Search

The development of copying behaviours of a group of infants from 9 to 15 months of age is analysed. These behaviours are classified according to their type (mimetic or imitated) and function (instrumental, social or hybrid). The function of the behaviours is derived from observable indicators linked to dyadic interaction. Mimetic behaviours are maintained from 9 to 15 months, while imitative behaviours increase in frequency. The elicited copying situation promotes more behaviours with instrumental function, while other functions appear spontaneously. The concurrent and prospective relationships between copying behaviours -- frequency, type and function- and receptive and expressive language are different through development. This study proposes an innovative definition of the functions of copying behaviours that is based on dynamic variables linked to interaction, in contrast to previous work that derives function from static variables such as context, object use and/or the body part performing the movement.

In spite of the relevant role of prosody in communication, and in contrast with other linguistic components, there is paucity of research in this field for Williams syndrome (WS). Therefore, this study performed a systematic assessment of prosodic abilities in WS. The Spanish version of the Profiling Elements of Prosody in Speech-Communication battery was administered to 27 Spanish-speaking adolescents and adults with WS and a control group of 54 typically developing participants matched for chronological age (CA). Participants with WS presented prosodic deficits, relative to their CA, to comprehend and express prosodic cues both on a function and a form level. These difficulties were mainly due to their cognitive impairments. In addition, the areas of understanding and expressing the prosodic function of segmentation and the expression of the nonfinal contrastive focus were found to be particularly impaired in WS. (Contains 3 tables and 1 figure.)

Background The COVID-19 pandemic had a major impact on the mental health and well-being of children with neurodevelopmental conditions (NDCs) and of their families worldwide. However, there is insufficient evidence to understand how different factors (e.g., individual, family, country, children) have impacted on anxiety levels of families and their children with NDCs developed over time. Methods We used data from a global survey assessing the experience of 8043 families and their children with NDCs (mean of age (m)=13.18 years, 37% female) and their typically developing siblings (m=12.9 years, 45% female) in combination with data from the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, the University of Oxford, and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) World Factbook, to create a multilevel data set. Using stepwise multilevel modelling, we generated child-, family- and country-related factors that may have contributed to the anxiety levels of children with NDCs, their siblings if they had any, and their parents. All data were reported by parents. Results Our results suggest that parental anxiety was best explained by family-related factors such as concerns about COVID-19 and illness. Children's anxiety was best explained by child-related factors such as children's concerns about loss of routine, family conflict, and safety in general, as well as concerns about COVID-19. In addition, anxiety levels were linked to the presence of pre-existing anxiety conditions for both children with NDCs and their parents. Conclusions The present study shows that across the globe there was a raise in anxiety levels for both parents and their children with NDCs because of COVID-19 and that country-level factors had little or no impact on explaining differences in this increase, once family and child factors were considered. Our findings also highlight that certain groups of children with NDCs were at higher risk for anxiety than others and had specific concerns. Together, these results show that anxiety of families and their children with NDCs during the COVID-19 pandemic were predicted by very specific concerns and worries which inform the development of future toolkits and policy. Future studies should investigate how country factors can play a protective role during future crises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista Caatinga is the property of Revista Caatinga and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Rivière proposed a taxonomy of psychological functions organized around a set of dimensions that qualify human development. Type 3 functions involve the inculturation of aspects defined in biology. Its alteration comprises the core of the cognitive phenotype in autism, and understanding its genesis allows for conceptualizing autism as the product of a process of adaptation to the physical and social environment, based on atypical restrictions both in processing social stimuli and in participating in meaningful interactions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Individuals with Williams syndrome (WS) present prosodic impairments. They are also interested in musical activities. In typical development, a body of research has shown that the linguistic prosodic skills of musically trained individuals are enhanced. However, it is not known whether, in WS, musical training is also associated with enhanced prosodic performance, a question this study sought to answer. We compared the performance on linguistic prosodic tasks among seven musically trained and fourteen musically untrained individuals with WS, and typically developing peers. Among those with WS, musically trained participants outperformed their musically untrained counterparts on the perception of acoustic parameters involved in prosody, the understanding of questioning and declarative intonation, and the comprehension of prefinal contrastive stress. The results suggest that musical training facilitates prosodic performance in WS. Our findings also suggest common processing mechanisms for acoustic parameters involved in both prosody and music, and that positive music-to-language transfer effects could take place in WS. We discuss the implications of these results for intervention purposes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Annette Karmiloff-Smith's perspective places development at the very core of of the explanation of psychological functioning. Her neuroconstructivist model involves several fundamental assumptions, as follows: (a) functional specificity is acquired through interactive experience with the environment through a process of progressive specialization; (b) the influence of each level of explanation in human development (i.e., genetic, cellular, neural, cognitive, behavioural and environmental) inter-depends on the others; (c) there is no one-to-one correspondence between the level of observable behaviours and the level of cognitive processes and mental representations; and (d) interaction with caregivers is the privileged development context. There is an urgency to translate these assumptions into practices that enable the optimization of developmental contexts; this paper addresses this urgency by suggesting the implications of this neuroconstructivist model for the assessment and design of support for children at risk of atypical development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From our deep interest in the neuroconstructivist framework, we would like to comment on two fundamental aspects of Mareschal et al.'s work: the role of neuroconstructivism for clinical work with people suffering from developmental disorders; and the relation between the process of progressive specialization and the increasing abstraction of representations in development.

