving listening tasks and semi-structured interviews was employed to investigate the topic from multiple dimensions,…

Similar to many sighted children who struggle with learning to read, a proportion of blind children have specific difficulties related to reading braille which cannot be easily explained. A lot of research has been conducted to investigate the perceptual and cognitive processes behind (impairments in) print reading. Very few studies, however, have…

Attempts to account for consonant cluster acquisition are always made into two aspects. One is transfer of the first language (L1), and another is markedness effects on the developmental processes in second language acquisition. This study has continued these attempts by finding out how well Thai university students were able to perceive English…

When visually impaired students attend regular high school, additional materials are necessary to help them understand physics concepts. The time for teachers to develop teaching materials for such students is scarce. Visually impaired students in regular high school physics classes often use a braille version of the physics textbook. Previously,…

The current study by Beck (2014) investigated whether any relationship exists between a cross-section of 48 fourth-grade elementary-school students and their artistic judgments regarding the seven elements of art: color, form, line, shape, space, texture, and value. Each of these elements of art affects our senses and might offer a better…

Previous research has shown that both dictation and speech-to-text (STT) software can increase the quality of writing for native English speakers. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of these modalities on the written composition and cognitive load of elementary school English language learners (ELLs). In a within-subjects…

Purpose: Infant-directed speech (IDS) facilitates language learning in infants with normal hearing, compared to adult-directed speech (ADS). It is well established that infants with normal hearing prefer to listen to IDS over ADS. The purpose of this study was to determine whether infants with hearing impairment (HI), like their NH peers, show a…