Verbal bias in recognition of facial emotions in children with Asperger syndrome.

Thirteen children and adolescents with diagnoses of Asperger syndrome (AS) were matched with 13 nonautistic control children on chronological age and verbal IQ. They were tested on their ability to recognize simple facial emotions, as well as facial emotions paired with matching, mismatching, or irrelevant verbal labels. There were no differences between the groups at recognizing simple emotions but the Asperger group performed significantly worse than the control group at recognizing emotions when faces were paired with mismatching words (but not with matching or irrelevant words). The results suggest that there are qualitative differences from nonclinical populations in how children with AS process facial expressions. When presented with a more demanding affective processing task, individuals with AS showed a bias towards visual-verbal over visual-affective information (i.e., words over faces). Thus, children with AS may be utilizing compensatory strategies, such as verbal mediation, to process facial expressions of emotion.

Agents of change: pathways through which mentoring relationships influence adolescents' academic adjustment.

A conceptual model was tested in which the effects of mentoring relationships on adolescents' academic outcomes were hypothesized to be mediated partially through improvements in parental relationships. The parameters of the model were compared with those of an alternative, in which improved parental relationships were treated as an outcome variable rather than a mediator. The study included 959 young adolescents (M age = 12.25 years), all of whom applied to Big Brothers Big Sisters programs. The adolescents were randomly assigned to either the treatment or control group and administered questions at baseline and 18 months later. The hypothesized model provided a significantly better explanation of the data than the alternative. In addition to improvements in parental relationships, mentoring led to reductions in unexcused absences and improvements in perceived scholastic competence. Direct effects of mentoring on global self-worth, school value, and grades were not detected but were instead mediated through improved parental relationships and scholastic competence. Implications of the findings for theory and research are discussed.

Pragmatic directions and children's word learning.

The present study tested the hypothesis that children as young as two use what adults tell them about meaning relations when they make inferences about new words. 18 two-year-olds (mean age 2;2) and 18 three-year-olds (mean age 3;2) learned two new terms (a) with instructions either (i) to treat one term as a superordinate to the other, or (ii) to replace one term with another; and (b) with no instruction given about how two new words might be related. Children were attentive to both kinds of instructions or pragmatic directions, and made use of them in their word-learning. When they received no instruction relating the two new words, they resorted to a range of coping strategies to assign and relate meanings to each other. These findings support the view that children's learning of new word meanings is guided by the pragmatic directions adults offer.

The development of children's knowledge about inner speech.

Two studies demonstrated that preschool children have little knowledge and awareness of inner speech. Study 1 showed that, in contrast to 6- to 7-year-olds and adults, 4-year-olds usually did not infer that a person silently engaged in such intrinsically verbal mental activities as reading, counting, or recalling items from a shopping list was saying things to herself. They also tended to deny that covert speech is a possible human activity. Study 2 demonstrated that 4- and 5-year-olds are much poorer than adults at detecting their own inner speech. Children seem to acquire this sort of knowledge and awareness during the early school years, perhaps through experiencing their own inner speech while reading, writing, adding, and subtracting.