Background and aims: Although young children's gaze behaviors in experimental task contexts have been shown to be potential biobehavioral markers relevant to autism spectrum disorder (ASD), we know little about their everyday gaze behaviors. The present study aims (1) to document early gaze behaviors that occur within a live, social interactive…

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…

The study aimed to improve sequential time perception among deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) children with and without cochlear implants (CIs) by administering an intervention programme using virtual-reality (VR) technology. The study included 55 children 7-10 years old who were divided into 3 groups: DHH children with CIs, DHH children without CIs,…

Verbs serve as the architectural centerpiece of sentences, making verb learning pivotal for language acquisition. Verb learning requires both the formation of a verb-action mapping and the abstraction of relations between an object and its action. Two competing positions have been proposed to explain the process of verb learning: (a) seeing a…

The fact that the violin is a fretless instrument brings along intonation problems both in its performance and in its education. The introduction of technology into educational environments day by day, has led to the need to try different methods besides the traditional methods for solving intonation problems. The aim of this study is to examine…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine group and individual differences in attentional bias toward and away from socially threatening facial stimuli among adolescents who stutter and age- and sex-matched typically fluent controls. Method: Participants included 86 adolescents (43 stuttering, 43 controls) ranging in age from 13 to 19…

Purpose: Conversational entrainment describes the tendency for individuals to alter their communicative behaviors to more closely align with those of their conversation partner. This communication phenomenon has been widely studied, and thus, the methodologies used to examine it are diverse. Here, we summarize key differences in research design…

Visual word recognition is facilitated by the presence of "orthographic neighbors" that mismatch the target word by a single letter substitution. However, researchers typically do not consider "where" neighbors mismatch the target. In light of evidence that some letter positions are more informative than others, we investigate…

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: Many speech-language pathologists (SLPs) experience challenging behaviors during service delivery and also report minimal training in effective behavior management strategies. The purpose of this tutorial is to present low-effort behavior management strategies that SLPs can adopt, adapt, and implement. Method: After providing an overall…

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.,…

This study proposes a software system for determining gaze patterns in on-screen testing. The system applies machine learning techniques to eye-movement data obtained from an eye-tracking device to categorize students according to their gaze behavior pattern while solving an on-screen test. These patterns are determined by converting eye movement…

At the highest level, this dissertation is a case study on how bias can become encoded into the tools used to measure a construct and into the very definition of the construct itself. In this case, the construct is spatial ability. This dissertation focuses on the validity and accuracy of spatial tests and illuminates gender bias that is…

Language skills have long been posited to be a factor contributing to developmental stuttering. The current study aimed to evaluate whether novel word recognition, a critical skill for language development, differentiated children who stutter from children who do not stutter. Twenty children who stutter and 18 children who do not stutter, aged 3-8…