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The use of virtual museums in cultural transfer is an interdisciplinary approach of significant importance. Virtual museums play a crucial role in cultural transfer by digitally preserving cultural heritage. This article examines the educational role of virtual museums as a key tool in cultural transfer, particularly in the context of representing Ottoman works in virtual museums. Museums, indispensable elements of cultural transfer and education in contemporary society, have gained the opportunity to reach wider audiences by transitioning into the digital realm. In this context, the representation of Ottoman works in virtual museums and its role in cultural transfer are highlighted. Virtual museums hold great educational potential. It is well recognized that the representation of Ottoman works in virtual museums has educational effects such as expanding learning environments, facilitating access to knowledge, and increasing cultural awareness. Therefore, the representation of Ottoman works in virtual museums, especially in the field of education, is addressed. This study evaluates the role of the representation of Ottoman works in virtual museums in cultural transfer and education, thus demonstrating the educational potential of virtual museums. The research illustrates that virtual museums serve as significant tools for the preservation and dissemination of cultural heritage, and the representation of Ottoman works in virtual museums contributes to this process. Using Ferdinand de Saussure's theory of signs, signifier, signified, this study examines the representation and educational role of Ottoman works in virtual museums.

Little is known about OCD in people with learning disabilities (LD) in general and in terms of current and professional support. In this study, we examined caregivers' perceived challenges and strategies practiced in institutionalized settings in managing OCD in people with LD and derived implications for research and practice. We studied individual cases of people with LD (n = 7). Each case included group discussions (n = 28) and semistructured interviews with caregivers (n = 20). We used qualitative content analysis to analyze the data. Our findings reveal the following challenges for caregivers: recognizing and classifying ambiguous behaviors, recognizing emotional well-being and needs through nonverbal signals, finding and applying effective strategies, being unqualified regarding additional needs, managing inappropriate institutionalized conditions, and lacking external specialization. We identified five strategies for dealing with compulsive behavior: tolerating and allowing, accepting and supporting, involving, limiting the compulsive act, and stopping the act. Collaboration among psychiatric, therapeutic, and caregivers in institutionalized settings is critical for early identification and support of OCD. Challenges arise from caregivers' lack of training on the additional needs of people with LD and OCD, highlighting the urgent need for disorder-specific guidelines for identification and support.

Teachers play a key role in communicating with parents to support student learning. One of the more challenging aspects of this role for teachers is having a difficult conversation with a parent about their child. Difficult conversations, when needed, are best accomplished face-to-face incorporating effective communication skills to promote a positive and productive interaction. This article reviews a number of key practical communication skills that teachers can use when communicating with parents including use of clear vocabulary, active listening, I-messages, questioning strategies, paraphrasing and summarizing, leveled information, as well as attention to nonverbal messages. Strategies to support both planned and unplanned difficult conversations are discussed. Barriers to having difficult conversations between teachers and parents are outlined as well as new directions for research. Effective communication skills are integral for teachers to hold difficult, yet productive, conversations with parents to promote partnerships and to support student success.

With the fast development of artificial intelligence and emerging technologies, automatic recognition of students' facial expressions has received increased attention. Facial expressions are a kind of external manifestation of emotional states. It is important for teachers to assess students' emotional states and adjust teaching activities accordingly. However, existing methods for automatic facial expression recognition have the limitations of low accuracy of recognition and poor feature extraction. To address the problem, this study proposed a novel deep learning model called DenseNetX-CBAM to improve facial expression recognition by utilizing a variant of densely connected convolutional networks (DenseNet) to reduce unnecessary parameters and strengthen the reuse of expression features between networks; moreover, convolutional block attention module (CBAM) was integrated to allow the networks to focus on important special regions and important channels when representing features. The proposed model was tested using 217 video clips of 33 students in an online course. The results demonstrated promising effects of the method in improving the accuracy of facial expression recognition, which can help teachers to accurately recognize students' emotions and provide real-time adjustment in online learning environments.

While improving ability to communicate effectively is a given for developing student leadership potential, there are very few systematic frameworks to guide communication skill improvement. Using a model of emotional and social skills derived from research in interpersonal and emotional/nonverbal communication, tools and strategies for both assessing possession of complex and sophisticated social/communication skills and their development are discussed. This well-researched model breaks down complex communication into well-defined skills that underlie the more abstract leadership competencies of emotional and social intelligences. It provides a foundation for enhancing the emotional and social skills of students that lead them to be more effective in positions of leadership, and in social interactions more generally. Specific strategies for communication skill development are suggested, as well as discussion of formal guides and resources to aid in student leadership development.

