Purpose: The current study examined whether children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), in comparison with typically developing children, perceive and produce gestures to identify nonpresent objects (i.e., referent-identifying gestures), which is crucial for communicating ideas in a discourse. Method: An experimenter described the uses of…

We investigated the spelling of derivational and inflectional suffixes by 10-13-year-old Greek children. Twenty children with dyslexia (DYS), 20 spelling-level-matched (SA) and 20 age-matched (CA) children spelled adjectives, nouns, and verbs in dictated word pairs and sentences. Children spelled nouns and verbs more accurately than adjectives and…

Humane education programs designed to increase children's empathy for animals are becoming more common. A quasi-experiment tested the effectiveness of one such program by comparing 80 children who had completed the program with a control group of 57 children who had not. The children read a story involving an injured dog and rated the degree of…

Morality is an evolved aspect of human nature, yet is heavily influenced by cultural environment. This developmental study adopted an integrative approach by combining measures of socioeconomic status (SES), executive function, affective sharing, empathic concern, theory of mind, and moral judgment in predicting sharing behavior in children (N =…

Previously, a total of 121 children with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) performed an adaptive working memory (WM)-training, an adaptive flexibility-training, or a non-adaptive control (mock)-training. Despite overall improvement, there were minor differences between the adaptive and mock-training conditions. Moreover, dropout was relatively…

Background: A number of studies have suggested that language in individuals with Down syndrome (DS) may not be simply delayed compared with language in typically developing (TD) children, but deviant. The deviance has been detected in the comprehension of pronouns, and it has triggered proposals for the existence of a specific syntactic deficit in…

This study aimed to evaluate the Program for the Education and Enrichment of Relational Skills (PEERS: Laugeson et al. in "J Autism Dev Disord" 39(4):596-606, 2009). PEERS focuses on improving friendship quality and social skills among adolescents with higher-functioning ASD. 58 participants aged 11-16 years-old were randomly assigned to…

Purpose: The objectives of this study were to determine (a) whether school-age children with typical hearing demonstrate poorer auditory working memory performance in multitalker babble at degraded signal-to-noise ratios than in quiet; and (b) whether the amount of cognitive demand of the task contributed to differences in performance in noise. It…

This study developed three types of educational preoperative materials and examined their efficacy in preparing children for surgery by analysing children's preoperative worries and parental anxiety. The sample was recruited from three hospitals in Lisbon and consisted of 125 children, aged 8-12 years, scheduled to undergo outpatient surgery. The…

School is often considered an ideal setting for child social skills training due to the opportunities it provides for skills teaching, modeling, and practice. The current study evaluated the effectiveness of two variants of the Secret Agent Society social skills program for children with high-functioning autism spectrum disorders (HFASD) in a…

Objective: This study examines the psychometric properties of the revised Perceived Social Competence Scale (PSCS), a brief, user-friendly tool used to assess social competence among youth. Method: Confirmatory factor analyses (CFAs) examined the factor structure and invariance of an enhanced scale (PSCS-II), among a sample of 420 youth.…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to know whether an intervention using an adaptation of the teaching games for understanding approach (named teaching races for understanding [TRfU]) led participants to improve skill execution, decision making, race performance, race involvement, race knowledge, enjoyment, intention to continue practicing…

Purpose: The primary purposes of this study were to examine the effects of hearing loss and respondent type (self- vs. parent-proxy report) on subjective fatigue in children. We also examined associations between child-specific factors and fatigue ratings. Method: Subjective fatigue was assessed using the Pediatric Quality of Life Inventory…

This study compared emotional and coping resources of two parent groups with children ages 8 to 12 years--children with learning disabilities (LD) versus with typical development--and explored how mothers' and fathers' emotional resources (low anxious/avoidant attachment, low negative affect, and high positive affect) may explain differences in…

The main goal of the present study was to shed further light on the psychological characteristics of children with different learning disability profiles aged between 8 and 11 years, attending from third to sixth grade. Specifically, children with nonverbal learning disabilities (NLD), reading disabilities (RD), or a typical development (TD) were…