This work was funded by the National Social Science Foundation of China [16BYY076] to Peng Zhou and the Science Foundation of Beijing Language and Cultural University under the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities [15YJ050003]. The authors are grateful to the children, parents, and teachers at the Enqi Autism Platform and Taolifangyuan Kindergarten in Beijing, China, for their support in running the study.

This study has been approved by the Ethics Committee of the School of Medicine at Tsinghua University. Informed consent has been obtained from all individual participants included in the study.
1. Participant Screening and Study Preparation
<ol>
	<li>Recruit Mandarin-speaking preschool children with autism. 
	NOTE: Their diagnoses should be confirmed by pediatric neurologists at hospitals using DSM-IV-TR40 or DSM-541 and, ideally, the number of participants should be no less than 15. The present study recruited 25 participants with confirmed diagnoses.</li>
	<li>Evaluate each participant independently using gold-standard diagnostic instruments like the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule42.</li>
	<li>Measure the verbal IQ of participants using the Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence-IV (CN), a standardized IQ test designed for Mandarin-speaking children between the ages of 2-6 and 6-1143. 
	NOTE: The verbal IQ scores of the children with autism in the present study were all above 80. They were all high-functioning children with autism.</li>
	<li>Calculate each participant&#39;s mean length of utterance (MLU) by dividing the total number of words by the number of utterances in each speech sample. Record 100 utterances for each participant from either their interactions with parents or with teachers. Then, calculate the MLU by dividing the total number of words in each participant&#39;s utterances by 100. 
	NOTE: MLU indicates the participant&#39;s sentence complexity levels.</li>
	<li>Recruit TD children. Ideally match the TD children to the children with autism for age (TD group 1), MLU (TD group 2), and verbal IQ (TD group 3). 
	NOTE: The present study recruited 50 TD children (25 boys and 25 girls) from local kindergartens. 25 matched to the children with autism for age and 25 matched to the children with autism for both MLU and verbal IQ.</li>
</ol>
2. Warm-up Session
<ol>
	<li>Invite the participants for a warm-up session before the actual test. Introduce the participant to the research environment and interact with him or her to establish a good rapport. 
	NOTE: This can be done on the same day as the testing session or organized on a different day. In the warm-up session, two experimenters are typically involved and interact with the participant using toys and props.</li>
</ol>
3. Conditions and Experimental Design
<ol>
	<li>Construct the test stimuli. Create 12 target items, each comprised of a visual stimulus, and two spoken sentences containing the morphological markers BA and BEI, respectively. Construct the spoken sentences using the same structure: morphological marker + noun phrase (NP) + adverb + verb phrase (VP) (see Examples 1a and 1b below). 
	NOTE: The marker BA indicates that the following NP is the recipient of the holding event (see 2a), and BEI indicates that the following NP is the initiator of the event (see 2b). The subject NP of a sentence in Mandarin can often be omitted when the referent of the NP is contextually available. 
	 