This study proposes that the gestures of an agent tutor in a multimedia learning environment can generate positive and negative emotions in learners and influence their cognitive processes. To achieve this, we developed and integrated positive and negative agent tutor gestures in a multimedia learning environment directed by cognitive gestures. The effects of emotion type on cognition were examined in terms of cognitive load, learning motivation, and achievement. The subjects were 46 university students in Gyeonggi Province, South Korea. The students were divided into three learner groups: cognition, cognition + negative emotion, and cognition + positive emotion. The learners watched a tutorial lecture on the Notion note-taking app by an agent tutor. Data analysis was conducted using one-way ANOVA to determine the cognitive load, learning motivation, and achievement. The results showed that the positive emotion design was more effective in terms of intrinsic cognitive load, learning motivation, and achievement but had a higher extrinsic cognitive load. However, even the negative + passive group showed more positive learning than the cognition group. Although this study focused on gestures by an agent tutor, it implies that such gestures in multimedia learning contexts must be informed by emotional as well as cognitive design to provide a more meaningful learning experience.

Blind adults display language-specificity in their packaging and ordering of events in speech. These differences affect the representation of events in "co-speech gesture"--gesturing with speech--but not in "silent gesture"--gesturing without speech. Here we examine when in development blind children begin to show adult-like patterns in co-speech and silent gesture. We studied speech and gestures produced by 30 blind and 30 sighted children learning Turkish, equally divided into 3 age groups: 5-6, 7-8, 9-10 years. The children were asked to describe three-dimensional spatial event scenes (e.g., running out of a house) first with speech, and then without speech using only their hands. We focused on physical motion events, which, in blind adults, elicit cross-linguistic differences in speech and co-speech gesture, but cross-linguistic similarities in silent gesture. Our results showed an effect of language on gesture when it was accompanied by speech (co-speech gesture), but "not" when it was used without speech (silent gesture) across both blind and sighted learners. The language-specific co-speech gesture pattern for both packaging and ordering semantic elements was present at the earliest ages we tested the blind and sighted children. The silent gesture pattern appeared later for blind children than sighted children for both packaging and ordering. Our findings highlight gesture as a robust and integral aspect of the language acquisition process at the early ages and provide insight into when language does and does "not" have an effect on gesture, even in blind children who lack visual access to gesture.

Contrary to prevailing research on willingness to communicate (WTC) which treats spoken second language (L2) as the predominant indicator of WTC, this study examines a young English as a second language (ESL) learner's WTC expressed through multimodal means and her utilization of multimodal and multilingual resources for mediating WTC in translingual environments. Data were collected from videotaped ESL lessons and an interview. Adopting a multimodal conversation analysis (CA) approach, this cross-disciplinary study analyzes the ESL novice's WTC expressions in two communicative settings: small-group interactions in ESL class and a multilingual triad conversation in an interview. Findings reveal that (1) gestural WTC display can signify more than one's intention to enter discourse, (2) contrary to previous WTC studies, first language (L1) use can indicate L2 WTC, and (3) the learner used diverse semiotic resources to mediate WTC and sustain discursive engagement. Implications are discussed with respect to the findings. This study extends the understanding of WTC beyond spoken L2 expressions, emphasizing embodied display and L1 use in the learner's communicative repertoire. Additionally, it sheds light on the learner's strategic use of multimodal resources to sustain engagement in translingual environments, contributing to the broader field of language education and multimodal analysis.

Purpose: Gesture delay in autistic infants and toddlers has been widely reported. The developmental trajectory of gesture production during early childhood is understudied. Thus, little is known about the possible changes of gesture production over time. The present study aimed to document the development of gesture production in autistic children and examine whether child-based factors (chronological age and initial language skills) predicted gesture development. Method: A total of 33 Chinese-speaking autistic children (M[subscript age] = 56.39 months, SD = 8.54 months) played with their parents at four time points over a 9-month period. Their speech was transcribed, and their gestures were coded from parent-child interaction. Multilevel modeling analysis was used to investigate the development of gesture and its associated factors. Results: The total number of gestures produced by autistic children decreased over time. Among different factors, children's initial age significantly and negatively predicted children's gesture production, while initial language positively predicted children's gesture production. Conclusions: Gesture delay persists in preschool age. The decline in gesture production was associated with children's age and initial language ability. These findings shed light on the difficulties surrounding gesture use in autistic children.

