When learning basic color vocabulary, young children show a selective delay in the acquisition of brown and gray relative to other basic color terms. In this study, we first establish the robustness of this finding and then investigate the extent to which perception, language, and color preference may influence color conceptualization.…

A relationship between brain responses at birth and later emerging language and reading skills have been shown, but questions remain whether changes in brain responses after birth continue to predict the mastery of language-related skills such as reading development. To determine whether developmental changes in the brain-based perceptual skills…

This study examined spoken-word recognition in children with specific language impairment (SLI) and normally developing children matched separately for age and receptive language ability. Accuracy and reaction times on an auditory lexical decision task were compared. Children with SLI were less accurate than both control groups. Two subgroups of…

Previous research with both brain-damaged and neurologically intact populations has demonstrated that the right cerebral hemisphere (RH) is superior to the left cerebral hemisphere (LH) at detecting anomalies (or incongruities) in objects (Ramachandran, 1995; Smith, Tays, Dixon, & Bulman-Fleming, 2002). The current research assesses whether the RH…

This study examines the on-line processing of sentences with movement using an auditory anomaly detection task (after Boland, Tanenhaus, Garnsey, & Carlson, 1995). Eight agrammatic aphasic participants (four of whom had undergone treatment focused on comprehension and production of filler-gap sentences) and 24 young normal participants listened to…

We report four patients with the syndrome of cerebellar ataxia with bilateral vestibulopathy (CABV) and, using search coil oculography, we validate its characteristic clinical sign, namely impairment of the visually enhanced vestibulo-ocular reflex (VVOR) or doll's head reflex. In our four patients, CABV began in the sixth decade of life; they are…

Three studies tested a self-categorization theory explanation for the third-person effect. In Study 1 (N = 49) undergraduate students judged the influence of the "National Enquirer," "Wall Street Journal," and TV show "Friends" on themselves, relative to low- and high-status outgroup members, and other undergraduate students. The profile of first-…

This paper explores the perceptions of school learning mentors with respect to their professional development and emerging professional identity. Although tentative, the emergence of two distinct professional identities is reported in this study: first, an instrumental technical identity characterized by compliance; and second, a creative…

Background: People with autism or Asperger Syndrome (AS) show altered patterns of brain activity during visual search and emotion recognition tasks. Autism and AS are genetic conditions and parents may show the "broader autism phenotype." Aims: (1) To test if parents of children with AS show atypical brain activity during a visual search…

This study examined fourth grade students' representations of sport education through drawings in order to determine what students perceived as most important throughout their soccer season. The first objective was to determine whether student representations would follow the components of sport education (e.g., season, team affiliation, formal…

Students intent on a career as a legal professional prepare for this through university study. The research reported in this paper looks at the clear relationships described by law students between the focus of their university study and their perceptions of the nature of work as a legal professional. We suggest that the current approach to…

The basis of young children's performance of judgments of recency and frequency was investigated using a modified version of Huppert and Piercy's [Huppert, F. A., & Piercy, M. (1978). The role of trace strength in recency and frequency judgements by amnesic and control subjects. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 30, 347-354]…

We propose a computer-assisted cancellation test system (CACTS) to understand the visual attention performance and visual search strategies in school children. The main aim of this paper is to present our design and development of the CACTS and demonstrate some ways in which computer techniques can allow the educator not only to obtain more…

The current study examined the temporal stability of threat perception abnormalities and anxiety disorder symptoms in non-clinical children. One-hundred-and-thirteen primary school children aged 9 to 13 years completed a self-report measure of anxiety disorder symptoms, and were interviewed individually using an ambiguous story paradigm from which…

This paper reports the results of a small-scale (n = 9) interview study of the "ways of knowing" of academics in a Design School at a South African polytechnic. The focus of the study was on exploring the perceptions of these academics about discipline-specific knowledge in their fields. The paper presents an analysis of the responses,…