The preferences of students with autism for watching themselves, a familiar adult, or a familiar peer in video recordings were examined. A multi-stimulus video preference assessment was used to evaluate the preferences of five students with autism. Three video options of a preferred activity (e.g., vacuuming) or daily/routine activity (e.g., snack…

One might assume that familiarity with a scene or previous encounters with objects embedded in a scene would benefit subsequent search for those items. However, in a series of experiments we show that this is not the case: When participants were asked to subsequently search for multiple objects in the same scene, search performance remained…

Robin Lakoff proposed that women are more likely than men to use tentative speech forms (e.g., hedges, qualifiers/disclaimers, tag questions, intensifiers). Based on conflicting results from research testing Lakoff's claims, a meta-analysis of studies testing gender differences in tentative language was conducted. The sample included 29 studies…

We investigated whether 1-year-old infants use their shared experience with an adult to determine the meaning of a pointing gesture. In the first study, after two adults had each shared a different activity with the infant, one of the adults pointed to a target object. Eighteen- but not 14-month-olds responded appropriately to the pointing gesture…

This study examines the effect of familiarity, context, and linguistic convention on idiom comprehension in Mandarin speaking children. Two experiments (a comprehension task followed by a comprehension task coupled with a metapragmatic task) were administered to test participants in three age groups (6 and 9-year-olds, and an adult control group).…

This paper explores three current notions of literacy, which underpin the theorisation and practice of teaching and learning for both children and adults in England. In so doing, it raises certain problems inherent in these approaches to literacy and literacy education and shows how Stanley Cavell's notions of reading, and especially his reading…

This study assessed the utility of document prevalence and familiarity as predictors of adult document literacy performance. Three indexes--quantifying document prevalence, document familiarity, and the frequency of document use--were constructed using survey responses from an adult community sample and documents collected from government agencies…

Performance on the visual paired-comparison (VPC) task has typically been interpreted with E. Sokolov's (1963) comparator model of the orienting response; novelty preferences are interpreted as evidence of retention, whereas null preferences are interpreted as evidence of forgetting. Here the authors capitalized on the verbal nature of human…

The sequencing of dance movements may be thought of as a grammar. We investigate implicit learning of regularities that govern sequences of unfamiliar, discrete dance movements. It was hypothesized that observers without prior experience with contemporary dance would be able to learn regularities that underpin structured human movement. Thirty-one…

Recent research in psychology and neuroscience has demonstrated that co-speech gestures are semantically integrated with speech during language comprehension and development. The present study explored whether gestures also play a role in language learning in adults. In Experiment 1, we exposed adults to a brief training session presenting novel…

A randomly-selected sample of 306 adults employed full-time rated how likely individuals would be to use various communication strategies (cost escalation, depersonalization, and state-of-the-relationship talk) to disengage from a workplace relationship (with the target of the deteriorations being a supervisor, a peer coworker, or a subordinate…

Proofreading a text for misspellings involves detecting spelling errors and then correcting those errors. We examined differences in spelling error detection and correction in adults as a function of type of spelling error. We modified student essays to include phonological (e.g., incredibul), orthographic (e.g., decisian), and morphological…

This investigation was undertaken to address questions about topic familiarity and disfluencies during oral descriptive discourse of adult speakers. Participants expressed more attributes when the topic was familiar than when it was unfamiliar. Fillers and lexical pauses were the most frequent disfluencies. The mean duration of each hesitation…

This study investigated how lexical access in naming tasks (picture naming, naming to open-ended sentences, and naming to category exemplars) might be influenced by different lexical factors during adolescence and adulthood. Participants included 1075 individuals, ranging in age from 12 to 83 years. Lexical factors examined included word frequency…

Experimental analysis of social stimuli has typically been restricted to the presence or absence of verbal attention. In the present study, an ABAB design was used to assess the influence of proximity as a social stimulus. Close and distant proximity of a familiar adult was systematically manipulated to evaluate the effect of proximity on the…