New motor skills can shape how infants communicate with their caregivers. For example, learning to walk allows infants to move faster and farther than they previously could, in turn allowing them to approach their caregivers more frequently to gesture or vocalize. Does the link between walking and communication differ for infants later diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), whose communicative and motor development differs from their neurotypically developing peers? We prospectively followed two groups of infants longitudinally during the transition from crawling to walking: (1) N = 25 infants with no family history of ASD; and (2) N = 91 infants with an older sibling with ASD. Fifteen infants were later diagnosed with ASD, and 26 infants showed a language delay (but did not receive an ASD diagnosis). After learning to walk, infants without ASD or language delay showed considerable changes in their communication: They gestured more frequently, and increasingly coordinated their gestures and vocalizations with locomotion (e.g., by approaching a caregiver and showing a toy). Infants with language delay showed similar but attenuated growth in their communication. However, infants later diagnosed with ASD did not display enhanced communication after they began to walk.

The objective of this case study was to identify the role of finger gestures in learning mathematics informally during play, especially in sociocultural settings. A mathematical activity involving addition was qualitatively analyzed at a Japanese preschool. We explored how the process of subjectification and objectification contributed to a mathematical activity at a Japanese preschool and how the role of preschoolers' finger gestures changed during the process of learning mathematics. We utilized Radford's theoretical construct of joint labor and analyzed Japanese preschool children's mathematical behaviors from a sociocultural perspective. The subjects were 15 Japanese preschool children and their teacher. We relied on both Radford's methodology and a microgenetic approach for the analysis. We found that subjectification and objectification proceeded in the scene of the conversations regarding addition; observing joint labor in a classroom activity offered valuable insights into these processes. In the activity, the children actively extended their practice of posing and answering quizzes, and learned how to resolve a conflict with the support of the teacher. Secondly, although the role of finger gestures was originally used to obtain correct answers to quizzes, it was reconstructed to solve the conflict between the children through the teacher's mediation. This showed that, even in an environment where children implicitly learn mathematics, they learn from one another, including the teacher, and that gestures in mathematical communications function well for developing mathematical thinking and skills.

Purpose: The current study examined the predictive role of gestures and gesture-speech combinations on later spoken language outcomes in minimally verbal (MV) autistic children enrolled in a blended naturalistic developmental/behavioral intervention (Joint Attention, Symbolic Play, Engagement, and Regulation [JASPER] + Enhanced Milieu Teaching [EMT]). Method: Participants were 50 MV autistic children (40 boys), ages 54-105 months (M = 75.54, SD = 16.45). MV was defined as producing fewer than 20 spontaneous, unique, and socially communicative words. Autism symptom severity (Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule--Second Edition) and nonverbal cognitive skills (Leiter-R Brief IQ) were assessed at entry. A natural language sample (NLS), a 20-min examiner-child interaction with specified toys, was collected at entry (Week 1) and exit (Week 18) from JASPER + EMT intervention. The NLS was coded for gestures (deictic, conventional, and representational) and gesture-speech combinations (reinforcing, disambiguating, supplementary, other) at entry and spoken language outcomes: speech quantity (rate of speech utterances) and speech quality (number of different words [NDW] and mean length of utterance in words [MLUw]) at exit using European Distributed Corpora Project Linguistic Annotator and Systematic Analysis of Language Transcripts. Results: Controlling for nonverbal IQ and autism symptom severity at entry, rate of gesture-speech combinations (but not gestures alone) at entry was a significant predictor of rate of speech utterances and MLUw at exit. The rate of supplementary gesture-speech combinations, in particular, significantly predicted rate of speech utterances and NDW at exit. Conclusion: These findings highlight the critical importance of gestural communication, particularly gesture-speech (supplementary) combinations in supporting spoken language development in MV autistic children.

Research has consistently shown that difficulties in facial emotion recognition (FER) are associated with peer problems and internalizing symptoms during middle childhood. However, no longitudinal research has investigated the direction of effects, that is, how these constructs influence each other across time. In this preregistered three-wave panel study, we tested the directional effects between FER, peer problems, and internalizing symptoms among Finnish school-aged children (n = 3,607; M[subscript age] = 8.20, SD[subscript age] = 0.86; 51% female). The results of random-intercept cross-lagged panel models showed that a low FER accuracy and high biases toward happiness and sadness correlated with higher levels of peer problems and internalizing symptoms at the between-person level. However, we found no evidence of directional effects at the within-person level. Overall, our findings suggest that these constructs might be associated because of shared underlying causes, rather than mutually influencing one another in middle childhood.

