Patricia J. Brooks

Use of Computer-Assisted Technologies (CAT) to Enhance Social, Communicative, and Language Development in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders

Major advances in multimedia computer technology over the past decades have made sophisticated computer games readily available to the public. This, combined with the observation that most children, including those with autism spectrum disorders (ASD), show an affinity to computers, has led researchers to recognize the potential of computer technology as an effective and efficient tool in research and treatment. This paper reviews the use of computer-assisted technology (CAT), excluding strictly internet-based approaches, to enhance social, communicative, and language development in individuals with ASD by dividing the vast literature into four main areas: language, emotion recognition, theory of mind, and social skills. Although many studies illustrate the tremendous promise of CAT to enhance skills of individuals with ASD, most lack rigorous, scientific assessment of efficacy relative to non-CAT approaches.

Young Children's Overgeneralizations with Fixed Transitivity Verbs

The present study examined English-speaking childrens tendency to make argument structure overgeneralization errors (e.g., I disappeared it). Children were exposed to several English verbs of fixed transitivity (exclusively intransitive or exclusively transitive) and then asked questions that encouraged them to overgeneralize usage of the verbs. Seventy-two children (24 in each of three age groups: 3, 4/5, and 8 years of age) experienced four actions performed by puppets. Each action had two verbs of similar meaning associated with it in the context of the experimental action: one more familiar to young children and one less familiar. Children at all ages were more likely to overgeneralize usage of verbs that were less familiar to them, supporting the hypothesis that childrens usage of verbs in particular construction types becomes entrenched over time. As children solidly learn the transitivity status of particular verbs, they become more reluctant to use those verbs in other argument structure constructions.

Phonological priming in children's picture naming.

Two experiments examined phonological priming in children and adults, using a cross-modal picture-word interference task. Pictures of familiar objects were presented on a computer screen, while interfering words (IWs) were presented over headphones. In terms of their relation to target pictures, IWs were either phonologically related, unrelated, neutral (the word go), or identical. Ninety children (30 aged 4;11 to 5;11, 30 aged 6;11 to 7;11, and 30 aged 9;5 to 11;9) and 30 adults were instructed to name the pictures as quickly as possible while ignoring the IWs. In Experiment 1, related IWs shared onset consonants with the names of the pictures. Across ages, participants named pictures faster with related IWs than with unrelated IWs. In Experiment 2, related IWs rhymed with the targets. Here, only the youngest children (five to seven-year-olds) named pictures faster with related IWs than with unrelated IWs. The results indicate that priming effects reach a peak during a time when articulatory information is being consolidated in the output phonological buffer. The disappearance of the rhyme priming effect with age may reflect the gradual emergence of the onset as an organizing structure in speech production. This increased prominence of the onset can be viewed as one component of a just-in-time, incrementalist approach to speech production that allows adults to speak more fluently than children.

The role of selective attention in preschoolers’ rule use in a novel dimensional card sort

Preschoolers often fail in switching between dimensions in sorting cards. To evaluate proposed cognitive constraints, we introduced a “same-silly” task, not requiring an extra-dimensional shift. Instructions were to sort cards so that the shapes were the same (“same” game) or not the same (“silly” game) as targets. In Experiment 1, using b/w line drawings, 3-year-olds successfully played both “same” and “silly” games. In Experiments 2 and 3, with the irrelevant dimension of color added to cards, most children below 4;6 perseverated on the “same” game, revealing an effect of stimulus complexity on rule-based reasoning. Thus, with uni-dimensional stimuli, 3-year-olds flexibly alternated between “same” and “silly” rules, but could not follow identical rules with bi-dimensional stimuli requiring selective attention to shape. We suggest that preschoolers’ difficulties in selective attention, rather than the presence of an extra-dimensional shift, lead to card sorting failure.

Developmental change in the cross-modal Stroop effect

E. M. Elliott, Cowan, and Valle-Inclan (1998) reported a cross-modal Stroop-like interference effect in adults when an auditory distractor (a color or noncolor word) occurred simultaneously with a color patch to be named. Response times were slower with color as opposed to noncolor distractors. To distinguish two accounts of this phenomenon, we tested 4- to 11-year-olds and adults. Thesuppression hypothesis posits that the irrelevant word enters a phonological buffer and is injurious to color naming if the participant is unable to suppress its representation in time. Theconcurrent processing hypothesis states that interference occurs when the distractor and the color name are lexically accessed at the same time. Our finding that the cross-modal Stroop effect occurred in young children even with a distractor presented 500 msec in advance of the color patch favors the suppression account. Development in executive functioning may also contribute to the interference effect’s becoming progressively weaker with age.

The Role of Learner and Input Variables in Learning Inflectional Morphology.