	Example: 
	(1)&#160;a. BA shizi qingqingdi bao-le&#160; &#160; &#160; qilai. 
	&#160; &#160; &#160; &#160; &#160;BA&#160; lion&#160; &#160;gently&#160; &#160; &#160; &#160;hold&#160; &#160; &#160; &#160; &#160;up 
	&#160; &#160; &#160; &#160; &#160;Meaning: Someone gently holds the lion. 
	&#160; &#160; &#160;b. BEI shizi qingqingdi bao-le&#160; &#160; &#160; qilai. 
	&#160; &#160; &#160; &#160; &#160;BEI lion&#160; &#160;gently&#160; &#160; &#160; &#160;hold&#160; &#160; &#160; &#160; &#160; up 
	&#160; &#160; &#160; &#160; &#160;Meaning: Someone is gently held by the lion. 
	(2)&#160;a. BA + [NP]Recipient 
	&#160; &#160; &#160;b. BEI + [NP]Initiator
	<ol>
		<li>Use Pixelmator (or another image editor) to create visual images. Open Pixelmator. Click on the Pixelmator icon. Create a visual image from a template. Click Show Details in the template chooser. Double-click the template to open it. Adjust the width, height, resolution, and color depth from the pop-up menus. Enter the relevant parameters. Click OK.</li>
		<li>Use Praat (or another audio editor) to construct spoken sentences. Set up the microphone. Open Praat. Click on the Praat icon. Select Record Mono sound from the New menu. Set the recording conditions by clicking the sample rate option of 44100. Click the Record button.</li>
		<li>Record the spoken sentences by asking a native Beijing Mandarin-speaker to produce the sentences in a child-directed manner. Save the recordings by clicking Save. 
		NOTE: Typically, 12 to 16 target items are constructed for sentence comprehension studies with children. Test stimuli can be created using other image and audio editors for a visual world study.</li>
	</ol>
	</li>
	<li>Construct visual images, each containing two pictures. The two pictures depict the same event involving the same characters. Reverse the event roles (initiator or recipient) of the two characters in the two pictures. Make one picture compatible with the construction containing BA (BA-target event) and one with the construction containing BEI (BEI-target event). An example is provided in Figure 1. 
	NOTE: This figure has been reprinted with permission from Zhou and Ma (2018)19.</li>
	<li>Counterbalance and randomization: divide the target trials into two experimental lists, with a participant seeing each visual stimulus but listening to only one of the recorded sentences for the stimulus. Counterbalance the spoken sentences containing BA and BEI across the two experimental lists, with 6 constructions containing BA and 6 containing BEI. Add 12 filler items to each experimental list and arrange the target and filler trials in a random order. Randomly assign the participants to the two lists.</li>
</ol>
4. Experimental Procedure
<ol>
	<li>Eye-tracking procedure.
	<ol>
		<li>Invite the participants to sit comfortably in front of the display monitor of the remote eye tracker. Set the distance between the participants&#39; eyes and the monitor around 60 cm. Perform the standard calibration and validation procedures by asking the participants to fixate on a grid of five fixation targets in random succession.</li>
		<li>Present the participants with a spoken sentence while they are seeing a visual image, as done in the standard visual world paradigm10,44. Use the monocular eye-tracking option by tracking the eye that is on the same side as the illuminator of the eye tracker. Record the participant&#39;s eye movements using the eye tracker. 
		NOTE: The eye tracker used in the present study allows remote eye-tracking with a sampling rate of 500 Hz.</li>
	</ol>
	</li>
	<li>Testing and measuring.
	<ol>
		<li>Test the participants individually. Simply tell the participants to listen to the spoken sentences while they are viewing the pictures. Ask one experimenter to monitor the participant on the computer and one to stand behind the participant and gently rest her hands on the participant&#39;s shoulders to minimize the participant&#39;s sudden movements.</li>
		<li>Measure the participant&#39;s eye movements that arise as automatic responses to the linguistic input using the eye tracker. 
		NOTE: The task does not ask participants to make any conscious judgments about the spoken sentences to minimize their computational burden. The eye tracker automatically records the eye movements.</li>
		<li>Monitoring during the test: use the live viewer mode on the computer screen, exhibited by the eye tracker during the test, to observe the participant&#39;s looking behavior. Ask the experimenter who monitors data collection via the live viewer mode to signal to the experimenter who stands behind the participant to reorient the participant if his or her eye gaze wanders off the computer screen.</li>
	</ol>
	</li>
</ol>
5. Data Treatment and Analysis
<ol>
	<li>Code the participants&#39; fixations in two interest areas. Use Data Viewer to draw the two interest areas: BA-target event area and BEI-target event area (see Figure 1). Open Data Viewer. Select one of the interest area shape icons on the tool bar. Use the mouse to drag a box around the region you want to define as an interest area. Save the interest area in the Interest Area Set folder. Apply the interest area to other visual images. 
	NOTE: The depicted event in the upper panel of Figure 1 matches the BA-construction, hence the BA-target event, and the event depicted in the lower panel matches Figure 1b, hence the BEI-target event. The software used for data coding is Data Viewer, which comes with the eye tracker used in the study. Other data analysis software is also available.</li>
	<li>Analyze the eye gaze patterns using Data Viewer.
	<ol>
		<li>Open Data Viewer. Choose the sample report function from the menu to set the time windows for analysis (e.g., every 200 ms for the time window in the present study). Use the same function to time lock the fixation proportions in the interest areas to the onset of the marker for each trial. Export the raw data into an excel file using the export function from the menu.</li>
		<li>Use the excel functions to average the fixation proportions following the onset of the marker for each area. Use the excel functions to compute the fixation proportions in each time window of 200 ms over a period of 5200 ms (the mean length of the target sentences + 200 ms) from the onset of the marker for the two areas. Apply linear mixed-effects models to the eye movement data, detailed in Representative Results below. 
		NOTE: The use of 200 ms as a time window is based on the standard procedure for analyzing child eye gaze data in the literature12,13,18,19,45,46,47, and it is generally assumed that it takes about 200 ms to observe the effects of linguistic markers on eye movements48.</li>
	</ol>
	</li>
</ol>

