Although it has long been known that time is a cue to causation, recent work with adults has demonstrated that causality can also influence the experience of time. In "causal reordering" (Bechlivanidis & Lagnado, 2013, 2016) adults tend to report the causally consistent order of events rather than the correct temporal order. However,…

Children on the autism spectrum often experience difficulty generalizing social skills across environments and contexts, which can make developing friendships challenging in early childhood. This means that, in addition to initial social skills instruction, children with autism may need specialized supports to promote the generalization of newly…

Structural patterns existing in language can be exploited for implicit prediction of sequences in speech and visual input via a process termed statistical learning (SL). Despite extensive examination of SL in dyslexia, whether SL problems arise from modality-constrained learning processes or from global learning processes is still unknown, nor is…

Purpose: This study investigated the attentional tendencies of preschool children with developmental language disorder (DLD) and their typical language (TL) peers during a word learning task to examine what visual properties of novel objects capture their attention. Method: Twelve children with DLD and 12 children with TL completed a novel name…

In the current study we examine how hearing parents use multimodal cuing to establish joint attention with their hearing (n = 9) or deaf (n = 9) children during a free-play session. The deaf children were all candidates for cochlear implantation who had not yet been implanted, and each hearing child was age-matched to a deaf child. We coded…

Contextual cueing refers to the guidance of search by associative learning of the location of task-relevant target items in relation to the consistent arrangement of distractor ("context") items in the search display. The present study investigated whether such target-distractor associations could also be formed in a cross-modal search…

Infant research is providing accumulating evidence that number-space mappings appear early in development. Here, a Posner cueing paradigm was used to investigate the neural mechanisms underpinning the attentional bias induced by nonsymbolic numerical cues in 9-month-old infants (N = 32). Event-related potentials and saccadic reaction time were…

Emotion can influence various cognitive processes. Communication with children often involves exaggerated emotional expressions and emotive language. Children with autism spectrum disorder often show a reduced tendency to attend to emotional information. Typically developing children aged 7 to 9 years who varied in their level of autism-like…

This study explored how pre-K children process an e-book with narration through eye movements, and also the effects of visual cues on preschoolers' visual attention to text, word recognition, and comprehension. Data were collected from eight children attending a university-associated daycare center. Eye tracker was used to record the participants'…

Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) display difficulties with response to joint attention in natural settings but often perform comparably to typically developing (TD) children in experimental studies of gaze following. Previous work comparing infants at elevated likelihood for ASD versus TD infants has manipulated aspects of the gaze…

Seminal work by Werker and colleagues (Stager & Werker [1997] "Nature," 388, 381-382) has found that 14-month-old infants do not show evidence for learning minimal pairs in the habituation-switch paradigm. However, when multiple speakers produce the minimal pair in acoustically variable ways, infants' performance improves in…

Purpose: Visual cues from a speaker's face may benefit perceptual adaptation to degraded speech, but current evidence is limited. We aimed to replicate results from previous studies to establish the extent to which visual speech cues can lead to greater adaptation over time, extending existing results to a real-time adaptation paradigm (i.e.,…

We report results from a driving simulator paradigm we developed to test the fine temporal effects of verbal tasks on simultaneous tracking performance. A total of 74 undergraduate students participated in two experiments in which they controlled a cursor using the steering wheel to track a moving target and where the dependent measure was overall…

A weaker McGurk effect is observed in individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD); weaker integration is considered to be the key to understanding how low-order atypical processing leads to their maladaptive social behaviors. However, the mechanism for this weaker McGurk effect has not been fully understood. Here, we investigated (1) whether…

In the present study, we showed evidence of an integration between two unconscious semantic representations. In experiment 1, two masked Chinese words of the same or different categories ("orange apple" or "grape hammer") were simultaneously presented in the prime, followed by two Chinese words also of same or different…