The humor response has long been considered mysterious, and it is given relatively little attention in modern experimental psychology, in spite of the fact that numerous studies suggest that it has substantial benefits for mood and health. Existing theories of humor fail to account for some of the most basic humor phenomena. On most occasions when…

Williams syndrome (WS) is a neurodevelopmental genetic disorder often described as being characterized by a dissociative cognitive architecture, in which profound impairments of visuo-spatial cognition contrast with relative preservation of linguistic, face recognition and auditory short-memory abilities. This asymmetric and dissociative cognition…

Purpose: The purposes were (a) to compare masking of consonant bursts by adjacent vowels for listeners with and without hearing loss and (b) to determine the extent to which the temporal intraspeech masking can be reduced by a simulated hearing-aid frequency-response shaping. Method: Fourteen adults with sensorineural hearing loss and 10 with…

This study examines 16-month-olds' understanding of word order and inflectional properties of familiar nouns and verbs. Infants preferred grammatical sentences over ungrammatical sentences when the ungrammaticality was cued by both misplaced inflection and word order reversal of nouns and verbs. Infants were also sensitive to inflection alone as a…

This article presents the authors' reply to Rod Ellis's comments on their study on motivated classroom behavior. As Ellis correctly summarizes, the three student variables selected for investigation in the authors' study were attention, participation, and volunteering for teacher-fronted activity. These three components were then summed up in a…

"Selective mutism" is the term used to describe a disorder in which a person speaks only in restricted stimulus situations. Examination of single-subject research concerning selective mutism reveals the most popular and successful interventions to instate speech involve a combination of behavior modification procedures. The present research…

Language acquisition has been a contentious topic among linguists, psycholinguists, and behaviorists for decades. Although numerous theories of language acquisition have surfaced, none have sufficiently accounted for the subtleties of the language that children acquire. The present study attempts to explain the role of modeling and automatic…

We examined the nature and timecourse of hemispheric asymmetries in verbal memory by recording event-related potentials (ERPs) in a continuous recognition task. Participants made overt recognition judgments to test words presented in central vision that were either novel (new words) or had been previously presented in the left or right visual…

This study is a replication of Sundberg and Sundberg (1990) that compared topography-based verbal behavior with selection-based verbal behavior in terms of acquisition, accuracy, and testing for the emergence of a new verbal relation. Participants were three typical children and three developmentally disabled persons with autism. The study sought…

The goal of the present study was to explore the emergence of verbal behavior resulting from the joint control of two antecedent stimuli that are presented together for the first time. Conditional discriminations were used for teaching and for probing. Four stimuli PI, P2, 0 1 , and 02 were samples and four stimuli Al, A2, BI, and B2 were the…

A major focus of research on language acquisition in infancy involves experimental studies of the infant's ability to discriminate various kinds of speech or speech-like stimuli. This research has demonstrated that infants are sensitive to many fine-grained differences in the acoustic properties of speech utterance. Furthermore, these empirical…

Chomsky's (1959) review of Skinner's (1957) "Verbal Behavior" has been influential and attributed with a role in the cognitive revolution. However, while counter reviews from within behavior analysis have noted that Chomsky misunderstood the subject matter, certain aspects of his scholarship have been underdiscussed. This includes several…

Background: Previous research suggested that persons with Down syndrome (DS) used a different strategy to drum than typical adults. Methods: The present study examined continuous bimanual drumming strategies in response to different instructions in 10 persons with DS, 10 mental age-matched and 10 chronological age-matched groups. The drumming task…

Acquisition of verbal behavior is a major goal of interventions for children with developmental disabilities. We evaluated the effectiveness of manipulation of an establishing operation for functional discriminated mands. Four individuals with developmental disabilities participated in a training procedure designed to teach two separate mands for…

Semantic and orthographic learning of new words was investigated with the help of the picture-word interference (PWI) task. In this version of the Stroop task, picture naming is delayed by the simultaneous presentation of a semantically related as opposed to an unrelated distractor word (a specific PWI effect), as well as by an unrelated word…