The authors have nothing to disclose.

In the current study, we present an eye-tracking paradigm that can directly and effectively assess the sentence comprehension abilities of children with autism. We found that 5-year-old children with autism, like their age-matched TD peers, exhibited eye gaze patterns that reflect effective and rapid use of linguistic cues during real-time sentence comprehension.
The findings provide evidence that eye-tracking (in particular, the visual world paradigm) is a sensitive measure of real-time sente...

Sentence comprehension relies on the ability to rapidly integrate different types of linguistic and non-linguistic information1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11. Prior research has found that young typically developing (TD) children incrementally compute the meaning of a sentence using both linguistic and non-linguistic cues12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19. However, there is currently a paucity of research exploring how preschool children with autism understand a sentence using different types of cues. The mechanisms underlying their sentence comprehension remains largely unclear.
It is generally acknowledged that there is enormous variability in the language abilities of children with autism, especially in their expressive language; for example, some children with autism have relatively good structural language, some exhibit deficits in both lexical and grammatical domains, some demonstrate impaired grammar, and some never acquire functional spoken language20,21,22,23,24,25. In addition, prior research seems to suggest that their receptive language is relatively more impaired than their expressive language26,27,28,29. Most research that has assessed sentence comprehension abilities of children with autism have used offline tasks (e.g., standardized tests, caregiver reports), and the findings suggest that their sentence comprehension abilities might be particularly impaired30,31,32,33,34,35,36,37. However, it has been pointed out that poor comprehension abilities are more likely related to these children&#39;s overall lack of social responsiveness than to language processing deficits38,39. Note that these offline tasks used in previous research often require high response demands or interactions with the experimenters, which might pose particular difficulties for children with autism, because they often exhibit various challenging behaviors or symptoms. As a result, this may interact with the high task and communication demands and mask their comprehension abilities [for an overview of methods for assessing receptive language in children with autism, see Kasari et al. (2013)27 and Plesa-Skwerer et al. (2016)29]. Thus, experimental paradigms that can better control these confounding factors are required to further understand the nature of sentence-processing mechanisms in autism.
In the current study, we present an eye-tracking paradigm that can directly and effectively assess sentence comprehension abilities of children with autism. Compared to offline tasks, eye-tracking is a more sensitive testing paradigm to demonstrate children&#39;s comprehension abilities. It is sensitive to the time course of the comprehension process and requires no explicit motor or language responses from the participant, making it a promising method to study younger children and minimally verbal children with autism. In addition, we record eye movements as automatic responses to linguistic input instead of measuring eye movements that accompany conscious responses to linguistic input.

<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" style="border-collapse:
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	<tbody>
		<tr height="63" style="height:47.25pt">
			<td class="xl63" height="63" style="height:47.25pt;width:162pt" width="216">EyeLink 1000 plus eye tracker&#160;</td>
			<td class="xl63" style="width:53pt" width="71">SR Research Ltd.</td>
			<td class="xl63" style="width:89pt" width="119"></td>
			<td class="xl64" style="width:125pt" width="167">&#160;The EyeLink 1000 plus allows remote eye tracking, without a head support. The eye tracker provides information about the participant&#8217;s point of gaze at a sampling rate of 500 Hz, and it has accuracy of 0.5 degrees of visual angle.&#160;</td>
		</tr>
	</tbody>
</table>

using the visual world paradigm to study sentence comprehension in mandarin-speaking children with autism

