Eye direction detection has been claimed to be intact in autism, but the development of this skill has not been investigated. Eleven children with autism and 11 typically developing children performed a demanding face-to-face eye direction detection task. Younger children with autism demonstrated a deficit in this skill, relative to younger…

The authors investigated whether supported employees are perceived on an equal basis within the workplace by their nondisabled worker colleagues. Three types of social relationships were considered in a workplace context ("work acquaintances," "work friends," and "social friends") in order to examine whether the types of social relationships that…

Grapheme-color synesthesia, when achromatic digits evoke an experience of a specific color (photisms), has been shown to be consistent, involuntary, and linked with number concept in adults, yet there have been no comparable investigations with children. We present a systematic study of grapheme-color synesthesia in children aged between 7 and 15…

Human recognition memory shows a decline during normal ageing, which is thought to be related to age-associated dysfunctions of mediotemporal lobe structures. Whether the hippocampus is critical for human general relational memory or for spatial relational memory only is still disputed. The human perirhinal cortex is thought to be critically…

This study investigated talker-dependent and talker-independent perceptual adaptation to foreign-accent English. Experiment 1 investigated talker-dependent adaptation by comparing native English listeners' recognition accuracy for Chinese-accented English across single and multiple talker presentation conditions. Results showed that the native…

Purpose: The effective use of visual cues to speech provides benefit for adults with normal hearing in noisy environments and for adults with hearing loss in everyday communication. The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of a computer-based, auditory-visual vowel identification training program on sentence recognition under difficult…

Background: Many factors influence listener perception of dysarthric speech. Final consensus on the role of gender and listener experience is still to be reached. The speaker's perception of his/her speech has largely been ignored. Aims: (1) To compare speaker and listener perception of the intelligibility of dysarthric speech; (2) to explore the…

The relationship between rapid automatized naming (RAN) and reading fluency is well documented (see Wolf, M. & Bowers, P.G. (1999). "The double-deficit hypothesis for the 'developmental dyslexias.'" "Journal of Educational Psychology," 91(3), 415-438, for a review), but little is known about which component processes are important in RAN, and why…

Writing performance is greatly affected by task-related elements such as topic familiarity, difficulty, task-type, and subject matter of the prompt, which are perceived differently by each individual writer. Yet, little has been reported on the direct relationship between writers' perceptions of a prompt and their actual performance on the prompt.…

Theoretical accounts of both speech perception and of short term memory must consider the extent to which perceptual representations of speech sounds might survive in relatively unprocessed form. This paper describes a novel version of the serial recall task that can be used to explore this area of shared interest. In immediate recall of digit…

This study further elaborates on the mind-reading impairments of young adults with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The hypothesis is that differences in mind-reading abilities between subjects with ASD and control subjects become more apparent when they have to infer thoughts and feelings of other persons in a less structured or more chaotic…

Developmental dyslexia is often characterized by a visual deficit, but the nature of this impairment and how it relates to reading ability is disputed ("Brain" 2003; "126": 841-865). In order to investigate this issue, we compared groups of adults with and without dyslexia on the Ternus, visual-search and symbols tasks.…

Exhibits in informal science institutions, like science centers and museums, are often designed to help people learn, but research showing the immediate impact of experiences with exhibits on understanding is limited. This dissertation tested the hypothesis that the value of first-hand experience with an exhibit is not necessarily in its immediate…

This brief reviews previous research related to the development of science knowledge and academic language in English language learners as well as the role of English language proficiency, learning in a second language, and first language knowledge in science learning. It also describes two successful CREATE interventions that build academic and…

A multidimensional study examines both the dimensions of school counselors' involvement in school-family-community partnerships and the factors related to their involvement in partnerships. The School Counselor Involvement in Partnerships Survey was revised and its factor structure examined. Principal factor analyses revealed three dimensions of…