Intact implicit learning of spatial context and temporal sequences in childhood autism spectrum disorder.

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is defined by atypicalities in domains that are posited to rely on implicit learning processes such as social communication, language, and motor behavior. The authors examined 2 forms of implicit learning in 14 children with high-functioning ASD (10 of whom were diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome) and 14 control children, learning of spatial context known to be mediated by the medial temporal lobes (using the contextual cueing task) and of sequences known to be mediated by frontal-striatal and frontal-cerebellar circuits (using the alternating serial reaction time task). Both forms of learning were unimpaired in ASD. Spatial contextual implicit learning was spared in ASD despite slower visual search of spatial displays. The present findings provide evidence for the integrity of learning processes dependent on integration of spatial and sequential contextual information in high-functioning children with ASD. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Imitation from 12 to 24 months in autism and typical development: A longitudinal Rasch analysis.

The development of imitation during the second year of life plays an important role in domains of sociocognitive development such as language and social learning. Deficits in imitation ability in persons with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) from toddlerhood into adulthood have also been repeatedly documented, raising the possibility that early disruptions in imitation contribute to the onset of ASD and the deficits in language and social interaction that define the disorder. This study prospectively examined the development of imitation between 12 and 24 months of age in 154 infants at familial risk for ASD and 78 typically developing infants who were all later assessed at 36 months for ASD or other developmental delays. The study established a developmental measure of imitation ability and examined group differences over time, using an analytic Rasch measurement model. Results revealed a unidimensional latent construct of imitation and verified a reliable sequence of imitation skills that was invariant over time for all outcome groups. Results also showed that all groups displayed similar significant linear increases in imitation ability between 12 and 24 months and that these increases were related to individual growth in both expressive language and ratings of social engagement but not in fine motor development. The group of children who developed ASD by age 3 years exhibited delayed imitation development compared with the low-risk typical outcome group across all time-points, but were indistinguishable from other high-risk infants who showed other cognitive delays not related to ASD. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Interaction between particles and word order in the comprehension and production of simple sentences in Japanese children.

In light of studies that have emphasized the role of word order for children learning English, 4 experiments were conducted in which the comprehension, production, and imitation of simple sentences among 92 2–6 yr old Japanese children were assessed. Japanese is a language that has a dominant subject–object–verb order yet allows flexibility in word order due to postposed particles that signal grammatical role. Results across different tasks suggest that children learning Japanese show neither a strong reliance on word order nor on particles alone. Rather, they possess a bias for a matching between particles and the position in the sentence where they appear. (33 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Distinguished Scientific Awards for an Early Career Contribution to Psychology: Dare A. Baldwin.

Discusses the contributions made by Dare A. Baldwin, one of five recipients of the 1997 American Psychological Association (APA) Distinguished Scientific Awards for an Early Career Contribution to Psychology. Baldwin is recognized for research on the development of language, inductive reasoning, and social cognition. Her studies of early word learning documented infants' active use of information about a speaker's focus of attention or communicative intent when they are figuring out the meaning of a new word. Through this research, she has provided a broadly conceived synthesis of word learning and early theory-of-mind development. Implications are made for social-emotional development and autism as well as for language development. This has advanced the understanding of the subtle interactions between cognitive, social and emotional development. A selected bibliography is appended. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Early Social Attention Impairments in Autism: Social Orienting, Joint Attention, and Attention to Distress.

This study investigated social attention impairments in autism (social orienting, joint attention, and attention to another's distress) and their relations to language ability. Three- to four-year-old children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD; n = 72), 3- to 4-year-old developmentally delayed children (n = 34), and 12- to 46-month-old typically developing children (n = 39), matched on mental age, were compared on measures of social orienting, joint attention, and attention to another's distress. Children with autism performed significantly worse than the comparison groups in all of these domains. Combined impairments in joint attention and social orienting were found to best distinguish young children with ASD from those without ASD. Structural equation modeling indicated that joint attention was the best predictor of concurrent language ability. Social orienting and attention to distress were indirectly related to language through their relations with joint attention. These results help to clarify the nature of social attention impairments in autism, offer clues to developmental mechanisms, and suggest targets for early intervention. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Learning color words involves learning a system of mappings.

This research examines the difficulty children encounter when acquiring 2 specific sets of adjectives, color and size words, and suggests that children must acquire a system of mapping in learning these words. Children were assessed on 4 types of mappings (word–word maps, property–property maps, word–property maps, and word–word–property maps) by completing 3 color tasks. Children also participated in comparable tasks for size words. In Study 1, 13 two-year-olds were followed longitudinally at 3-week intervals. In Study 2, 56 two-year-olds participated in a cross-sectional replication. The results indicate that children acquire color maps in a characteristic order. Children demonstrated a different pattern of acquisition for size words. The results suggest that learning word associations may promote color word acquisition and that learning color words may promote selective attention to color. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Languages, scripts, and the environment: Factors in developing concepts of print.

Preschool children bilingual in English and Hebrew were investigated for their understanding of concepts of print by means of two tasks. In the first, children had to understand that a printed word did not change its meaning if it moved to a new location. In the second, children had to make judgments about word length and ignore the size of the named objects. Previous research had shown bilingual French–English and Chinese–English children to excel in the first task, but only older Chinese–English bilinguals had an advantage in the second. The present study extended those results by investigating the effect of writing system in more detail. The study also examined the effect of the language of the environment by conducting parallel studies in environments in which either English or Hebrew was the community language. The results show that the bilingual children in both settings were more advanced than the monolinguals in both tasks and in both settings. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Phenotypic performance profile of children with reading disabilities: A regression-based test of the phonological-core variable-difference model.

Introduces a new analytic strategy for comparing the cognitive profiles of children developing reading skills at different rates: a regression-based logic analogous to the reading-level match design, but without some of the methodological problems of that design. It provides a unique method for examining whether the reading subskill profiles of poor readers with aptitude/achievement discrepancy differ from those without discrepancy. 907 children (aged 7–16 yrs) were compared on a varied set of phonological, orthographic, memory, and language processing tasks. The results indicated that cognitive differences between these 2 groups of poor readers all reside outside of the word recognition module. The results generally support the phonological-core variable-difference model of reading disability and demonstrate that degree of aptitude/achievement discrepancy is unrelated to the unique cognitive tradeoffs that are characteristic of the word recognition performance of children with reading disabilities. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Bilingualism, Language Proficiency, and Learning to Read in Two Writing Systems.

Two hundred and four 5- and 6-year-olds who were monolingual English-, bilingual English-Chinese-, or Chinese-speaking children beginning to learn English (2nd-language learners) were compared on phonological awareness and word decoding tasks in English and Chinese. Phonological awareness developed in response to language exposure and instruction but, once established, transferred across languages for both bilinguals and 2nd-language learners. In contrast, decoding ability developed separately for each language as a function of proficiency and instruction in that language and did not transfer to the other language. Therefore, there was no overall effect of bilingualism on learning to read: Performance depended on the structure of the language, proficiency in that language, and instructional experiences with that writing system. These results point to the importance of evaluating the features of the languages and instructional context in which children become biliterate. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Predictors of reading and spelling abilities in first- and second-language learners.

This study examined the basic literacy skills and related processes of 1st- through 4th-grade children speaking English as a 1st language (L1) and English as a 2nd language (ESL). The performances of the L1 and ESL children on phonological awareness, word and pseudoword reading, and word and pseudoword spelling tasks were highly similar. The ESL children were at an advantage with regard to lexical access but performed more poorly on verbal working memory and syntactic awareness tasks. The results suggest that the main processes underlying L1 children's basic reading ability in Grades 1 and 2, namely phonological awareness and lexical access, are of equal importance for ESL children. Phonological awareness remained the strongest predictor of word reading ability for L1 and ESL children in Grades 3 and 4. However, the processes involved in L1 and ESL word reading and spelling appeared to vary at other points. Verbal working memory and syntactic awareness were found to be of importance for the word reading and spelling abilities of L1 children but not for ESL children. Lexical access was found to be of more importance for ESL children. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Lexical learning by children with specific language impairment: effects of linguistic input presented at varying speaking rates

The purpose of this study was to investigate the impact of speaking rate variations in the linguistic input provided to children during a novel word learning task. Thirty-two school-age children participated in this investigation, including 16 children with specific language impairment (SLI) and 16 normal language (NL) controls matched on mental age (MA). The younger half of the NL group also served as a vocabulary level comparison for the older half of the children with SLI. No significant rate effects were found for comprehension of novel words, with all children performing at relatively high levels of accuracy. The group with SLI demonstrated the same recognition accuracy pattern as MA matched controls for target labels versus phonetically similar/dissimilar foils only for words trained at slow rate. Rate effects were most pronounced for items with the highest difficulty level, namely production of novel words. Children with SLI produced significantly fewer words that had been presented at fast rate during training than NL children matched on mental age or vocabulary level. Individual differences and production error patterns on fast rate items were examined. The finding that variations in speaking rate had a disproportionate impact upon word learning for children with SLI was interpreted within a framework of limited processing capacity.     

Predictors of word decoding and reading fluency across languages varying in orthographic consistency.

Very few studies have directly compared reading acquisition across different orthographies. The authors examined the concurrent and longitudinal predictors of word decoding and reading fluency in children learning to read in an orthographically inconsistent language (English) and in an orthographically consistent language (Greek). One hundred ten English-speaking children and 70 Greek-speaking children attending Grade 1 were examined in measures of phonological awareness, phonological memory, rapid naming speed, orthographic processing, word decoding, and reading fluency. The same children were reassessed on word decoding and reading fluency measures when they were in Grade 2. The results of structural equation modeling indicated that both phonological and orthographic processing contributed uniquely to reading ability in Grades 1 and 2. However, the importance of these predictors was different in the two languages, particularly with respect to their effect on word decoding. The authors argue that the orthography that children are learning to read is an important factor that needs to be taken into account when models of reading development are being generalized across languages. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Evidence for selective inhibitory impairment in individuals with autism spectrum disorder.

Objective: The social and communicative challenges faced by individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are often compounded by additional difficulties with executive function. It remains unclear, however, to what the extent individuals with ASD experienced impairment in inhibitory control. The objective of the present study was to assess the three main subtypes of executive inhibitory control within a single ASD sample thus providing new insight into the unique ASD-related pattern of sparing and impairment observed across different aspects of inhibitory control. Method: A sample of 28 children with ASD (mean age = 13.1 years) and a comparison group of 49 neurologically uncompromised children (mean age = 13.3 years) participated. A prepotent response inhibition task, a flanker visual filtering task, and a proactive interference memory task were used to evaluate prepotent response inhibition, resistance to distracter interference, and resistance to proactive interference, respectively. Results: After accounting for individual differences in noninhibition abilities (e.g., processing speed) and overall level of functioning, there was no evidence of group-related differences in inhibitory performance on the prepotent response inhibition test or proactive interference test. ASD-related impairments in inhibitory control were evident, however, on the flanker visual filtering task. Conclusions: Taken together, the present findings indicate that ASD is associated with impairments in some, but not all, aspects of inhibitory control. Individuals with ASD appear to have difficulty ignoring distracting visual information, but prepotent response inhibition and resistance to proactive interference are relatively intact. The current findings also provide support for a multitype model of inhibitory control. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Linguistic environment of 1- to 2-year-old twins.

Investigated differences in the language learning environments of singletons and twins, with special reference to pragmatic factors that might be expected to differ in dyadic and triadic interactive situations. Six twin pairs and 12 singleton children (all firstborn) were observed in natural interactions with their mothers, once at 15 mo of age and again at 21 mo of age. Findings reveal that twins were lower than singletons on all measures of language development and that their language learning environments were significantly different. Although twin mothers spoke and interacted with their children as much as singleton mothers when twins were analyzed together, when analyzed as individuals, twin children received less speech directed specifically to them, participated in fewer and shorter episodes of joint attentional focus, and had fewer and shorter conversations with their mothers. Twin mothers were also more directive in their interactional styles. Correlational analyses indicated that variation of these language learning environment factors for the sample as a whole, and variation for some of these factors within the twin group itself, were related to early language growth. It is proposed that both the quantitative and qualitative differences observed in the language learning environments of singletons and twins derive from the nature of the triadic situation and that these differences have important effects on the child's early language development. (23 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Growth in reading skills of children from diverse linguistic backgrounds: Findings from a 5-year longitudinal study.

This article reports on the results of a longitudinal investigation of the reading development of a sample of 824 children (406 girls, 418 boys). The sample included 689 native English-speaking (L1) children and 135 English-language learners (ELLs) representing 33 different native languages. In kindergarten and 4th grade, children's word reading, spelling, phonological processing, syntactic awareness, and working memory skills were assessed with standardized and experimental measures. In addition, word reading was assessed from kindergarten through 4th grade, and reading comprehension in 4th grade. Comparisons of reading skills between the ELLs and the L1 speakers demonstrated that despite slightly lower performance of the ELLs on several kindergarten tasks, differences at 4th grade were negligible. Fourth-grade word reading was predicted by the same kindergarten tasks for both language groups, and prediction of reading comprehension differed by only 1 task. Finally, the trajectory of word reading was nonlinear for both groups, although predictors of this trajectory differed between groups. The findings suggest that early identification models established through research with L1 speakers are appropriate for identifying ELLs at risk for reading difficulties. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Investigating the cause of language regularization in adults: Memory constraints or learning effects?

When language learners are exposed to inconsistent probabilistic grammatical patterns, they sometimes impose consistency on the language instead of learning the variation veridically. The authors hypothesized that this regularization results from problems with word retrieval rather than from learning per se. One prediction of this, that easing the demands of lexical retrieval leads to less regularization, was tested. Adult learners were exposed to a language containing inconsistent probabilistic patterns and were tested with either a standard production task or one of two tasks that reduced the demands of lexical retrieval. As predicted, participants tested with the modified tasks more closely matched the probability of the inconsistent items than did those tested with the standard task. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Phonological short-term memory and new word learning in children.

Sixty-five 5-year old children participated in 4 experimental tasks of word learning that varied systematically in the amounts of phonological and nonphonological learning required. Measures of the children's performances on 2 measures of phonological memory (digit span and nonword repetition), vocabulary knowledge, and nonverbal ability were also obtained. Learning of the sound structures of new words was significantly, and to some degree independently, associated with aspects of both phonological memory skill and vocabulary knowledge. Learning of pairs of familiar words was linked with current vocabulary knowledge, although not with phonological memory scores. The findings suggest that both existing lexical knowledge and phonological short-term memory play significant roles in the long-term learning of the sounds of new words. The study also provides evidence of both shared and distinct processes contributing to nonword repetition and digit span tasks. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effects of two types of phonological awareness training on word learning in kindergarten children.

The effects of 2 types of oral-language training programs on development of phonological awareness skills and word learning ability were examined. One of the training programs provided explicit instruction on both analytic (segmenting) and synthetic (blending) phonological tasks; the other program trained synthetic skills only. Effects of these programs were contrasted with a language-experience control group that received no phonologically oriented training. 48 kindergarten children participated in small-group training sessions 3 times per week for 7–8 wks. Children who received both analytic and synthetic training improved significantly on both types of skills, whereas children receiving the synthetic skills training alone improved only on blending skills. Only children receiving training on both types of tasks showed a positive training effect for the word learning or reading analog task. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The perception and production of rhyme in normal and developmentally apraxic children

The phonological competence of four children, aged 5-7 years old, who demonstrated a cluster of symptoms consistent with a diagnosis of developmental apraxia of speech (DAS), was contrasted to that of four normal children. Four rhyming tasks were used to assess the ability of the children to both spontaneously generate rhyming words to targets and to judge the (in)appropriateness of a rhyme in both a word series and forced-choice word pairs. The DAS children revealed a severe deficit in rhyming ability across all tasks and had rhyming abilities markedly inferior to those shown by normal children. The rhyming results were interpreted as possibly indicative of an impoverishment of an internalized phonemic representation system, which precludes accessing and evoking the needed sound image for the vowel + coda for a rhyme. These results, while preliminary in nature, lend support to a conceptualization of DAS as a fundamental disorder of the segmental phonological level of language that impacts on all hierarchically relevant language components. The hypothesis that the underlying etiology of DAS is a developmental dysmorphology of the neural substrates that mediate such basic phonological representational structure is discussed.     

Sensitivity of 24-month-olds to the prior inaccuracy of the source: Possible mechanisms.

Three studies examined 24-month-olds' sensitivity to the prior accuracy of the source of information and the way in which young children modify their word learning from inaccurate sources. In Experiments 1A, 2, and 3, toddlers interacted with an accurate or inaccurate speaker who trained and tested children's comprehension of a new word–object link. In Experiment 1, children performed less systematically in response to an inaccurate than to an accurate source. In Experiments 2 and 3, after toddlers' comprehension of the new word–object links was tested by the original source, a second speaker requested the target objects. In Experiment 2, children responded randomly in response to the second speaker's requests when novel words were previously presented by an inaccurate source. In Experiment 3, toddlers responded randomly in response to both speakers in the inaccurate condition when their memory for words was taxed by a brief delay period. Taken together, these findings suggest that toddlers attend to accuracy information, that they treat inaccuracy as a feature of a particular individual, and that the word–object representations formed as a result may be fragile and short lived. Findings are discussed in terms of possible mechanisms by which children adjust their word learning from problematic speakers. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)