Sentence comprehension relies on the ability to rapidly integrate different types of linguistic and non-linguistic information. However, there is currently a paucity of research exploring how preschool children with autism understand sentences using different types of cues. The mechanisms underlying sentence comprehension remains largely unclear. The present study presents a protocol to examine the sentence comprehension abilities of preschool children with autism. More specifically, a visual world paradigm of eye-tracking is used to explore the moment-to-moment sentence comprehension in the children. The paradigm has multiple advantages. First, it is sensitive to the time course of sentence comprehension and thus can provide rich information about how sentence comprehension unfolds over time. Second, it requires minimal task and communication demands, so it is ideal for testing children with autism. To further minimize the computational burden of children, the present study measures eye movements that arise as automatic responses to linguistic input rather than measuring eye movements that accompany conscious responses to spoken instructions.

The present study uses minimal pairs as in Examples 1a and 1b to investigate if and how fast children with autism can use event information encoded in two morphological markers during real-time sentence comprehension. It was predicted that if they are able to rapidly and effectively use event information in the two markers during real-time sentence comprehension, then they should look more at the BA-target event when hearing BA than when hearing BEI. Also, they should fixate more on the B...

Watch this Scientific Journal Video about Using the Visual World Paradigm to Study Sentence Comprehension in Mandarin-Speaking Children with Autism at JoVE.com

Using the Visual World Paradigm to Study Sentence Comprehension in Mandarin-Speaking Children with Autism

We present a protocol to examine the use of morphological cues during real-time sentence comprehension by children with autism.

Sentence comprehension relies on the ability to rapidly integrate different types of linguistic and non-linguistic information. However, there is ...

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7.6K Views.  Tsinghua University. We present a protocol to examine the use of morphological cues during real-time sentence comprehension by children with autism.

Video: Using the Visual World Paradigm to Study Sentence Comprehension in Mandarin-Speaking Children with Autism

Assessment and Evaluation of the High Risk Neonate: The NICU Network Neurobehavioral Scale

There has been a long-standing interest in the assessment of the neurobehavioral integrity of the newborn infant. The NICU Network Neurobehavioral Scale (NNNS) was developed as an assessment for the at-risk infant. These are infants who are at increased risk for poor developmental outcome because of insults during prenatal development, such as substance exposure or prematurity or factors such as poverty, poor nutrition or lack of prenatal care that can have adverse effects on the intrauterine environment and affect the developing fetus. The NNNS assesses the full range of infant neurobehavioral performance including neurological integrity, behavioral functioning, and signs of stress/abstinence. The NNNS is a noninvasive neonatal assessment tool with demonstrated validity as a predictor, not only of medical outcomes such as cerebral palsy diagnosis, neurological abnormalities, and diseases with risks to the brain, but also of developmental outcomes such as mental and motor functioning, behavior problems, school readiness, and IQ. The NNNS can identify infants at high risk for abnormal developmental outcome and is an important clinical tool that enables medical researchers and health practitioners to identify these infants and develop intervention programs to optimize the development of these infants as early as possible. The video shows the NNNS procedures, shows examples of normal and abnormal performance and the various clinical populations in which the exam can be used.

The NICU Network Neurobehavioral Scale (NNNS) was developed as an assessment for the at-risk infant. The purpose of this article is to describe the NNNS, provide video examples of the NNNS procedures and discuss the ways in which the exam has been used.

There has been a long-standing interest in the assessment of the neurobehavioral integrity of the newborn infant.  The NICU Network Neurobehavioral Scale ...

Using Eye Movements to Evaluate the Cognitive Processes Involved in Text Comprehension

The present article describes how to use eye tracking methodologies to study the cognitive processes involved in text comprehension. Measuring eye movements during reading is one of the most precise methods for measuring moment-by-moment (online) processing demands during text comprehension. Cognitive processing demands are reflected by several aspects of eye movement behavior, such as fixation duration, number of fixations, and number of regressions (returning to prior parts of a text). Important properties of eye tracking equipment that researchers need to consider are described, including how frequently the eye position is measured (sampling rate), accuracy of determining eye position, how much head movement is allowed, and ease of use. Also described are properties of stimuli that influence eye movements that need to be controlled in studies of text comprehension, such as the position, frequency, and length of target words. Procedural recommendations related to preparing the participant, setting up and calibrating the equipment, and running a study are given. Representative results are presented to illustrate how data can be evaluated. Although the methodology is described in terms of reading comprehension, much of the information presented can be applied to any study in which participants read verbal stimuli.

