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1. Children's social preference for teachers versus peers in autism inclusion classrooms: An objective perspective

   https://doi.org/10.1002/aur.3276  

   Drye, Madison; Banarjee, Chitra; Perry, Lynn; Viggiano, Alyssa; Irvin, Dwight; Messinger, Daniel (January 2025, Autism Research)

   Abstract In inclusive preschools, children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and other developmental disabilities (DD) are less socially engaged with peers than are typically developing (TD) children. However, there is limited objective information describing how children with ASD engage with teachers, or how teacher engagement compares to engagement with peers. We tracked over 750 hours' worth of children's (N = 77;N_ASD = 24,N_DD = 23,N_TD = 30;M_age = 43.98 months) and teachers' (N = 12) locations and orientations across eight inclusion preschool classrooms to quantify child‐teacher and child‐peer social preference. Social approach velocity and time in social contact were computed for each child and compared across social partners to index children's preference for teachers over peers. Children with ASD approached teachers–‐but not peers—more quickly than children with TD, and children with ASD were approached more quickly by teachers and more slowly by peers than children with TD. Children with ASD spent less time in social contact with peers and did not differ from children with TD in their time in social contact with teachers. Overall, children with ASD showed a greater preference for approaching, being approached by, and being in social contact with teachers (relative to peers) than children with TD. No significant differences emerged between children with DD and children with TD. In conclusion, children with ASD exhibited a stronger preference for engaging with teachers over peers, re‐emphasizing the need for classroom‐based interventions that support the peer interactions of children with ASD. 

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2. Children show limited movement repertoire when learning a novel motor skill

   Lee, Mei-Hua; Farshchiansadegh, Ali; Ranganathan, Rajiv (September 2017, Developmental science)

   Examining age differences in motor learning using real-world tasks is often problematic due to task novelty and biomechanical confounds. Here, we investigated how children and adults acquire a novel motor skill in a virtual environment. Participants of three different age groups (9-year-olds, 12-year-olds, and adults) learned to use their upper body movements to control a cursor on a computer screen. Results showed that 9-year-old and 12-year-old children showed poorer ability to control the cursor at the end of practice. Critically, when we investigated the movement coordination, we found that the lower task performance of children was associated with limited exploration of their movement repertoire. These results reveal the critical role of motor exploration in understanding developmental differences in motor learning. 

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3. A protracted developmental trajectory for English-learning children’s detection of consonant mispronunciations in newly learned words

   https://doi.org/10.1080/10489223.2022.2069026  

   Quam, Carolyn; Swingley, Daniel (September 2022, Language Acquisition)

   Children are adept at learning their language’s speech-sound categories, but just how these categories function in their developing lexicon has not been mapped out in detail. Here, we addressed whether, in a language-guided looking procedure, 2-year-olds would respond to a mispronunciation of the voicing of the initial consonant of a newly learned word. First, to provide a baseline of mature native-speaker performance, adults were taught a new word under training conditions of low prosodic variability. In a second experiment, 24- and 30-month-olds were taught a new word under training conditions of high or low prosodic variability. Children and adults showed evidence of learning the taught word. Adults’ target looking was reduced when the novel word was realized at test with a change in the voicing of the initial consonant, but children did not show any such decrement in target fixation. For both children and adults, most learners did not treat the pho- nologically distinct variant as a different word. Acoustic-phonetic variability during teaching did not have consistent effects. Thus, under conditions of intensive short-term training, 24- and 30-month-olds did not differentiate a newly learned word from a variant differing only in consonant voicing. High task complexity during training could explain why mispronunciation detec- tion was weaker here than in some prior studies. 

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4. Age-dependent differences in learning to control a robot arm using a body-machine interface

   https://doi.org/s41598  

   Ranganathan, R; Lee, M-H; Padmanabhan, M; Aspelund, S; Kagerer, F; Mukherjee, R (February 2019, Scientific reports)

   Body-machine interfaces, i.e. interfaces that rely on body movements to control external assistive devices, have been proposed as a safe and robust means of achieving movement and mobility; however, how children learn these novel interfaces is poorly understood. Here we characterized the learning of a body-machine interface in young unimpaired adults, two groups of typically developing children (9-year and 12-year olds), and one child with congenital limb deficiency. Participants had to control the end-effector of a robot arm in 2D using movements of the shoulder and torso. Results showed a striking effect of age - children had much greater difficulty in learning the task compared to adults, with a majority of the 9-year old group unable to even complete the task. The 12-year olds also showed poorer task performance compared to adults (as measured by longer movement times and greater path lengths), which were associated with less effective search strategies. The child with congenital limb deficiency showed superior task performance compared to age-matched children, but had qualitatively distinct coordination strategies from the adults. Taken together, these results imply that children have difficulty learning non-intuitive interfaces and that the design of body-machine interfaces should account for these differences in pediatric populations. 

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5. Children’s Acquisition of the Concept of Antonym Across Different Lexical Classes

   Ionescu, A.; Lu, H.; Holyoak, K. J.; Sandhofer, C. M. (January 2022, Proceedings of the 44th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society)

   Understanding abstract relations, and reasoning about various instantiations of the same relation, is an important marker in human cognition. Here we focus on development of understanding for the concept of antonymy. We examined whether four- and five-year-olds (N= 67) are able to complete an analogy task involving antonyms, whether language cues facilitate children’s ability to reason about the antonym relation, and how their performance compares with that of two vector-based computational models. We found that explicit relation labels in the form of a relation phrase (“opposites”) improved performance on the task for five-year-olds but not four-year-olds. Five-year-old (but not four-year-old) children were more accurate for adjective and verb antonyms than for noun antonyms. Two computational models showed substantial variability in performance across different lexical classes, and in some cases fell short of children’s accuracy levels. These results suggest that young children acquire a solid understanding of the abstract relation of opposites, and can generalize it to various instantiations across different lexical classes. These developmental results challenge relation models based on vector semantics, and highlight the importance of examining performance across different parts of speech. 

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