Evidence for syntactic alignment in children with autism.

We report an experiment that examined whether children with Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD) spontaneously converge, or align, syntactic structure with a conversational partner. Children with ASD were more likely to produce a passive structure to describe a picture after hearing their interlocutor use a passive structure to describe an unrelated picture when playing a card game. Furthermore, they converged syntactic structure with their interlocutor to the same extent as did both chronological and verbal age-matched controls.

Is a FAN always FUN? Phonological and orthographic effects in bilingual visual word recognition.

A visual semantic categorization task in English was performed by native English speakers (Experiment 1) and late bilinguals whose first language was Japanese (Experiment 2) or Spanish (Experiment 3). In the critical conditions, the target word was a homophone of a correct category exemplar (e.g.

The KEY to the ROCK: near-homophony in nonnative visual word recognition.

To test the hypothesis that native language (L1) phonology can affect the lexical representations of nonnative words, a visual semantic-relatedness decision task in English was given to native speakers and nonnative speakers whose L1 was Japanese or Arabic. In the critical conditions, the word pair contained a homophone or near-homophone of a semantically associated word, where a near-homophone was defined as a phonological neighbor involving a contrast absent in the speaker's L1 (e.g.

Tasty non-words and neighbours: the cognitive roots of lexical-gustatory synaesthesia.

For lexical-gustatory synaesthetes, words trigger automatic, associated food sensations (e.g., for JB, the word slope tastes of over-ripe melon).

Do speakers avoid ambiguities during dialogue?

What affects speakers' production of ambiguous utterances in dialogue? They might consider ease of production for themselves, or ease of comprehension for their addressees. Previous research has demonstrated that ease of production plays a role in speakers' syntactic choices, but that ease of comprehension does not. However, such studies have not employed dialogues that involve role swapping on a turn-by-turn basis.

Benign intracranial hypertension in children following renal transplantation.

Benign intracranial hypertension (BIH) is a condition characterized by headache, papilledema, and a raised cerebrospinal fluid pressure with normal cranial imaging. It is uncommon in childhood. Previously, there have been reports that children with chronic impairment of renal function may be at greater risk of developing BIH.