Anecdotal reports have described children with Williams syndrome (WS) as presenting outstanding skills for recognizing environmental sounds by their timbre. This has led to suggest that the skills for environmental sound recognition by timbre are highly developed in WS. Furthermore, the term hypertimbria has been proposed to refer to this feature. However, no academic research has assessed these skills in WS. This study therefore aimed to contrast the reports on the highly developed skills for environmental sound recognition by timbre in children with WS. An environmental sound recognition task was administered to children with WS, children with Down syndrome of the same chronological age and cognitive level, and chronological age-matched typically developing children. Participants with WS performed significantly lower than their typically developing peers and no significant differences were found between the WS and Down syndrome groups. Unlike previous reports, this study points out that in WS environmental sound recognition by timbre does not constitute a phenotypic strength either in absolute or relative terms. Results suggest that children with WS do not present hypertimbria or preserved skills for timbre recognition. We discuss the implications of these results for theories of cognitive modularity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this commentary, we raise two issues. First we argue that in any species, the comparative study of metacognitive abilities must he approached from a developmental perspective and not solely from the adult end state. This makes it possible to explore the trajectories by which different species reach their phenotypic outcome and whether different cognitive systems interact over developmental time. Second, using our research comparing different genetic disorders in humans, we challenge the authors' claim that it is unparsimonious to interpret the same performance in humans and animals in qualitatively different ways, because even the same overt behaviour in different groups of humans can be sustained by different underlying cognitive processes.

