Two-year-olds at elevated risk for ASD can learn novel words from their parents.

Children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often have smaller vocabularies in infancy compared to typically-developing children. To understand whether their smaller vocabularies stem from problems in learning, our study compared a prospective risk sample of 18 elevated risk and 11 lower risk 24-month-olds on current vocabulary size and word learning ability using a paradigm in which parents teach their child words. Results revealed that both groups learned novel words, even though parents indicated that infants at elevated risk of ASD knew fewer words.

Beneficial effects of the mother's voice on infants' novel word learning.

The maternal voice appears to have a special role in infants' language processing. The current eye-tracking study investigated whether 24-month-olds (n = 149) learn novel words easier while listening to their mother's voice compared to hearing unfamiliar speakers. Our results show that maternal speech facilitates the formation of new word-object mappings across two different learning settings: a live setting in which infants are taught by their own mother or the experimenter, and a prerecorded setting in which infants hear the voice of either their own or another mother through loudspeakers.

Targeted misexpression of NAC052, acting in H3K4 demethylation, alters leaf morphological and anatomical traits in Arabidopsis thaliana.

In an effort to identify genetic regulators for the cell ontogeny around the veins in Arabidopsis thaliana leaves, an activation-tagged mutant line with altered leaf morphology and altered bundle sheath anatomy was characterized. This mutant had a small rosette area with wrinkled leaves and chlorotic leaf edges, as well as enhanced chloroplast numbers in the (pre-)bundle sheath tissue. It had a bundle-specific promoter from the gene GLYCINE DECARBOXYLASE SUBUNIT-T from the C4 species Flaveria trinervia (GLDTFt promoter) inserted in the coding region of the transcriptional repressor NAC052, functioning in H3K4 demethylation, in front of an alternative start codon in-frame with the natural start codon.

Photosynthetic response to increased irradiance correlates to variation in transcriptional response of lipid-remodeling and heat-shock genes.

Plants have evolved several mechanisms for sensing increased irradiance, involving signal perception by photoreceptors (cryptochromes), and subsequent biochemical (reactive oxygen species, ROS) and metabolic clues to transmit the signals. This results in the increased expression of heat-shock response genes and of the transcription factor LONG HYPOCOTYL 5 (HY5, mediated by the cryptochrome photoreceptor 1, CRY1). Here, we show the existence of another response pathway in Arabidopsis.

Brain Responses to Faces and Facial Expressions in 5-Month-Olds: An fNIRS Study.

Processing faces and understanding facial expressions are crucial skills for social communication. In adults, basic face processing and facial emotion processing rely on specific interacting brain networks. In infancy, however, little is known about when and how these networks develop.