The current study examined to what extent face and speech processing interact with each other and whether they enhance or impair the processing of the other in 5-year-olds (n = 51) and adults (n = 34). Using a computer-based speeded sorting task allowed to directly test the influence of auditory speech on face processing and the influence of face identity on auditory speech processing within one experiment. Participants were asked to either sort faces while ignoring auditory speech information (face task) or to sort auditory speech while ignoring face information (speech task). The tasks comprised three conditions: control (irrelevant dimension constant), correlational (congruent pairing of relevant and irrelevant dimension), and orthogonal (random pairing). For the 5-year-olds, reaction times did not differ in the face task, but differed in the speech task. They were the fastest in the control and the slowest in the orthogonal compared with the constant conditions. Adults' reaction times were similar across conditions and tasks indicating an independent processing of faces and speech. Hence, we found an asymmetrical processing pattern between face and auditory speech processing in children, in which face identity is processed independent of auditory speech; however, auditory speech processing is affected by face identity.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the relations among children's symbolic functioning at 15 months, joint attention at 24 months, expressive communication at 24 and 36 months, and executive functioning at 36 months. With the sample from rural areas in the United States collected by the Family Life Project (N = 1,008), a longitudinal data analysis was conducted. The results of structural equation modeling suggested that children's symbolic functioning at 15 months and children's executive functioning at 36 months was directly related to each other. These two variables were also indirectly related to each other through joint attention at 24 months and expressive communication at 24 and 36 months. Psychological distancing and verbal and nonverbal communication were used to explain the role symbolic functioning plays in the development of executive functioning during the second and the third years of children's lives.

The present study identifies and maps the reflexive praxis of two experienced English as a foreign language (EFL) instructors as they reconstruct and negotiate textbook material in situ. An abundance of critical studies underscoring social injustices in the contents of globally published EFL textbooks do not sufficiently address the negotiation of their multimodal discourses during class time. Although reflexive teaching practice in language learning classrooms has a robust pool of research, limited scholarly attention has been given to the active negotiation of a textbook's multimodal discourse in Korean university classrooms. The present study asks: (1) How do two instructors at different Korean universities negotiate the contents of an EFL textbook with their students during class? (2) How do the students react to the multimodal discourse negotiated in their textbooks? (3) What pedagogical implications do the findings lend to EFL textbook instruction in Korean university contexts? Using Norris' (2004) framework for video transcription of multimodal interaction in two Korean university English communication classes, the findings reveal that reflexive negotiation between students and instructors is a kind of rhetorical accomplishment that lessens the potential for cultural marginalization in the multimodal discourse of EFL textbooks. Implications suggest that textbook reflexivity in situ raises the value of student EFL learning investments.

Academic misconduct is a growing problem in online education. While there are ways to curb academic misconduct in online exams, utilization of technology to proctor online exams in a simple manner in limited-resource settings remain unclear. This study set out to identify a reliable technique for utilizing webcam footage to identify instances of academic dishonesty. Instead of applying component-based feature extraction, this study provides a deep learning-based approach to online exam proctoring that recognizes exam candidates' behaviors directly from video input. By using an online exam dataset consisting of twenty-four test-takers who replicate real-world actions, experimental results show the efficiency of the approach. The article provides a collection of webcam recordings with annotated actions to evaluate the proposed approach. The findings show that a deep learning model using the Slow Only variation has a true detection rate of 78.9%. The visualization module reduces the amount of time invigilators must spend watching videos to capture academic misbehaviors by offering a comprehensive graphical view with details of a candidate's actions during an exam. The study's conclusions will help design an effective and efficient system for online exam proctoring in resource-constrained environments.

Utilizing a novel computerized task, we aimed to examine whether social anxiety symptoms would be related to individual differences in facial emotion recognition (FER) in a sample of autistic male adolescents and young adults without intellectual disability. Results indicated that social anxiety and IQ predicted poorer FER, irrespective of specific emotion type. When probing specific effects within emotion and condition types, social anxiety impacted surprise and disgust FER during a "truncated" viewing condition and not "full viewing" condition. Collectively, results suggest that social anxiety in autism may play a larger role in FER than previously thought. Future work should consider the role of social anxiety within autism as a factor that may meaningfully relate to FER assessment and intervention.

