Sanja Šimleša

Gestural development and its relation to a child's early vocabulary

Gesture and language are tightly connected during the development of a childs communication skills. Gestures mostly precede and define the way of language development; even opposite direction has been found. Few recent studies have focused on the relationship between specific gestures and specific word categories, emphasising that the onset of one gesture type predicts the onset of certain word categories or of the earliest word combinations. The aim of this study was to analyse predicative roles of different gesture types on the onset of first word categories in a childs early expressive vocabulary. Our data show that different types of gestures predict different types of word production. Object gestures predict open-class words from the age of 13 months, and gestural routines predict closed-class words and social terms from 8 months. Receptive vocabulary has a strong mediating role for all linguistically defined categories (open- and closed-class words) but not for social terms, which are the largest word category in a childs early expressive vocabulary. Accordingly, main contribution of this study is to define the impact of different gesture types on early expressive vocabulary and to determine the role of receptive vocabulary in gesture-expressive vocabulary relation in the Croatian language.

Towards A Robot-Assisted Autism Diagnostic Protocol: Modelling and Assessment with POMDP

The existing procedures for Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) diagnosis are often time consuming and tiresome both for highly-trained human evaluators and children. In addition, prospective human evaluators need to undergo a rigorous and lengthy training process that may not be accessible or affordable to all interested individuals. Hence, this paper proposes a framework for robot-assisted ASD evaluation based on Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP) modelling. POMDP is broadly used for modelling optimal sequential decision making tasks under uncertainty. Spurred by the widely accepted Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule (ADOS), we start off with emulating ADOS. In other words, our POMDP model explicitly takes into account the ADOS stratification into several modules, ongoing task informativeness and robotic sensor deficiencies. Relying only on imperfect sensor observations, the robot provides an assessment of the child’s ASD-relevant functioning level (which is partially observable) within a particular task. Finally, we demonstrate that the proposed POMDP framework provides fine-grained outcome quantification, which could also increase the appeal of robot-assisted diagnostic protocols in the future.

Four Tasks of a Robot-assisted Autism Spectrum Disorder Diagnostic Protocol: First Clinical Tests

Notwithstanding intensive research and many scientific advances, diagnosing autism spectrum disorders remains a slow and tedious process. Due to the absence of any physiological tests, the outcome depends solely on the expertise of the clinician, which takes years to acquire. Complicating the matter further, research has shown that inter-rater reliability can be very low, even among experienced clinicians. As an attempt to facilitate the diagnostic process and make it more objective, this paper proposes a robot-assisted diagnostic protocol. The expected benefit of using a robot is twofold: the robot always performs its actions in a predictable and consistent way, and it can use its sensors to catch aspects of a childs behavior that a human examiner can miss. In this paper, we describe four tasks from the widely accepted ADOS protocol, that have been adapted to make them suitable for the Aldebaran Nao humanoid robot. These tasks include evaluating the childs response to being called by name, symbolic and functional imitation, joint attention and assessing the childs ability to simultaneously communicate on multiple channels. All four tasks have been implemented on the robots onboard computer and are performed autonomously. As the main contribution of the paper, we present the results of the initial batch of four clinical trials of the proposed robot assisted diagnostic protocol, performed on a population of preschool children. The results of the robots observations are benchmarked against the findings of experienced clinicians. Emphasis is placed on evaluating robot performance, in order to assess the feasibility of a robot eventually becoming an assistant in the diagnostic process. The obtained results indicate that the use of robots as autism diagnostic assistants is a promising approach, but much work remains to be done before they become useful diagnostic tools.

Early Childhood Inclusion in Croatia.

This article explains early childhood inclusion in Croatia from its beginnings up to challenges in current policy and practice. The first preschool education for children with disabilities dates back to the 1980s and was provided in special institutions. In the last 10 years, mainstream kindergartens have been enrolling children with disabilities but unevenly in different Croatian regions and also with a different quality of support. The lower economic potential of the rural and smaller local communities adversely influence the possibility of organizing support for children with disabilities in general, especially in an inclusive setting. The great challenge in analyzing the quality of early childhood inclusion in educational settings is the lack of reliable sources of data and evaluation research. Main challenges in early childhood inclusion and future directions are discussed.

Executive Functions during Childhood, Development of

Executive functions (EFs) encompass higher order processes required for purposeful, goal- oriented activity. The processes most frequently included in this term are inhibition, working memory, cognitive flexibility, and planning. More recent studies show that EF processes have different developmental trajectories and start their intensive development at different periods. This article presents definitions of EF, changes in the concept and studies of EF during time, different development trajectories of EF and related changes in the brain through three developmental periods: (1) infants and toddlers, (2) early childhood, and (3) middle childhood, and finally methodological issues in the studies of EF in children.