Shared book reading, and the conversation that accompanies it, can facilitate young children's vocabulary growth. To identify the features of extratextual questions that help 3-year-olds learn unfamiliar words during shared book reading, two experiments explored the impact of cognitive demand level, placement, and an approximation to scaffolding. Asking questions about target words improved children's comprehension and production of word-referent associations, and children with larger vocabularies learned more than children with smaller vocabularies. Neither the demand level nor placement of questions differentially affected word learning. However, an approximation to scaffolding, in which adults asked low demand questions when words first appeared and high demand questions later, did facilitate children's deeper understanding of word meanings as assessed with a definition task. These results are unique in experimentally demonstrating the value for word learning of shifting from less to more challenging input over time. Discussion focuses on why a scaffolding-like procedure improves children's acquisition of elaborated word meanings.

Emotion recognition was investigated in typically developing individuals and individuals with autism. Experiment 1 tested children (5 to 7 years, n = 37) with brief video displays of facial expressions that varied in subtlety. Children with autism performed worse than the control children. In Experiment 2, three age groups (8 to 12 years, n = 49; 13 to 17 years, n = 49; and adults n = 45) were tested on the same stimuli. Whereas the performance of control individuals was best in the adult group, the performance of individuals with autism was similar in all age groups. Results are discussed with respect to underlying cognitive processes that may be affecting the development of emotion recognition in individuals with autism.

Background Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is characterized by social impairments that have been related to deficits in social attention, including diminished gaze to faces. Eye-tracking studies are commonly used to examine social attention and social motivation in ASD, but they vary in sensitivity. In this study, we hypothesized that the ecological nature of the social stimuli would affect participants' social attention, with gaze behavior during more naturalistic scenes being most predictive of ASD vs. typical development. Methods 81 children with and without ASD participated in three eye-tracking tasks that differed in the ecological relevance of the social stimuli. In the “Static Visual Exploration” task, static images of objects and people were presented; in the “Dynamic Visual Exploration” task, video clips of individual faces and objects were presented side-by-side; in the “Interactive Visual Exploration” task, video clips of children playing with objects in a naturalistic context were presented. Results Our analyses uncovered a three-way interaction between Task, Social vs. Object Stimuli, and Diagnosis. This interaction was driven by group differences on one task only – the Interactive task. Bayesian analyses confirmed that the other two tasks were insensitive to group membership. In addition, ROC analyses demonstrated that, unlike the other two tasks, the Interactive task had significant classification power. Conclusions The ecological relevance of social stimuli is an important factor to consider for eye-tracking studies aiming to measure social attention and motivation in ASD.

Recent studies suggest that longstanding findings of abnormal amygdala morphology in ASD may be related to symptoms of anxiety. To test this hypothesis, fifty-three children with ASD (mean age = 11.9) underwent structural MRI and were divided into subgroups to compare those with at least one anxiety disorder diagnosis (n = 29) to those without (n = 24) and to a typically developing control group (TDC; n = 37). Groups were matched on age and intellectual level. The ASD and anxiety group showed decreased right amygdala volume (controlled for total brain volume) relative to ASD without anxiety (p = .04) and TDCs (p = .068). Results suggest that youth with ASD and co-occurring anxiety have a distinct neurodevelopmental trajectory.

Prototype formation is a critical skill for category learning. Research suggests that individuals with autism may have a deficit in prototype formation of some objects; however, results are mixed. The current study used a natural category, faces, to further examine prototype formation in high-functioning individuals with autism. High-functioning children (age 8–13 years) and adults with autism (age 17–53 years) and matched controls were tested in a facial prototype formation task that has been used to test prototype formation abilities in typically developing infants and adults (Strauss, 1979). Participants were familiarized to a series of faces depicting subtle variations in the spatial distance of facial features, and were then given a forced choice familiarity test between the mean prototype and the mode prototype. Overall, individuals in the autism group were significantly less likely to select the mean prototype face. Even though the children with autism showed this difference in prototype formation, this pattern was driven primarily by the adults, because the adults with autism were approximately 4 times less likely to select the mean prototype than were the control adults. These results provide further evidence that individuals with autism have difficulty abstracting subtle spatial information that is necessary not only for the formation of a mean prototype, but also for categorizing faces and objects.