The purpose of this study was to examine potential differences in social learning between individuals with fragile X syndrome (FXS), the leading known inherited cause of intellectual disability, and individuals with non-syndromic autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Thirty school-aged males with FXS and 26 age and symptom-matched males with non-syndromic ASD, were administered a behavioral treatment probe designed to improve levels of social gaze during interactions with others. The treatment probe was administered by a trained behavior therapist over two days in our laboratory and included reinforcement of social gaze in two alternating training conditions -- looking while listening and looking while speaking. Prior to each session, children in each group were taught progressive muscle relaxation and breathing techniques to counteract potential increased hyperarousal. Measures included the rate of learning in each group during treatment, in addition to levels of social gaze and heart rate obtained during administration of a standardized social conversation task administered prior to and following the treatment probe. Results showed that learning rates obtained during administration of the treatment probe were significantly less steep and less variable for males with FXS compared to males with non-syndromic ASD. Significant improvements in social gaze were also observed for males with FXS during the social conversation task. There was no effect of the treatment probe on heart rate in either group. These data reveal important differences in social learning between the two groups and have implications for early interventions in the two conditions.

Recent evidence suggests that deaf children with CIs exposed to nonnative sign language from hearing parents can attain age-appropriate vocabularies in both sign and spoken language. It remains to be explored whether deaf children with CIs who are exposed to early nonnative sign language, but only up to implantation, also benefit from this input and whether these benefits also extend to memory abilities, which are strongly linked to language development. The present study examined the impact of deaf children's early short-term exposure to nonnative sign input on their spoken language and their phonological memory abilities. Deaf children who had been exposed to nonnative sign input before and after cochlear implantation were compared to deaf children who never had any exposure to sign input as well as to children with typical hearing. The children were between 5;1 and 7;1 years of age at the time of testing and were matched on age, sex, and socioeconomic status. The results suggest that even short-term exposure to nonnative sign input has positive effects on general language and phonological memory abilities as well as on nonverbal working memory--with total length of exposure to sign input being the best predictor of deaf children's performance on these measures. The present data suggest that even access to early short-term nonnative visual language input is beneficial for the language and phonological memory abilities of deaf children with cochlear implants, suggesting also that parents should not be discouraged from learning and exposing their child to sign language.

It is known that the rhythms of speech are visible on the face, accurately mirroring changes in the vocal tract. These low-frequency visual temporal movements are tightly correlated with speech output, and both visual speech (e.g., mouth motion) and the acoustic speech amplitude envelope entrain neural oscillations. Low-frequency visual temporal information ('visual prosody') is known from behavioural studies to be perceived by infants, but oscillatory studies are currently lacking. Here we measure cortical tracking of low-frequency visual temporal information by 5- and 8-month-old infants using a rhythmic speech paradigm (repetition of the syllable 'ta' at 2 Hz). Eye-tracking data were collected simultaneously with EEG, enabling computation of cortical tracking and phase angle during visual-only speech presentation. Significantly higher power at the stimulus frequency indicated that cortical tracking occurred across both ages. Further, individual differences in preferred phase to visual speech related to subsequent measures of language acquisition. The difference in phase between visual-only speech and the same speech presented as auditory-visual at 6- and 9-months was also examined. These neural data suggest that individual differences in early language acquisition may be related to the phase of entrainment to visual rhythmic input in infancy.

The improvements in attention by mindfulness training have been proved. However, the effects of mindfulness training on attention to emotional stimuli were mixed. We employed a randomized, controlled design to investigate the effects of mindfulness training on attention to emotional expressions, and investigated whether baseline levels of dispositional mindfulness and emotional intelligence would moderate the intervention effects. Forty participants received 8-week mindfulness training, and another forty participants attended two lectures about mindfulness. All participants completed the visual search task, the Five Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire, and the Emotional Intelligence Scale at both pre-training and post-training. The results showed that the improvements in search efficiencies were larger in the mindfulness group than those in the control group for sad and angry faces, but not for happy faces. In addition, baseline emotional intelligence but not dispositional mindfulness played a significant moderating role in the relationship between mindfulness training and emotional attention to sadness and anger. The search efficiencies of negative emotions (i.e., anger and sadness) but not positive emotions (i.e., happiness) were significantly improved by mindfulness training. Individuals with a high level of baseline emotional intelligence showed significant improvement in search efficiencies relative to those with a low level of emotional intelligence.