To examine effects of input and learner characteristics on morphology acquisition, 60 adult English speakers learned to inflect masculine and feminine Russian nouns in nominative, dative, and genitive cases. By varying training vocabulary size (i.e., type variability), holding constant the number of learning trials, we tested whether learners required a “critical mass” of vocabulary to generalize case marking patterns to new nouns. Cattell’s Culture-Fair IQ Test mediated the effect of type variability on success in generalizing case marking to new vocabulary: only participants with above-median CultureFair Test scores showed the predicted critical mass effect of better generalization with larger training vocabulary. These results demonstrate how individual differences in central executive functioning and attention allocation capacity can affect adult second language learning. Every natural language encompasses a highly complex system of categories at multiple levels of linguistic organization (Gomez & Gerkin, 2000; Lakoff, 1987). Language learners are faced with the task of organizing linguistic input in terms of phonological, semantic, pragmatic, lexical, morphological, and syntactic distinctions. This categorization problem is especially challenging to adult second language (L2) learners, who may be acquiring L2 categories based on limited input, and with potential interference from their knowledge of other languages (FrenckMestre, Foucart, & Caetano-Nunes, 2004; Gesi Blanchard, 1998; Hernandez, Li, & MacWhinney, 2005; MacWhinney, 1992). With respect to morphological categorization, languages vary enormously in the richness of their inflectional patterns. English, in particular, presents a very impoverished set of noun and verb inflections, relative to many other languages (e.g., Russian, Hungarian, Lithuanian, Finnish, Spanish). One feature of natural languages that is especially difficult for adult learners involves mastery of grammatical dependencies (Braine,

Exploring the time course of semantic interference and associative priming in the picture–word interference task:

The picture–word interference (PWI) task is a widely used technique for exploring effects of semantic context on lexical access. In this task, printed words are superimposed over pictures to be named, with the timing of the interfering word relative to the picture systematically manipulated. Two experiments (N = 24 adults in each) explored the time course of effects of associates (e.g., CARROT superimposed on a picture of a rabbit) versus coordinates (e.g., CHIPMUNK superimposed on a picture of a rabbit) on naming latencies. Associates led to faster picture naming than did unrelated words, with facilitative effects occurring at stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs, in ms) ranging from –450 to 0. Coordinates led to slower naming latencies, with the interference effect restricted to SOAs of –150 and 0. The overlapping time course of associative priming and coordinate interference provides important constraints on models of lexical access in speech production.

Shortcuts to Quantifier Interpretation in Children and Adults

Errors involving universal quantification are common in contexts depicting sets of individuals in partial, one-to-one correspondence. In this article, we explore whether quantifier-spreading errors are more common with distributive quantifiers each and every than with all. In Experiments 1 and 2, 96 children (5- to 9-year-olds) viewed pairs of pictures and selected one corresponding to a sentence containing a universal quantifier (e.g., Every alligator is in a bathtub). Both pictures showed extra objects (e.g., alligators or bathtubs) not in correspondence, with correct sentence interpretation requiring their attention. Children younger than 9 years made numerous errors, with poorer performance in distributive contexts than collective ones. In Experiment 3, 21 native, English-speaking adults, given a similar task with the distributive quantifier every, also made childlike errors. The persistence of quantifier-spreading errors in adults undermines accounts positing immature syntactic structures as the error source. Rather, the errors seemingly reflect inaccurate syntax to semantics mapping, with adults and children alike resorting to processing shortcuts.

Crosslinguistic evidence for the diminutive advantage: gender agreement in Russian and Serbian children

Our previous research showed that Russian children commit fewer gender-agreement errors with diminutive nouns than with their simplex counterparts. Experiment 1 replicates this finding with Russian children (N = 24, mean 3;7, range 2;10-4;6). Gender agreement was recorded from adjective usage as children described animal pictures given just their names, varying in derivational status (diminutive/ simplex), novelty, and gender. Experiment 2 extends the gender-agreement elicitation methodology developed for Russian to Serbian, a language with similar morphosyntactic structure but considerably fewer diminutives in child-directed speech. Serbian children (N = 22, mean age 3;8, range 3;0-4;1), exhibited an advantage for diminutive nouns of almost the same magnitude as the Russian children. The fact that the diminutive advantage was found in a language with a low frequency of diminutives in the input suggests that morphophonological homogeneity of word clusters and membership in dense neighbourhoods are important factors that contribute to the reduction of inflectional errors during language development.

Individual differences in adult foreign language learning: The mediating effect of metalinguistic awareness

In this study, we sought to identify cognitive predictors of individual differences in adult foreign-language learning and to test whether metalinguistic awareness mediated the observed relationships. Using a miniature language-learning paradigm, adults (N = 77) learned Russian vocabulary and grammar (gender agreement and case marking) over six 1-h sessions, completing tasks that encouraged attention to phrases without explicitly teaching grammatical rules. The participants’ ability to describe the Russian gender and case-marking patterns mediated the effects of nonverbal intelligence and auditory sequence learning on grammar learning and generalization. Hence, even under implicit-learning conditions, individual differences stemmed from explicit metalinguistic awareness of the underlying grammar, which, in turn, was linked to nonverbal intelligence and auditory sequence learning. Prior knowledge of languages with grammatical gender (predominantly Spanish) predicted learning of gender agreement. Transfer of knowledge of gender from other languages to Russian was not mediated by awareness, which suggests that transfer operates through an implicit process akin to structural priming.