The Benefits of Participating in a Learning Assistant Program on the Metacognitive Awareness and Motivation of Learning Assistants.

Learning assistant (LA) programs train undergraduate students to foster peer discussion and facilitate active-learning activities in undergraduate science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) classes. Students who take courses that are supported by LAs demonstrate better conceptual understanding, lower failure rates, and higher satisfaction with the course. There is less work, however, on the impact that participating in LA programs has on the LAs themselves.

Convergence to shortened and lengthened voice onset time in an imitation task.

Convergence to variation in voice onset time (VOT) of English voiceless stops is reported to be selective, with speakers adjusting their VOTs after exposure to stimuli with lengthened, but not shortened, VOT. The current study re-examined this proposed selectivity with an explicit imitation paradigm designed to maximize convergence, using stimuli with more extreme differences, and explored the perceptual salience of the differences in a discrimination task. Participants showed phonetic convergence to both shortened and lengthened VOT, and better discrimination of shortened than lengthened VOT.

How sociolinguistic factors shape children's subjective impressions of teacher quality.

When university students are asked to rate their instructors, their evaluations are often influenced by the demographic characteristics of the instructor-such as the instructor's race, gender, or language background. These influences can manifest in unfair systematic biases against particular groups of teachers and hamper movements to promote diversity in higher education. When and how do these biases develop? Here, we begin to address these questions by examining children's sociolinguistic biases against teachers who speak with different accents.

Comparing Phonetic Convergence in Children and Adults.

Observations by sociolinguists suggest that when children relocate to a new community, they rapidly learn to imitate their peers, adopting the new local accent faster and more effectively than adults. However, few well-controlled laboratory experiments have been conducted comparing speech or accent imitation across ages. Here, we investigated Canadian English-speaking children's and adults' imitation of three model speakers: a Canadian English talker, an Australian English talker, and a non-native Mandarin English talker who learned English later in life.

The independent contribution of voice onset time to perceptual metrics of convergence.

This work explores the relationship between phonetic and perceptual metrics for convergence in shadowed productions by adults and 6-year-old children by isolating the role of voice onset time (VOT) in listeners' similarity judgments. Results show a small but independent role for VOT: listeners were less likely to identify shadowed tokens as more similar to the model when natural VOT convergence present in the stimulus set had been artificially removed (experiments 1 and 2). However, VOT equivalence alone, when accompanied by naturally occurring variation along other dimensions, was not sufficient to drive listeners' judgments of similarity (experiment 3).

Targeted adaptation in infants following live exposure to an accented talker.

Infants struggle to understand familiar words spoken in unfamiliar accents. Here, we examine whether accent exposure facilitates accent-specific adaptation. Two types of pre-exposure were examined: video-based (i.

Resolving the (Apparent) Talker Recognition Paradox in Developmental Speech Perception.

The infant literature suggests that humans enter the world with impressive built-in talker processing abilities. For example, newborns prefer the sound of their mother's voice over the sound of another woman's voice, and well before their first birthday, infants tune in to language-specific speech cues for distinguishing between unfamiliar talkers. The early childhood literature, however, suggests that preschoolers are unable to learn to identify the voices of two unfamiliar talkers unless these voices are highly distinct from one another, and that adult-level talker recognition does not emerge until children near adolescence.

The effect of accent exposure on children's sociolinguistic evaluation of peers.

Language and accent strongly influence the formation of social groups. By five years of age, children already show strong social preferences for peers who speak their native language with a familiar accent (Kinzler, Shutts, DeJesus, & Spelke, 2009). However, little is known about the factors that modulate the strength and direction of children's accent-based group preferences.

Predictors of emergency department use by adolescents and adults with autism spectrum disorder: a prospective cohort study.

Objectives: To determine predictors of emergency department (ED) visits in a cohort of adolescents and adults with autism spectrum disorder (ASD).

Design: Prospective cohort study.

Setting: Community-based study from Ontario, Canada.

Two-year-olds' sensitivity to subphonemic mismatch during online spoken word recognition.

Sensitivity to noncontrastive subphonemic detail plays an important role in adult speech processing, but little is known about children's use of this information during online word recognition. In two eye-tracking experiments, we investigate 2-year-olds' sensitivity to a specific type of subphonemic detail: coarticulatory mismatch. In Experiment 1, toddlers viewed images of familiar objects (e.

Perceived self-efficacy in parents of adolescents and adults with autism spectrum disorder.

Many parents of adolescents and adults with autism spectrum disorder experience difficulty accessing appropriate services for their children, and may report low levels of parent self-efficacy. In an effort to identify the factors that contribute to the difficulties these families face, this study examined the role of demographic, systemic, and clinical need variables as they relate to parents' experience of self-efficacy. Participants included 324 parents of individuals with autism spectrum disorder, 12-25 years of age.

Predictors of emergency service use in adolescents and adults with autism spectrum disorder living with family.

Introduction: The use of emergency services among adolescents and adults with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) transitioning into adult health services has not been well described.

Objectives: To describe emergency service use including emergency departments (EDs), paramedics, and police involvement among adolescents and adults with ASD and to examine predictors of using emergency services.

Methods: Caregivers of 396 adolescents and adults with ASD were recruited through autism advocacy agencies and support programmes in Ontario to complete a survey about their child's health service use.