Advancing knowledge of human development, developmental disabilities, and neurodegenerative diseases.
Alexander disease (AxD) is a primary genetic disorder of astrocytes caused by dominant mutations in the gene encoding the intermediate filament (IF) protein GFAP. This disease is characterized by excessive accumulation of GFAP, known as Rosenthal fibers, within astrocytes.
Verbal trait disorders encompass a wide range of conditions and are marked by deficits in five domains that impair a person’s ability to communicate: speech, language, reading, spelling, and writing. Nonword repetition is a robust endophenotype for verbal trait disorders that is sensitive to cognitive processes critical to verbal development, including auditory processing, phonological working memory, and motor planning and programming.
As researchers have investigated the socio-historical conditions responsible for the upsurge in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) diagnosis, they have neglected how clinicians determine the diagnoses in local encounters in the first place.
Title: FMR1 Genotype Interacts with Parenting Stress to Shape Health and Functional Abilities in Older Age. Legend: Among those with modal numbers of CGG repeats (around 30), the figure shows similarity between parents of children with disabilities and parents in the comparison group (i.e., parents of children without disabilities) with respect to the number of …
Title: Does Bilateral Experience Lead to Improved Spatial Unmasking of Speech in Children Who Use Bilateral Cochlear Implants? Legend: We vary the spatial locations of target speech and masking speech, so they are co-located (A) or separated (B). The difference in speech reception thresholds between (A) and (B) indicates advantage from spatial cues (spatial release …
Title: Grammatical processing and non-verbal working memory in monolingual and bilingual children Legend: Spanish-English bilingual children did not perform as well on the English grammaticality judgment task, and showed greater reliance on nonverbal working memory during grammatical processing compared to monolingual English-speaking children. Citation: Gangopadhyay, I., Davidson, M.M., Ellis Weismer, S., & Kaushanskaya, M. (2016). …
Title: Longitudinal development of communication in children with cerebral palsy between 24 and 53 months: Predicting speech outcomes Legend: (Left) Longitudinally-assessed word intelligibility score (%) by age and time since child was first able to speak. Thin lines are individual children. Thick lines are group means as a function of time (months) since child was …
Title: Neural Distance Effects When Comparing Fractions and Line Ratios Legend: Left: Adult participants were asked to compare pairs of fractions (top), combinations of fractions and line ratios (middle) or pairs of line-ratios (bottom), while we recorded accuracy and reaction time (RT). Pairs were chosen so that some were “near” (i.e., similar, like 5/7 vs. …
Title: Family Context and Parenting Experiences in Autism Legend: Family context (having multiple children with special needs [Fig 1], household income [Fig 2], and parent level of broader autism phenotype [BAP; Fig 3] moderated spillover of a challenging parenting day on next-day couple experiences in parents of children with autism across a 14-day daily diary. Citation: …
Title: Adolescent impulsivity and novelty seeking as differential predictors of relational and overt aggression Legend: Mother- and self-reported impulsivity during adolescence predict concurrent overt aggression reported by cotwins. This pattern remained the same when predicting relational aggression. Although impulsivity predicted both types of aggression, mother- and self-reported novelty seeking did not predict aggression of either …
