Volume 17 (2013): Edizione 3 (December 2013)

Previous studies have shown that music can have a positive impact on phonological awareness and on foreign language acquisition. The present research investigates specifically the role of pitch discrimination ability in native and foreign language spelling performance. Two groups of elementary school children were selected based on their pitch discrimination abilities (high and low). Their spelling performance in their native and a foreign (fictional) language was assessed. The results indicate that pitch discrimination ability can be linked to spelling ability in both the native and a foreign language. They also suggest that studying a musical instrument might predict enhanced spelling performance ability

This paper presents results from five studies that investigate how people perceive the distinction between facts and beliefs. The central question being asked is whether the features that distinguish the categories of facts and beliefs are distinct or overlapping. In each of the five studies, participants are presented with content statements and asked the degree to which they agree with a given statement, the degree to which they think others would agree with it, and whether the statement was a fact or a belief. From these ratings, six possible patterns were derived. The results showed that in many content areas the patterns that describe the statements they categorized as facts and those that they categorized as beliefs had considerable overlap. In addition, participant consensus as to which statements were to be considered facts versus beliefs varied from high to low depending on the specific content being evaluated.

Birch & Bloom (2007) suggest that adults’ reasoning about other people’s mental states is influenced by their privileged knowledge about reality. When asked where a person described in a story would search for a missing object, participants tend to judge with higher probability that the person would search in a particular box when they know that the object is indeed in that box. However, the results of that experiment could be an effect of unintended priming in the experimental materials. The increased attention towards the box might be caused by reading about it in the task instructions. In a new version of the experiment, we controlled for this factor by priming different locations in the instructions. The results show that it is unlikely that priming is the source of Birch and Bloom’s observations: only knowledge about reality changed the participants’ strategies in reasoning about the actions of others.

The purpose of this study is to present a diagnostic tool to assess the nonverbal pragmatic behaviors of people with Asperger syndrome, with the intent to give an account of the severity of symptoms in the area of nonverbal interaction, as well as providing a profile of nonverbal behaviors that may be targeted for intervention. Through this communication profile, overall nonverbal ability is calculated in a group of 20 subjects with Asperger syndrome. The proposed scale also includes the measurement of the following nonverbal dimensions: (1) eye gaze, (2) facial expression, (3) body language and posture, (4) proxemics, (5) gestures, and (6) paralanguage. The results of this assessment suggest low nonverbal pragmatic ability in these subjects, show specific deficits in nonverbal communication, and capture variability in nonverbal behavior in individuals with AS.

Before speaking language, infants produce pointing gestures. To elucidate the mechanism promoting imperative pointing by infants, we investigated whether referential problem spaces, which are eco-cultural contexts in which subjects are reliant on others to obtain desirable but unreachable objects, affect the parental awareness of the frequency of imperative pointing by infants. Through a survey questionnaire, we asked parents of infants aged 8-30 months about the kinds of objects they place away from their infants and the frequency of their infants’ imperative pointing. The results show that parents who mentioned placing tiny objects or objects mainly used by adults or older children away from their infants reported higher frequencies of imperative pointing by their infants than those who did not. This suggests that the frequency of infants’ imperative pointing is increased by referential problem spaces, which are constructed by placing tiny objects or objects mainly used by adults or older children away from the infants.

The study aims to answer questions about the developmental trajectories of irony comprehension. The research focuses on the problem of the age at which ironic utterances can first be understood. The link between ironic utterance comprehension and early Theory of Mind (ToM) is examined as well. In order to approach the topic, 46 preschool children were tested with the Irony Comprehension Task (Banasik & Bokus, 2013) and the Reflection on Thinking Test (Białecka-Pikul, 2012) in three age groups: four-year-olds, five-year-olds and six-year-olds. The study showed no age effect in the Irony Comprehension Task and a significant effect in the Reflection on Thinking Test. On some of the measures, irony comprehension correlates with theory of mind. Also, an analysis of children’s narratives was conducted to observe how children explain the intention of the speaker who uttered the ironic statement. The children’s responses fall into four categories, one of which involves a function similar to a white lie being ascribed to the utterance.