Autistic discussion forums: insights into the topics that clinicians don't know about.

Background: User-led autism discussion forums provide a wealth of information about autistic lived experiences, albeit oriented toward those who regularly use computers. We contend that healthcare professionals should read autism discussion forums to gain insight, be informed, and in some cases, to correct assumptions about autistic persons' lives and possibilities. But experts may be dismissive of user-led forums, believing forums to be filled with myths, misinformation, and combative postings.

Expanding the emergentist Account:Reply to open peer commentaries.

Emergentism provides a framework for understanding how language learning processes vary across developmental age and linguistic levels, as shaped by core mechanisms and constraints from cognition, entrenchment, input, transfer, social support, motivation, and neurology. As our commentators all agree, this landscape is marked by intense variability arising from the complexity. These mechanisms interact in collaborative and competitive ways during actual moments of language use.

Age effects in second language acquisition: Expanding the emergentist account.

In 2005, Science magazine designated the problem of accounting for difficulties in L2 (second language) learning as one of the 125 outstanding challenges facing scientific research. A maturationally-based sensitive period has long been the favorite explanation for why ultimate foreign language attainment declines with age-of-acquisition. However, no genetic or neurobiological mechanisms for limiting language learning have yet been identified.

American Sign Language Syntax and Analogical Reasoning Skills Are Influenced by Early Acquisition and Age of Entry to Signing Schools for the Deaf.

Failing to acquire language in early childhood because of language deprivation is a rare and exceptional event, except in one population. Deaf children who grow up without access to indirect language through listening, speech-reading, or sign language experience language deprivation. Studies of Deaf adults have revealed that late acquisition of sign language is associated with lasting deficits.

Acquiring English as a second language via print: the task for deaf children.

Only a minority of profoundly deaf children read at age-level. We contend this reflects cognitive and linguistic impediments from lack of exposure to a natural language in early childhood, as well as the inherent difficulty of learning English only through the written modality. Yet some deaf children do acquire English via print.

Understanding differences in neurotypical and autism spectrum special interests through Internet forums.

Special interests are frequently developed by individuals with autism spectrum disorder, expressed as an intense focus on specific topics. Neurotypical individuals also develop special interests, often in the form of hobbies. Although past research has focused on special interests held by children with autism spectrum disorder, little is known about their role in adulthood.

Superior encoding enhances recall in color-graphemic synesthesia.

Synesthesia is a phenomenon in which particular stimuli, such as letters or sound, generate a secondary sensory experience in particular individuals. Reports of enhanced memory in synesthetes raise the question of its cognitive and neurological substrates. Enhanced memory in synesthetes could arise from the explicit or implicit use of a synesthetic cue to aid memory, from changes unique to the synesthete brain, or from both, depending on the task.

Obsessive-compulsive personality traits: compensatory response to executive function deficit?

Obsessive-compulsive personality traits (OCPTs) may be associated with cognitive disorganization (i.e., executive control deficits).

Fast pairs: a visual word recognition paradigm for measuring entrenchment, top-down effects, and subjective phenomenology.

When word pairs having a familiar order are sequentially flashed on a computer in their non-familiar order, (code zip), observers have a strong phenomenology of seeing them in familiar order (zip code). Reversal errors remained frequent even when participants obtained perceptual experience of reverse-display items by beginning with a block of longer-duration trials. A forced-choice order-detection procedure reduced but did not eliminate reversal errors, showing that "fast pairs" is a robust perceptual illusion.

Emotion and lying in a non-native language.

Bilingual speakers frequently report experiencing greater emotional resonance in their first language compared to their second. In Experiment 1, Turkish university students who had learned English as a foreign language had reduced skin conductance responses (SCRs) when listening to emotional phrases in English compared to Turkish, an effect which was most pronounced for childhood reprimands. A second type of emotional language, reading out loud true and false statements, was studied in Experiment 2.

Repetition blindness: an emergent property of inter-item competition.

Repeating an item in a brief or rapid display usually produces faster or more accurate identification of the item (repetition priming), but sometimes produces the opposite effect (repetition blindness). We present a theory of short-term repetition effects, the competition hypothesis, which explains these paradoxical outcomes. The central tenet of the theory is that repetition produces a representation with a higher signal-to-noise ratio but also produces a disadvantage in the representation's ability to compete with other items for access to awareness.

Semantic interference and associative facilitation from words presented in rapid serial visual presentation.

Semantic interference in picture naming is readily obtained when categorically related distractor words are displayed with picture targets; however, this is not typically the case when both primes and targets are words. Researchers have argued that to obtain semantic interference for word primes and targets, the prime must be shown for a sufficient duration, prime processing must be made difficult, and participants must attend to the primes. In this article, we used a novel procedure for prime presentation to investigate semantic interference in word naming.

When personality and culture clash: the psychological distress of allocentrics in an individualist culture and idiocentrics in a collectivist culture.

Because humans need both autonomy and interdependence, persons with either an extreme collectivist orientation (allocentrics) or extreme individualist values (idiocentrics) may be at risk for possession of some features of psychopathology. Is an extreme personality style a risk factor primarily when it conflicts with the values of the surrounding society? Individualism-collectivism scenarios and a battery of clinical and personality scales were administered to nonclinical samples of college students in Boston and Istanbul. For students residing in a highly individualistic society (Boston), collectivism scores were positively correlated with depression, social anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder and dependent personality.