Purpose: The aim of this study was to examine the influence of caregivers' reports of family-related environmental confusion--which refers to the level of overstimulation in the family home environment due to auditory and nonauditory (i.e., visual and cognitive) noise--on the relation between child temperament and spoken language outcomes in…

Listening is often perceived to be the most challenging skill by second/foreign language (L2) learners. Due to its real-time nature, L2 listeners experience several comprehension problems related to the processing of aural input. To scaffold L2 listening, captioning is commonly used since the dual coding of aural and written stimuli is expected to…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine whether children's identification of misarticulated words as real objects was influenced by an inherent bias toward selecting real objects or whether a change in experimental conditions could impact children's selections. Method: Forty preschool children aged 4 years 0 months to 6 years 11 months…

The current study investigates whether informative, mutually redundant audiovisual cues support better performance in a category learning paradigm. Research suggests that, under some conditions, redundant multisensory cues supports better learning, when compared with unisensory cues. This was examined systematically across two experiments. In…

Providing single-modality cueing (either visual cueing or auditory cueing) in multimedia lessons does not consistently improve learning outcomes. In 3 eye-tracking experiments, some students learned an onscreen lesson with an oral explanation of graphics and then took a posttest on the material (no cues group). Across all 3 experiments, students…

A large amount of learning occurs through the observation of stimulus-stimulus relations. One procedure that involves this sort of learning is the stimulus-pairing observation procedure (SPOP). The current study involves a systematic replication of Byrne, Rehfeldt, and Aguirre (2014). Tests for the emergence of tact and listener relations were…

Infants appear to progress from universal to language-specific event perception. In Japanese, two different verbs describe a person crossing a "bounded ground" (e.g., street) versus an unbounded ground (e.g., field) while in English, the same verb -- "crossing" -- describes both events. Interestingly, Japanese "and"…

Atypical sensory processing has recently gained much research interest as a key domain of autistic symptoms. Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) exhibit difficulties in processing the temporal aspects of sensory inputs, and show altered behavioural responses to sensory stimuli (i.e., sensory responsiveness). The present study examined…

The present study sought to evaluate trial designs and training designs that are commonly used in popular commercially available computer-assisted language-learning (CALL) programs. The first two experiments (Experiment 1a and 1b) compared the effects of passive viewing and active student response methods in vocabulary learning. Contingencies on…

Autism spectrum disorder is a pervasive neurodevelopmental disorder that has been linked to a range of perceptual processing alterations, including hypo- and hyperresponsiveness to sensory stimulation. A recently proposed theory that attempts to account for these symptoms, states that autistic individuals have a decreased ability to anticipate…

Sound symbolism refers to non-arbitrary mappings between the sounds of words and their meanings and is often studied by pairing auditory pseudowords such as "maluma" and "takete" with rounded and pointed visual shapes, respectively. However, it is unclear what auditory properties of pseudowords contribute to their perception as…

Color. Carpets. Configurations. The classroom can create a sense of safety, calm, and invitation to learn if designed correctly. Authors and educators Nancy Frey, Douglas Fisher, and Dominique Smith describe their journey to making their school's classrooms trauma-informed and safe, inviting spaces for students.

To learn a language infants must learn to link arbitrary sounds to their meaning. While words are the clearest example of this link, they are not the only component of language; morphological regularities (e.g., the plural -s suffix in English) carry meaning as well. Comprehensive theories of language acquisition must account for how infants build…

Presentation of a previously trained Pavlovian conditioned stimulus while an organism is engaged in operant responding can moderate the rate of responding, a phenomenon known as Pavlovian-to-instrumental transfer. Although it is well known that Pavlovian contingencies will generate conditioned behavior that is temporally organized with respect to…

We tested 4-6- and 10-12-month-old infants to investigate whether the often-reported decline in infant sensitivity to other-race faces may reflect responsiveness to static or dynamic/silent faces rather than a general process of perceptual narrowing. Across three experiments, we tested discrimination of either dynamic own-race or other-race faces…