Effects of incidental reminders on prospective memory in children.

Prospective memory (PM) involves remembering to carry out intended actions in the future (e.g., posting a letter on the way to school or passing on a message) and is important for children's independent functioning in daily life.

Event-based prospective memory in mildly and severely autistic children.

Background: There is a growing body of research into the development of prospective memory (PM) in typically developing children but research is limited in autistic children (Aut) and rarely includes children with more severe symptoms.

Aims: This study is the first to specifically compare event-based PM in severely autistic children to mildly autistic and typically developing children.

Methods And Procedures: Fourteen mildly autistic children and 14 severely autistic children, aged 5-13 years, were matched for educational attainment with 26 typically developing children aged 5-6 years.

Pragmatic language development in language impaired and typically developing children: incorrect answers in context.

This study focussed on young children's incorrect answers to pragmatically demanding questions. Children with specific language impairment (SLI), including a subgroup with pragmatic language difficulties (PLD) and typically developing children answered questions targeting implicatures, based on a storybook and short verbal scenarios. Ninety-seven children participated in this study: 30 children with SLI of whom 12 had PLD, 32 typically developing children aged 5-6 years and 35 aged 7-11 years.

How children with normal hearing and children with a cochlear implant use mentalizing vocabulary and other evaluative expressions in their narratives.

This study explored the use of mental state and emotion terms and other evaluative expressions in the story generation of 65 children (aged 2-8 years) with normal hearing (NH) and 11 children (aged 3-7 years) using a cochlear implant (CI). Children generated stories on the basis of sets of sequential pictures. The stories of the children with CI were obtained over the 5-year follow-up period.

Cognitive approach to assessing pragmatic language comprehension in children with specific language impairment.

Background: Pragmatic language impairment in children with specific language impairment has proved difficult to assess, and the nature of their abilities to comprehend pragmatic meaning has not been fully investigated.

Aims: To develop both a cognitive approach to pragmatic language assessment based on Relevance Theory and an assessment tool for identifying a group of children with pragmatic language impairment from within an specific language impairment group.

Methods & Procedures: The authors focused on Relevance Theory's view of the role of context in pragmatic language comprehension using questions of increasing pragmatic complexity in different verbal contexts (scenarios with and without pictures and a story with supporting pictures).

Answering questions and explaining answers: a study of Finnish-speaking children.

This research explores, within the framework of Relevance Theory, how children's ability to answer questions and explain their answers develops between the ages of 3 and 9 years. Two hundred and ten normally developing Finnish-speaking children participated in this study. The children were asked questions requiring processing of inferential meanings and routines, and were asked to explain their correct answers to elicit understanding about their awareness of how they had derived the answers from the context.

Answering contextually demanding questions: pragmatic errors produced by children with Asperger syndrome or high-functioning autism.

Unlabelled: This study examined irrelevant/incorrect answers produced by children with Asperger syndrome or high-functioning autism (7-9-year-olds and 10-12-year-olds) and normally developing children (7-9-year-olds). The errors produced were divided into three types: in Type 1, the child answered the original question incorrectly, in Type 2, the child gave a correct answer, but when asked a follow-up question, he/she explained the answer incorrectly, and in Type 3, the child first gave a correct answer or explanation, but continued answering, which ultimately led to an irrelevant answer. Analyses of Type 1 and 2 errors indicated that all the children tried to utilize contextual information, albeit incorrectly.

Use of context in pragmatic language comprehension by children with Asperger syndrome or high-functioning autism.

Utilizing relevance theory, this study investigated the ability of children with Asperger syndrome (AS) and high-functioning autism (HFA) to use context when answering questions and when giving explanations for their correct answers. Three groups participated in this study: younger AS/HFA group (age 7-9, n=16), older AS/HFA group (age 10-12, n=23) and a normally functioning control group (age 7-9, n=23). The results indicated that the younger AS/HFA group did less well when answering contextually demanding questions compared to the control group, and the performance of the older AS/HFA group fell in between the younger AS/HFA group and the control group.

Use of context in question answering by 3-, 4- and 5-year-old children.

This study investigates, within the theory of relevance of Sperber & Wilson (1995), how3-, 4-, and 5-year-old children (n = 45) use context when answering questions. The children were required to answer questions that placed differing contextual and processing demands on them, as predicted by the theory. The results indicate that an increasing ability to use complex contextual information was related to age and was reflected in the children's ability to answer questions appropriately.