Participation in research can provide direct and indirect benefit to individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), their caregivers, families, and society at large. Unfortunately, individuals with high support needs, including those with intellectual disability, cognitive disability or minimal verbal ability, are often systematically excluded…

Divergent thinking (DT) is considered as an indicator of creative potential and a predictor of creative achievement. Furthermore, it is also conceptualized as an indicator of cognitive reserve (CR) in healthy elderly. CR refers to a functional benefit that can potentially offer protection against brain pathologies and is thereby considered a…

Purpose: Using a longitudinal design, this study aimed to describe inferential comprehension abilities of neglected French-speaking preschool children from 42 to 66 months of age in comparison to non-neglected peers, to examine the association with receptive vocabulary, and to determine whether rates of change in inferential abilities over time…

The present study investigated the effect of verbal working memory capacity (VWMC) on the processing of semantic information during on-line lexical ambiguity resolution of bilinguals. Seventeen Persian-English subordinate bilinguals of similar proficiency level were recruited to perform two experimental tasks: (1) a multi-load-level reading span…

Background: Verbal fluency tests (VFT) are highly sensitive to cognitive deficits. Usually, the score on VFT is based on the number of correct words produced, yet it alone gives little information regarding underlying test performance. The implementation of different strategies (cluster and switching) to perform efficiently during the tasks…

The primary objective of this study is to evaluate the divergent thinking abilities of first-year architecture students who are currently enrolled in a course focused on thinking in architecture. The statistical analysis of student's studio works with Wallach Kogan's divergent thinking pre/post-tests results demonstrated that the post-test score…

Purpose: Pronouns are referentially ambiguous: For example, "she" could refer to any female. Nonetheless, errors in pronoun interpretation rarely occur for adults with typical development (TD) due to several strategies implicitly shared between the talker and listener. The purpose of this study was to test the impacts of syntactic,…

This study investigates the role of diglossic and orthographic features in reading comprehension in Arabic. Specifically, it probes the independent contribution of language, metalinguistic, and decoding skills in the spoken language and in Standard Arabic to reading comprehension in the "abjad" writing system of Arabic. A sample of 112…

Competing viewpoints on the independency or interdependency of Skinner's verbal operants have been discussed in the literature and with empirical support for both positions generated using single-case research methods. Our study provides support for the interdependency of the verbal operants using items contained in the Verbal Behavior Milestones…

Children in out-of-home care persistently show poorer educational and developmental outcomes than their peers. This study investigates the effect of the comprehensive educational intervention, "LUKoP," in a randomized controlled trial, compared to treatment-as-usual (TAU). Outcome measures included reading and math abilities, IQ and…

Music has been shown to improve social interaction and attention to verbal stimuli in autism. We report a feasibility randomised controlled trial of an online intervention using music-assisted programmes, compared with best-practice treatment (Social Communication Intervention for Pre-schoolers-Intensive) for language learning in preschool…

Although the focus in the early grades is often on teaching young children how to read, the ultimate goal of reading is to understand the text--whether to learn new information or simply enjoy a story. Building the groundwork needed for this understanding starts right from the beginning of life--and it's essential from the beginning of school.…

An intraverbal assessment was administered to older adults with aphasia, using a hierarchy of questions that required increasingly complex verbal discriminative stimulus control. Five categories of errors were defined and analyzed for putative stimulus control, with the aim to identify requisite assessment components leading to more efficient and…

Early research that relied on standardized assessments of intelligence reported negative effects of bilingualism for children, but a study by Peal and Lambert (1962) reported better performance by bilingual than monolingual children on verbal and nonverbal intelligence tests. This outcome led to the view that bilingualism was a positive…

This study evaluates the psychometric properties of a verbal fluency task for potential use as an outcome measure in future clinical trials involving children with Down syndrome. Eighty-five participants attempted a modified version of the Neuropsychological Assessment of Children, Second Edition Word Generation Task at two time points. In the…