In this article we critique the use of traditional standardized tests for the cognitive assessment of children with neurodevelopmental disorders. Limitations stem from the lack of integrating (a) results from research into the psychological functioning of these populations, and (b) the main arguments underlying models of human development. We identify four secondary issues in this discussion: (1) these instruments cannot be used with children who have particularly low cognitive functioning; (2) little or no variance in the scores obtained by individuals with neurodevelopmental disorders, because all are at floor, prevent adequate interpretations; (3) measurements do not provide information useful for the design of intervention strategies; and (4) different cognitive and/or neural processes may underlie behavioural scores 'in the normal range'. Rethinking traditional assessment methods in favour of technologicallymediated games yields new cognitive assessment possibilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The infancy literature situates the perceptual narrowing of speech sounds at around 10 months of age, but little is known about the mechanisms that influence individual differences in this developmental milestone. We hypothesized that such differences might in part be explained by characteristics of mother-child interaction. Infant sensitivity to syllables from their native tongue was compared longitudinally to sensitivity to non-native phonemes, at 6 months and again at 10 months. We replicated previous findings that at the group level, both 6- and 10- month-olds were able to discriminate contrasts in their native language, but only 6-month-olds succeeded in discriminating contrasts in the non-native language. However, when discrimination was assessed for separate groups on the basis of mother-child interaction--a 'high contingency group' and a 'moderate contingency' group--the vast majority of infants in both groups showed the expected developmental pattern by 10 months, but only infants in the 'high contingency' group showed early specialization for their native phonemes by failing to discriminate non-native contrasts at 6-months. The findings suggest that the quality of mother-child interaction is one of the exogenous factors influencing the timing of infant specialization for speech processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although absolute pitch (AP) is a rare skill in typical development, individuals with Williams syndrome (WS) are often referred to as possessing this musical ability. However, there is paucity of research on the topic. In this article, 2 studies were conducted to evaluate AP in WS. In Study 1, seven musically trained individuals with WS, 14 musically trained typically developing controls matched for chronological age, and 2 experienced musicians with AP completed a pitch-identification task. Although the task was a classical assessment of AP, it required participants to have musical knowledge, and the availability and accessibility of musically trained individuals with WS is very low. In Study 2, a paradigm suitable for evaluating AP in individuals without musical training was used, which made it possible to evaluate a larger group of participants with WS. A pitch memory test for isolated tones was presented to 27 individuals with WS, 54 typically developing peers matched for chronological age, and the 2 musicians with AP. Both individuals with WS and their controls obtained low results in the two studies. They showed an arbitrary pattern of response, and their performance was far from that of musicians with AP. Therefore, participants with WS did not appear to possess AP. Unlike what is usually claimed, results suggest that AP is not a remarkable ability in WS and that, as in the typically developing population, this musical ability is also rare in individuals with WS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Neuroconstructivism can provide Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) with a developmental framework to understand mental disorders. Neuroconstructivism proposes that mental disorders are the outcome of a developmental trajectory. Based on this assumption, symptoms would reveal the system's adaptation to optimize functioning according to the system's experience of the physical and social contexts. RDoC adopts a translational research approach with the aim of detecting, curing, and preventing mental illness. More specifically this involves to: (a) identify early signs of mental disorders, (b) find the optimal patient‐treatment fit, and (c) design efficient interventions to prevent the system's eventual pathological functioning. We propose that meeting RDoC's threefold objective necessarily involves predicting the system's developmental trajectory. Such endeavor requires counting with assessment tools that are sensitive to both the process of development and its different contexts; the measures provided by these tools will allow identifying the risk and protective factors that make the system vulnerable to depart from a typical developmental trajectory. Including vectors relative to time and contexts in a relevant part of the matrix will make of RDoC a truly integrative model, which considers the relationships between behavior and neural circuits throughout the developmental pathway. This article is categorized under: Psychology > Brain Function and DysfunctionNeuroscience > Clinical NeuroscienceNeuroscience > Development RDoC meets neuroconstructivism: Development as the axis to organizing a new conceptualization of mental disorders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces a series of 12 papers written in memory of Professor Ángel Rivière Gómez on the twentieth anniversary of his death. These papers analyse monographically this author's theoretical agenda on autism by reviewing the lines of research that he developed and by critically comparing his contributions with more recent knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'In your opinion, what are some important research questions, problems or challenges that scholars in your field of specialization should address in the coming years? What types of studies should be conducted to move your field further? Please justify'. This prompt was posed by the incoming Editor of JSED to the new team of Deputy and Associate Editors in the journal's three thematic areas (human development, learning and education), who were invited to co-author this Editorial. We briefly describe the history of JSED, present the composition of its new Editorial Board, highlight modifications recently introduced in our aims and scope and inform readers about our vision, goals and strategies for the upcoming years. The next section presents the Editors' individual responses to the above-mentioned prompt, in the spirit of sharing perspectives with our scientific community. Finally, we identify common topics that emerged within the three thematic areas and encourage authors to send us high-quality manuscripts that fill the identified research gaps. JSED aims to foster a paradigm of 'glocalization' in development, learning and education research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Keven & Akins (K&A) redefine some of the neonatal imitation (NI) behaviors as developmental stereotypes. From a neuroconstructivist framework, those early gestures are also far from being considered as imitative behaviors. The cognitive substrate of imitation requires an interactive context to develop. Prior to intentional imitation, the dyad shows mimicry behaviors, which are automatic, but do not fade through development.

Between February and June 2010, 113 fiddler crabs Uca spinicarpa were collected from the Chuburna lagoon system on the northern coast of the Yucatan Peninsula, México. Of the 68 crabs gathered outside their burrows, 13 were infected with 25 cystacanths of Hexaglandula corynosoma (intensity of infection from 1 to 5) and the remaining 55 crabs were uninfected. The other 45 crabs were found inside their burrows and only one was found infected with 1 cystacanth of H. corynosoma. Serotonin (5-HT) levels were higher in the group of crabs infected with H. corynosoma in contrast to the group of uninfected crabs and the group of those infected with other parasites. A redundancy analysis corroborated a positive relationship between 5-HT and the intensity of infection with H. corynosoma. In contrast, dopamine levels remained similar among different groups of crabs.