The present article describes how to use eye tracking methodologies to study the cognitive processes involved in text comprehension. Descriptions of eye tracking equipment, how to develop experimental stimuli, and procedural recommendations are included. The information presented can be applied to most any study using verbal stimuli.

The present article describes how to use eye  tracking methodologies to study the cognitive processes involved in text  comprehension. Measuring eye ...

How to Study Placebo Responses in Motion Sickness with a Rotation Chair Paradigm in Healthy Participants

Placebo responses occur in every medical intervention when patients or participants expect to receive an effective treatment to relieve symptoms. However, underlying mechanisms of placebo responses are not fully understood. It has repeatedly been shown that placebo responses are associated with changes in neural activity but for many conditions it is unclear whether they also affect the target organ, such as the stomach in motion sickness. Therefore, we present a methodology for the multivariate assessment of placebo responses by subjective, behavioral and objective measures in motion sickness with a rotation chair paradigm. The physiological correlate of motion sickness is a shift in gastric myoelectrical activity towards tachygastria that can be recorded with electrogastrography. The presented study applied the so-called balanced placebo design (BPD) to investigate the effects of ginger compared to placebo and the effects of expectations by verbal information. However, the study revealed no significant main or interactional effects of ginger (as a drug) or information on outcome measures but showed interactions when sex of participants and experimenters are taken into considerations. We discuss limitations of the presented study and report modifications that were used in subsequent studies demonstrating placebo responses when rotation speed was lowered. In general, future placebo studies have to identify the appropriate target organ for the studied placebo responses and to apply the specific methods to assess the physiological correlates.

An experimental rotation chair paradigm is used to investigate whether a placebo intervention on motion sickness affects subjective outcome measures only or also affects behavioral and objective measures in a balanced placebo design.

Placebo responses occur in every medical intervention when patients or participants expect to receive an effective treatment to relieve symptoms. However, ...

Testing Sensory and Multisensory Function in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

In addition to impairments in social communication and the presence of restricted interests and repetitive behaviors, deficits in sensory processing are now recognized as a core symptom in autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Our ability to perceive and interact with the external world is rooted in sensory processing. For example, listening to a conversation entails processing the auditory cues coming from the speaker (speech content, prosody, syntax) as well as the associated visual information (facial expressions, gestures). Collectively, the &#8220;integration&#8221; of these multisensory (i.e., combined audiovisual) pieces of information results in better comprehension. Such multisensory integration has been shown to be strongly dependent upon the temporal relationship of the paired stimuli. Thus, stimuli that occur in close temporal proximity are highly likely to result in behavioral and perceptual benefits &#8211; gains believed to be reflective of the perceptual system&#39;s judgment of the likelihood that these two stimuli came from the same source. Changes in this temporal integration are expected to strongly alter perceptual processes, and are likely to diminish the ability to accurately perceive and interact with our world. Here, a battery of tasks designed to characterize various aspects of sensory and multisensory temporal processing in children with ASD is described. In addition to its utility in autism, this battery has great potential for characterizing changes in sensory function in other clinical populations, as well as being used to examine changes in these processes across the lifespan.

We describe how to implement a battery of behavioral tasks to examine the processing and integration of sensory stimuli in children with ASD. The goal is to characterize individual differences in temporal processing of simple auditory and visual stimuli and relate these to higher order perceptual skills like speech perception.

In addition to impairments in social communication and the presence of restricted interests and repetitive behaviors, deficits in sensory processing are ...

Using Fiberless, Wearable fNIRS to Monitor Brain Activity in Real-world Cognitive Tasks

Functional Near Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS) is a neuroimaging technique that uses near-infrared light to monitor brain activity. Based on neurovascular coupling, fNIRS is able to measure the haemoglobin concentration changes secondary to neuronal activity. Compared to other neuroimaging techniques, fNIRS represents a good compromise in terms of spatial and temporal resolution. Moreover, it is portable, lightweight, less sensitive to motion artifacts and does not impose significant physical restraints. It is therefore appropriate to monitor a wide range of cognitive tasks (e.g., auditory, gait analysis, social interaction) and different age populations (e.g., new-borns, adults, elderly people). The recent development of fiberless fNIRS devices has opened the way to new applications in neuroscience research. This represents a unique opportunity to study functional activity during real-world tests, which can be more sensitive and accurate in assessing cognitive function and dysfunction than lab-based tests. This study explored the use of fiberless fNIRS to monitor brain activity during a real-world prospective memory task. This protocol is performed outside the lab and brain haemoglobin concentration changes are continuously measured over the prefrontal cortex while the subject walks around in order to accomplish several different tasks.