Gestures--hand movements that accompany speech and express ideas--can help children learn how to solve problems, flexibly generalize learning to novel problem-solving contexts, and retain what they have learned. But does it matter who is doing the gesturing? We know that producing gesture leads to better comprehension of a message than watching someone else produce gesture. But we do not know how producing versus observing gesture impacts deeper learning outcomes such as generalization and retention across time. Moreover, not all children benefit equally from gesture instruction, suggesting that there are individual differences that may play a role in who learns from gesture. Here, we consider two factors that might impact whether gesture leads to learning, generalization, and retention after mathematical instruction: (1) whether children see gesture or do gesture and (2) whether a child spontaneously gestures before instruction when explaining their problem-solving reasoning. For children who spontaneously gestured before instruction, both doing and seeing gesture led to better generalization and retention of the knowledge gained than a comparison manipulative action. For children who did not spontaneously gesture before instruction, doing gesture was less effective than the comparison action for learning, generalization, and retention. Importantly, this learning deficit was specific to gesture, as these children did benefit from doing the comparison manipulative action. Our findings are the first evidence that a child's use of a particular representational format for communication (gesture) directly predicts that child's propensity to learn from using the same representational format.

With the widespread use of masks in the COVID-19 pandemic, it is crucial to understand how emotion recognition is affected by partial face covering. Since individuals with autism spectrum condition often tend to look at the lower half of the face, they are likely to be particularly restricted in emotion recognition by people wearing masks, since they are now forced to look at the upper half of the face. This study compared the recognition of basic and complex emotions in individuals with and without autism spectrum condition, when faces were presented uncovered, with face masks, or with sunglasses. We also used eye tracking to examine group differences in gaze patterns during emotion recognition. Individuals with autism spectrum condition were less accurate at recognizing emotions in all three conditions. Averaged across the three stimulus types, individuals with autism spectrum condition had greater difficulty recognizing anger, fear, pride, and embarrassment than control group. There was no group difference in emotion recognition between the three conditions. However, compared to individuals without autism spectrum condition, there was no evidence of either gaze avoidance or preference for the mouth region. Our results suggest that emotion recognition is reduced in individuals with autism spectrum condition, but this is not due to differences in gaze patterns.

Being looked at is an important communicative signal, and attenuated responses to such direct gaze have been suggested as an early sign of autism. Using live eye tracking, we examined whether direct gaze elicits different gaze responses in infants at ages 10, 14 and 18 months with and without later autism in real-life interaction. The sample consisted of 169 infants: 35 with elevated likelihood of autism and subsequent diagnosis, 94 without subsequent diagnosis and 40 with typical likelihood of autism. Infants in all groups tended to look more towards the adult's face shortly after the direct gaze occurred. Neither how much nor how quickly the infants responded to the direct gaze differentiated the without elevated likelihood of autism and subsequent diagnosis and with elevated likelihood of autism and subsequent diagnosis groups. Infants in the typical likelihood group looked more at the face after the direct-gaze event than infants in the two elevated likelihood groups, but this result is tentative. In an exploratory analysis, infants in the elevated likelihood of autism and subsequent diagnosis group looked away quicker from faces with direct gaze than infants in the typical likelihood group, but this measure did not correlate with dimensional autism or differentiate between the two elevated likelihood groups. The current results suggest that attenuated behavioural responses to direct gaze in infancy are neither strong nor specific early markers of autism.

Children all over the world learn language, yet the contexts in which they do so vary substantially. This variation needs to be systematically quantified to build robust and generalizable theories of language acquisition. We compared communicative interactions between parents and their 2-year-old children (N = 99 families) during mealtime across five cultural settings (Brazil, Ecuador, Argentina, Germany, and Japan) and coded the amount of talk and gestures as well as their conversational embedding (interlocutors, function, and themes). We found a comparable pattern of communicative interactions across cultural settings, which were modified in ways that are consistent with local norms and values. These results suggest that children encounter similarly structured communicative environments across diverse cultural contexts and will inform theories of language learning.

The present study investigated the relation between continuous measures of two qualitatively different types of bilingual experience and outcome measures that varied in domain (verbal or nonverbal) and processing demands (degree of conflict). Participants were 195 English-speaking children, 7 years old, who were enrolled in French immersion programs. Children were assessed for their degree of "home bilingualism," reflecting language use patterns at home, and "school bilingualism," reflecting progress in learning French. None of the children spoke French at home. Participants completed verbal fluency, n-back, and global-local tasks, with conditions within tasks varying in degree of attentional processing required. Type of bilingual experience affected verbal and nonverbal tasks differently. