EVALUATING PROGRESS IN BEHAVIORAL PROGRAMS FOR CHILDREN WITH AUTISM SPECTRUM DISORDERS VIA CONTINUOUS AND DISCONTINUOUS MEASUREMENT

We evaluated the influence of two different frequencies of data collection on skill acquisition and maintenance within behavioral treatment programs for children with autism spectrum disorders. Six children were taught multiple skills in up to four different behavioral programs. Half of the skills were measured continuously (i.e., trial by trial), and the other half were measured discontinuously (i.e., first trial only). When differences were detected, quicker acquisition was typically associated with discontinuous measurement, and stronger maintenance was typically associated with continuous measurement.     

Naming problems do not reflect a second independent core deficit in dyslexia: Double deficits explored

The double deficit hypothesis states that naming speed problems represent a second core deficit in dyslexia independent from a phonological deficit. The current study investigated the main assumptions of this hypothesis in a large sample of well-diagnosed dyslexics. The three main findings were that (a) naming speed was consistently related only to reading speed; (b) phonological processing speed and naming speed loaded on the same factor, and this factor contributed strongly to reading speed; and (c) although general processing speed was involved in speeded naming of visual items, it did not explain the relationship between naming speed and reading speed. The results do not provide support for the existence of a second independent core naming deficit in dyslexia and indicate that speeded naming tasks are mainly phonological processing speed tasks with an important addition: fast cross-modal matching of visual symbols and phonological codes.     

Exploring the impact of phonological awareness, visual–spatial working memory, and preschool quantity–number competencies on mathematics achievement in elementary school: Findings from a 3-year longitudinal study

This longitudinal study explored the importance of kindergarten measures of phonological awareness, working memory, and quantity–number competencies (QNC) for predicting mathematical school achievement in third graders (mean age 8 years 8 months). It was found that the impact of phonological awareness and visual–spatial working memory, assessed at 5 years of age, was mediated by early QNC, which predicted math achievement in third grade. Importantly, and confirming our isolated number words hypothesis, phonological awareness had no impact on higher numerical competencies (i.e., when number words needed to be linked with quantities [QNC Level II and above]) but predicted basic numerical competencies (i.e., when number words were isolated from quantities [QNC Level I]), explaining the moderate relationship between early literacy development and the development of mathematical competencies.     

Speech perception deficits by Chinese children with phonological dyslexia

Findings concerning the relation between dyslexia and speech perception deficits are inconsistent in the literature. This study examined the relation in Chinese children using a more homogeneous sample—children with phonological dyslexia. Two experimental tasks were administered to a group of Chinese children with phonological dyslexia, a group of age-matched control children, and a group of adults. In addition to a categorical perception task, a selective adaptation task was carried out. The results indicated that Chinese children with phonological dyslexia were less consistent than both the child and adult control groups in identifying stimuli within a given phonetic category. Furthermore, they did not show any significant adaptation effects in the selective adaptation task even when the adapting stimulus was identical to an endpoint stimulus in the test continuum. It seems that children with phonological dyslexia have a general deficiency in representing and processing speech stimuli.     

Cognitive development, reading and prosodic skills in children with cochlear implants

This report summarizes some of the results of studies in our laboratory exploring the development of cognitive, reading and prosodic skills in children with cochlear implantation (CI). The children with CI performed at significantly lower levels than the hearing comparison group on the majority of cognitive tests, despite showing levels of nonverbal ability. The differences between children with CI and hearing children were most pronounced on tasks with relatively high phonological processing demands, but they were not limited to phonological processing. Impairment of receptive and productive prosody was also evident in children with CI. Despite these difficulties, 75% of the children with CI reached a level of reading skill comparable to that of hearing children. The results are discussed with respect to compensation strategies in reading.     

儿童筷子使用技能特性的发展及其与学业成绩的关系

本研究考察了我国儿童筷子使用技能特性的发展特点及其与学业成绩的关系．结果发现：(1)在儿童筷子使用技能的精确性、时效性以及稳定性上,4岁组儿童和其他组都存在显著差异,5岁组和7岁、8岁组儿童存在显著差异,8岁组儿童的发展水平与成人仍有显著差异;(2)学业成绩好和差的儿童在筷子使用技能的稳定性上存在显著差异;(3)儿童筷子使用技能的时效性和稳定性与其语文成绩显著相关,与其数学成绩相关不显著。     

中文读写能力及其相关因素研究

使用5点量表,本研究在北京地区调查了2187名小学一、三、五年级儿童的中文读写能力及其相关因素。因素分析抽取了8个因素：书面语意义理解、基本知觉能力、书写技能、家庭阅读背景、动作技能、口语能力、朗读和听写、书面表达。对上述因素进行多元逐步回归分析发现,各种读写能力内部相关显著。基本知觉能力、口语能力、家庭阅读背景和动作技能分别对中文读写能力的不同成分有显著解释作用。这个结果对于理解阅读能力发展及其与家庭阅读背景、口语、基本知觉一动作能力之间的关系,以及阅读障碍的内在机制具有重要的理论意义。     

Lexical categories at the edge of the word

Language acquisition may be one of the most difficult tasks that children face during development. They have to segment words from fluent speech, figure out the meanings of these words, and discover the syntactic constraints for joining them together into meaningful sentences. Over the past couple of decades, computational modeling has emerged as a new paradigm for gaining insights into the mechanisms by which children may accomplish these feats. Unfortunately, many of these models assume a computational complexity and linguistic knowledge likely to be beyond the abilities of developing young children. This article shows that, using simple statistical procedures, significant correlations exist between the beginnings and endings of a word and its lexical category in English, Dutch, French, and Japanese. Therefore, phonetic information can contribute to individuating higher level structural properties of these languages. This article also presents a simple 2-layer connectionist model that, once trained with an initial small sample of words labeled for lexical category, can infer the lexical category of a large proportion of novel words using only word-edge phonological information, namely the first and last phoneme of a word. The results suggest that simple procedures combined with phonetic information perceptually available to children provide solid scaffolding for emerging lexical categories in language development.     

Using auditory feedback to improve striking for mixed martial artists

The purpose of this study was to evaluate auditory feedback to increase the effectiveness of throwing a “right cross.” Auditory feedback, implemented by the mixed martial arts coach, was evaluated in multiple baselines across participants design with four mixed martial arts students, two males and two females, 25–54 years old. The target behavior was the percentage of correct steps in the 20‐step task analysis of throwing a right cross. In the auditory feedback procedure, the coach used a handheld clicker and make the clicking sound as a reinforcer each time the participant performed a specific step in the task analysis correctly. This process continued until all steps were performed correctly. The percentage of correct steps of the right cross improved substantially during assessment sessions following the introduction of the auditory feedback and maintained at 90% or more for all participants during follow‐up. Improvements were also noted in the social validity assessment.     

政治技能与自我效能感对职业适应能力的影响——自尊的中介作用

本研究采用问卷调查法, 以492名高校大学生为研究对象,探索政治技能和自我效能感对大学生职业适应能力的影响及自尊的中介作用。结果表明：（1）政治技能和自我效能感对个体的职业适应能力有积极影响。（2）自尊在政治技能和职业适应能力之间,自我效能感与职业适应能力之间起着双重中介作用。