Children with autism often show atypical brain lateralization for speech and language processing, however, it is unclear what linguistic component contributes to this phenomenon. Here we measured event-related potential (ERP) responses in 21 school-age autistic children and 25 age-matched neurotypical (NT) peers during listening to word-level…

Fine motor skills develop in childhood. In this study, we evaluate motor planning in 6- to 11-year-old children using a pegboard and midline crossing task. The results of the pegboard task showed that children modified their strategies of hand use and space use as a function of age, albeit with a transition in the 8- to 9-year-old children. The…

The development of the ability to anticipate--as manifested by preparatory actions and neural activation related to the expectation of an upcoming stimulus--may play a key role in the ontogeny of cognitive skills more broadly. This preregistered study examined anticipatory brain potentials and behavioral responses (reaction time; RT) to…

Purpose: The fine-tuning of linguistic prosody in later childhood is poorly understood, and its neurological processing is even less well studied. In particular, it is unknown if grammatical processing of prosody is left- or rightlateralized in childhood versus adulthood and how phonological working memory might modulate such lateralization.…

This study investigated the relationship between a metaphor-based approach to teaching English as a foreign language (EFL) and involvement of the brain's right hemisphere. Specifically, it examined learners' understanding of three levels of sureness associated with different expressions in English -- those that are "certain,"…

Socioeconomic status (SES) has been shown to influence language skills, with children of lower SES backgrounds performing worse on language assessments compared to their higher SES peers. While there is abundant behavioral research on the effects of SES, whether there are differences in the neural mechanisms used to support language skill is less…

This research intended to examine the influence of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teachers' self-efficacy, job satisfaction, and reflective thinking on their professional development. Two-hundred and twelve Iranian EFL teachers from different universities, language institutes, and schools participated in the research. They were requested to…

Background: An increase in positivity of event-related potentials (ERPs) at the lateral anterior sites has been hypothesized to be an index of semantic and discourse processing, with the right lateral anterior positivity (LAP) showing particular sensitivity to discourse factors. However, the research investigating the LAP is limited; it is unclear…

Individuals with autism spectrum conditions attend less to the left side of centrally presented face stimuli compared to neurotypical individuals, suggesting a reduction in right hemisphere activation. We examined whether a similar bias exists for non-facial stimuli in a large sample of neurotypical adults rated above- or below-average on the…

Infants often pay special attention to speech sounds, and they appear to detect key features of these sounds. To investigate the neural foundation of speech perception in infants, we measured cortical activation using near-infrared spectroscopy. We presented the following three types of auditory stimuli while 3-month-old infants watched a silent…

Memory performance in linear order reasoning tasks (A > B, B > C, C > D, etc.) shows quicker, and more accurate responses to queries on wider (AD) than narrower (AB) pairs on a hypothetical linear mental model (A -- B -- C -- D). While indicative of an analogue representation, research so far did not provide positive evidence for spatial…

Research shows that strong right-handedness is associated with decreased cognitive flexibility and decreased tendencies to update beliefs, arising from decreased interhemispheric interaction. In the current study, strong right-handedness was associated with decreased overall liking of less popular musical genres (with the specific genres of…

Rapidly changing environments in day-to-day activities, enriched with stimuli competing for attention, require a cognitive control mechanism to select relevant stimuli, ignore irrelevant stimuli, and shift attention between alternative features of the environment. Such attentional orchestration is essential to the acquisition of reading skills. In…

Previous studies have asked whether visual sensitivity and attentional processing in deaf signers are enhanced or altered as a result of their different sensory experiences during development, i.e., auditory deprivation and exposure to a visual language. In particular, deaf and hearing signers have been shown to exhibit a right visual field/left…

The motor and language skills, emotional and behavioural problems of 245 children were measured at school entry. Fine motor scores were significantly predicted by hyperactivity, phonetic awareness, prosocial behaviour, and the presence of medical problems. Gross motor scores were significantly predicted by the presence of medical problems. The…