Jennifer Ference

Predicting Older Adults’ Driving Difficulties Using the Roadwise Review

The Roadwise Review has been reported to provide an effective means of self-assessing and predicting driving difficulties in older adults. We administered it to 73 community-dwelling older drivers (M = 73 years) and also gathered data on self-reported driving difficulties, 2-year retrospective collisions, and moving violations. The acuity tests and Useful Field of View exhibited substantial ceiling effects that limit predictive utility, and there was a high failure rate on the head and neck flexibility test. Additionally, the Roadwise Review did not predict self-reported driving problems or collision risk. Thus, in current form, it does not appear to be a useful tool for assessing older drivers. Future research efforts should assess predictive validity in a more heterogeneous sample of older adults and with a broader range of outcomes, including on-road driving performance.

Attention to lexical stress and early vocabulary growth in 5-month-olds at risk for autism spectrum disorder

Typically developing infants differentiate strong-weak (trochaic) and weak-strong (iambic) stress patterns by 2months of age. The ability to discriminate rhythmical patterns, such as lexical stress, has been argued to facilitate language development, suggesting that a difficulty in discriminating stress might affect early word learning as reflected in vocabulary size. Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often have difficulty in correctly producing lexical stress, yet little is known about how they perceive it. The current study tested 5-month-old infants with typically developing older siblings (SIBS-TD) and infants with an older sibling diagnosed with ASD (SIBS-A) on their ability to differentiate the trochaic and iambic stress patterns of the word form gaba. SIBS-TD infants showed an increased interest in attention to the trochaic stress pattern, which was also positively correlated with vocabulary comprehension at 12months of age. In contrast, SIBS-A infants attended equally to these stress patterns, although this was unrelated to later vocabulary size.

Now You Hear It: Fourteen-Month-Olds Succeed at Learning Minimal Pairs in Stressed Syllables

We examined whether 14-month-olds learn the mapping between a novel word and object in an associative-learning task when the forms differ minimally in only one segment where the crucial difference occurs in a stressed syllable. Fifty infants were presented with novel word–object pairings. Infants in one group heard the minimal difference in an initially stressed syllable, and the other group heard the minimal difference in a medially stressed syllable. Only those infants who were taught the medially stressed minimal pair detected a mismatch in the word–object pairing. These results demonstrate that 14-month-olds can succeed at minimal pair word learning when the critical information is presented in a stressed syllable, but importantly, only when particular acoustic cues are highlighted by syllable position—in this case, the medial position.