Evaluation of 17 children with autism at the ages of 6 to 15 and then again at ages 13 to 25, suggested that, for the majority of people with autism, there may be little development of a theory of mind. For a minority, development may extend to the equivalent of a 3- to 4-year-old level by the teenage years. (JDD)

Background: This study presents two experiments that investigated whether children with autism were susceptible to the Thatcher illusion. Perception of the Thatcher illusion requires being able to compute second-order configural relations for facial stimuli. Method: In both experiments children with autism were matched for non-verbal and verbal…

The primary purpose of this study was to test two hypotheses proposed by Bracken and McCallum (1998), authors of the Universal Nonverbal Intelligence Test (UNIT), as to how children diagnosed with ADHD would perform on the UNIT. Twenty-nine students between the ages of 5 and 17 years were administered the extended battery of the UNIT twice, with…

A study analyzed the relationship between foreign language learning and four variables, including: nonverbal intelligence, conceptual level, mother tongue, and mathematics. The aim of the study was to investigate whether the same mental processes are involved in poor and good language learning, regardless of the learner's mother tongue. The study…

Followed development of children at family risk for dyslexia from 3 years to 8 years. Found that 66 percent of high-risk group had reading disabilities at age 8 compared with only 13 percent in a control group. However, family risk of dyslexia was continuous. Interpreted findings within a model in which problems in establishing a phonological…

The purpose of this study is to assess the English vocabulary of Eskimo pupils entering a bilingual education program by establishing a normative criterion based on the vocabulary levels of children whose first language is English. The tests used, "Raven's Coloured Progressive Matrices" and "English Receptive Vocabulary," bear out the anticipated…

Background: Five DNA markers (single-nucleotide polymorphisms, SNPs) have recently been found to be associated with general cognitive ability "g") in a sample of 7414 7-year-old twins. These children have also been studied at 2, 3, 4, and 7 years of age on measures of cognitive and language development and behaviour problems; family environment…