Monitoring brain activity outside the lab without physical constraints presents methodological challenges. A fiberless, wearable functional Near Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS) system was used to measure brain activity during an ecological prospective memory task. It was demonstrated that this system could be used to monitor brain activity during non-lab based experiments.

Functional Near Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS) is a neuroimaging technique that uses near-infrared light to monitor brain activity. Based on neurovascular ...

A Method to Quantify Visual Information Processing in Children Using Eye Tracking

Visual problems that occur early in life can have major impact on a child's development. Without verbal communication and only based on observational methods, it is difficult to make a quantitative assessment of a child's visual problems. This limits accurate diagnostics in children under the age of 4 years and in children with intellectual disabilities. Here we describe a quantitative method that overcomes these problems. The method uses a remote eye tracker and a four choice preferential looking paradigm to measure eye movement responses to different visual stimuli. The child sits without head support in front of a monitor with integrated infrared cameras. In one of four monitor quadrants a visual stimulus is presented. Each stimulus has a specific visual modality with respect to the background, e.g., form, motion, contrast or color. From the reflexive eye movement responses to these specific visual modalities, output parameters such as reaction times, fixation accuracy and fixation duration are calculated to quantify a child's viewing behavior. With this approach, the quality of visual information processing can be assessed without the use of communication. By comparing results with reference values obtained in typically developing children from 0-12 years, the method provides a characterization of visual information processing in visually impaired children. The quantitative information provided by this method can be advantageous for the field of clinical visual assessment and rehabilitation in multiple ways. The parameter values provide a good basis to: (i) characterize early visual capacities and consequently to enable early interventions; (ii) compare risk groups and follow visual development over time; and (iii), construct an individual visual profile for each child.

A method is described to quantify the quality of visual information processing based on reflexive eye movements in response to specific visual modalities. Reaction times and fixation output parameters are used to characterize visual performance in children with and without visual impairments from 6 months of age.

Visual problems that occur early in life can have major impact on a child's development. Without verbal communication and only based on observational ...

Eye Tracking During Visually Situated Language Comprehension: Flexibility and Limitations in Uncovering Visual Context Effects

The present work is a description and an assessment of a methodology designed to quantify different aspects of the interaction between language processing and the perception of the visual world. The recording of eye-gaze patterns has provided good evidence for the contribution of both the visual context and linguistic/world knowledge to language comprehension. Initial research assessed object-context effects to test&#160;theories of modularity in language processing. In the introduction, we describe how subsequent investigations have taken the role of the wider visual context in language processing as a research topic in its own right, asking questions such as how our visual perception of events and of speakers contributes to&#160;comprehension informed by&#160;comprehenders&#39; experience. Among the examined aspects of the visual context are actions, events, a speaker&#39;s gaze, and emotional facial expressions, as well as spatial object configurations. Following an overview of the eye-tracking method and its different applications, we list the key steps of the methodology in the protocol, illustrating how to successfully use it to study visually-situated language comprehension. A final section presents three sets of representative results and illustrates the benefits and limitations of eye tracking for investigating the interplay between the perception of the visual world and language comprehension.

The present article reviews an eye-tracking methodology for studies on language comprehension. To obtain reliable data, key steps of the protocol must be followed. Among these are the correct set-up of the eye tracker (e.g., ensuring good quality of the eye and head images) and accurate calibration.

The present work is a description and an assessment of a methodology designed to quantify different aspects of the interaction between language processing ...

