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with Prof. Thomas Beaudoin / Campion Hall 303

No description available.

Contingent maternal responsiveness has previously been shown to influence the development of many abilities including attachment, language, vocabulary, phonology, attention, and cognitive functioning. In addition, it has been speculated that early contingent interactions may facilitate the development of early social communicative behaviors including joint attention abilities. Examining 13-month-old infant vocal-led interactions with mothers in free play allowed us to look at maternal responses to a specific social communicative interaction. These interactions were then correlated with infants' social communicative abilities as assessed by the Early Social Communicative Scales. Both components were then used to predict later language abilities using the McArthur Communicative Development Inventory: Words and Gestures. Specific responses from mothers during free play and infants communicative abilities were shown to correlate and predict social communicative abilities. Later language abilities were also shown to be predicted by specific responses from mothers during free play and infants' own social communicative skills.

Knowledge plays an increasingly important role in business, company, and organization,it is the ability for organization to learn and assimilate new knowledge in orderto make plans or business progresses. However, when comes to the tacit knowledge,in most cases, as Polanyi (1969) said ”we can know more than we can tell”, whichmeans in our daily lives, most of the knowledge stored in our brain can not be expressedout to others easily, we call this kind of knowledge ”tacit”. Therefore, tacitknowledge holds most part of our knowledge - and at the same time - harder to identifyand share.There is an popular approach called ’Community of Practice (CoP)’ which aimsat creating and sharing knowledge through informal practicing and learning. Thus,in this study, a qualitative research is desired to be made on the approach of communityof practice as well as its effects on tacit knowledge sharing. The purpose of thisstudy is to understand the pattern of sharing tacit knowledge among communitieswith social communication technologies (Tencent QQ) embedded, and to explorethe mechanisms of generating and transferring tacit knowledge with ”community ofpractice”.

Children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) often face problems in areas of social communication including negotiating with peers, entering ongoing interactions, and engaging in conflict resolution. A potential cause of these social communication difficulties is the decreased ability to make emotional inferences. This thesis investigates the effects of a social communication intervention on the ability of school-aged children with DLD to make inferences about emotions. Five children with DLD between the ages of 6;10 and 12;4 participated in a social communication intervention that highlighted principles of emotion understanding (recognizing emotions in facial expressions, inferring emotions with contextual information, and discussing reasoning behind emotions) using story books to illustrate concepts. Data were gathered before and after intervention using a psychometrically balanced measure of emotional inferencing ability. Results revealed notable improvements in three of the participants and consistent performance in two of the participants baseline to follow-up. While performance on the emotional inferencing task varied due to multiple factors, the participants that showed improvement produced real growth which encourages future research to be conducted.

Shy children often have difficulty communicating; however, it is not clear whether these difficulties stem from a skills deficit or from an anxiety-driven performance deficit. Therefore, the present study examined how shy children’s communication skills differed from those of average, non-shy children, using the Internet as a medium for social communication. It was hypothesized that shy children may be more reticent than average children to initiate conversation in a novel situation. However, over time shy children were expected to become more comfortable in discussions with their on-line partner and to become less anxious as they acknowledge the anonymity of chat groups. This study also investigated potential changes in negative effects associated with shyness over time. Fifteen shy children (Mean shyness score=72.3; SD=6.43) and 15 average children (Mean shyness score=53.7; SD=5.6) participated in the 10 MSN conversation groups. Children were also given a series of questionnaires prior to and after the 10 sessions. Results from this study suggest that shy children communicate in a similar manner to their average partners when online. Results also suggest that shy children had higher levels of social anxiety than average children before beginning an online conversation with an unknown partner. However, by the end of the 10 sessions, their anxiety had been significantly reduced. No other changes or differences in psychological functioning were noted between shy and average children.

The purpose of this thesis was to evaluate the efficacy of an intervention to increase the production of emotion words in five children with language impairment. Participants were between the ages of 5;11 (years; months) and 11;3 (at the onset of enrollment in treatment) and had been identified with language impairment. Each participant completed between three and six baseline sessions, 20 twenty-minute intervention sessions, and three follow-up sessions. Tasks included story reading, story enactment, and journaling. Each session was recorded and then coded for emotion category (sadness, anger, fear, and surprise), errors made, type of production, and valence agreement. Total emotion word production per category is reported along with percentage of non-overlapping data calculations to determine the effectiveness of treatment for each participant for each emotion word category. Based on percentage of non-overlapping data calculations, treatment was moderately effective for four of the five participants in at least one or more emotion word category. Treatment was mildly effective for all five participants in at least one emotion category. Each participant was observed to make between one and five valence errors throughout the intervention. The errors made by participants often involved the substitution of a simple emotion word category for a more complex emotion word category. Participants were more successful with intervention tasks when provided increased support from the clinician, as seen by most productions being made in response to a question or in response to a cue. While results from this intervention were variable, participants generally made improvements from their participation in this intervention. Utilization of a similar intervention framework with a few alterations based on the limitations observed would be beneficial in future research.

The SCQ is a popular screener for ASDs derived from the gold-standard diagnostic interview. This study examined the validity of the SCQ in a Hispanic sample. Additionally, the mother's expressed emotion toward her child with ASD was examined. Participants included 217 Hispanic and non-Hispanic white mothers of children with and without ASDs ages 4-10. The actual diagnostic status of all children was determined using a historical review of records. ROC curve analysis yielded much lower sensitivity and specificity than the original validation study, with very little difference found between the 15 and 22 cutoffs. A cutoff score of 12 performed the best with a sensitivity of .86 and specificity of .54 in distinguishing between ASD and Non-ASD. There were no significant findings in expressed emotion between Hispanics or Whites, nor did it predict SCQ score. Limitations included a small non-Hispanic White sample. Findings of this study corroborate recent validation results.

Shy children often have difficulty communicating; however, it is not clear whether these difficulties stem from a skills deficit or from an anxiety-driven performance deficit. Therefore, the present study examined how shy children’s communication skills differed from those of average, non-shy children, using the Internet as a medium for social communication. It was hypothesized that shy children may be more reticent than average children to initiate conversation in a novel situation. However, over time shy children were expected to become more comfortable in discussions with their on-line partner and to become less anxious as they acknowledge the anonymity of chat groups. This study also investigated potential changes in negative effects associated with shyness over time. Fifteen shy children (Mean shyness score=72.3; SD=6.43) and 15 average children (Mean shyness score=53.7; SD=5.6) participated in the 10 MSN conversation groups. Children were also given a series of questionnaires prior to and after the 10 sessions. Results from this study suggest that shy children communicate in a similar manner to their average partners when online. Results also suggest that shy children had higher levels of social anxiety than average children before beginning an online conversation with an unknown partner. However, by the end of the 10 sessions, their anxiety had been significantly reduced. No other changes or differences in psychological functioning were noted between shy and average children.