Using Eye Movements Recorded in the Visual World Paradigm to Explore the Online Processing of Spoken Language

In a typical eye tracking study using the visual world paradigm, participants' eye movements to objects or pictures in the visual workspace are recorded via an eye tracker as the participant produces or comprehends a spoken language describing the concurrent visual world. This paradigm has high versatility, as it can be used in a wide range of populations, including those who cannot read and/or who cannot overtly give their behavioral responses, such as preliterate children, elderly adults, and patients. More importantly, the paradigm is extremely sensitive to fine grained manipulations of the speech signal, and it can be used to study the online processing of most topics in language comprehension at multiple levels, such as the fine grained acoustic phonetic features, the properties of words, and the linguistic structures. The protocol described in this article illustrates how a typical visual world eye tracking study is conducted, with an example showing how the online processing of some semantically complex statements can be explored with the visual world paradigm.

The visual world paradigm monitors participants' eye movements in the visual workspace as they are listening to or speaking a spoken language. This paradigm can be used to investigate the online processing of a wide range of psycholinguistic questions, including semantically complex statements, such as disjunctive statements.

In a typical eye tracking study using the visual world paradigm, participants' eye movements to objects or pictures in the visual workspace are recorded ...

Modeling Verbal Behavior Deficits with the Stimulus Control Ratio Equation, SCoRE

Verbal operant analyses are the extension of functional analysis technology to the field of verbal behavior, of particular relevance to autism spectrum disorders and associated developmental disabilities. Similarly, a verbal operant analysis carefully controls specific environmental factors that influence language, and measures strength of responding across four verbal operant classes: tact, mand, echoic, and sequelic. The frequency of each independent verbal operant is then measured against one another using the stimulus control ratio equation (SCoRE) to summarize the relative strength of the speaker&#8217;s repertoire. The verbal behavior SCoRE yields a statistic that can be compared against itself (e.g., for the purposes of pre/post testing) or against others (e.g., for the purposes of randomized controlled trials). The results of this evaluation provide an individualized hierarchy for diverging stimulus control across the verbal operants, from which a treatment plan for errorless language learning may be prescribed.

This article describes the procedures for conducting a verbal operant analysis (VOA), calculating the stimulus control ratio equation (SCoRE), and developing individualized verbal behavior treatment plans, specifically significant to address the deficits characteristic of autism.

Verbal operant analyses are the extension of functional analysis technology to the field of verbal behavior, of particular relevance to autism spectrum ...

Experimental Paradigm for Measuring the Effects of Self-distancing in Young Children

Self-distancing (i.e., creating mental distance between the self and a stimulus by adopting a less egocentric perspective) has been studied as a way to improve adolescents' and adults' emotion regulation. These studies instruct adolescents and adults to use visual imagery or language to create distance from the self before engaging in self-regulation tasks and when thinking about past and future events. For example, adults are asked to recall past, negative emotional experiences from either a first-person perspective (no distance) or a third-person perspective (self-distanced). These studies show that a self-distanced perspective allows adults to cope more adaptively when recalling negative feelings. However, the self-distancing paradigm used with adults was not developmentally appropriate for young children. This modified self-distancing paradigm involves instructing children to think about their thoughts, feelings, and actions from different perspectives that vary in their distance from the self while completing a self-regulation task. The paradigm involves randomly assigning children to use one of three perspectives: self-immersed, third-person, or exemplar. In the self-immersed condition, children are asked to think about themselves using the first-person perspective (e.g., "How am I feeling?") and no distance is created from the self. In the third-person condition, children are asked to create distance from the self by using the third-person perspective (e.g., "How is [child's name] feeling?"). In the exemplar condition, the greatest distance from the self is created by asking children to pretend to be a media character and to think about that character's thoughts and feelings (e.g., "How is Batman feeling?"). Studies using the self-distancing paradigm with 4-6-year-olds have found that as the amount of distance from the self increases (self-immersed &lt; third-person &lt; exemplar), children perform better on self-regulation tasks. These findings suggest that the strategies implemented in the self-distancing protocol may be useful to include in self-regulation interventions for young children.

An experimental paradigm was created to measure the effects of self-distancing in young children (4-6-year-olds). Self-distancing is a process through which individuals adopt a less egocentric perspective. This paradigm has been used to examine the effects of self-distancing on young children&#39;s self-regulation.

Self-distancing (i.e., creating mental distance between the self and a stimulus by adopting a less egocentric perspective) has been studied as a way to ...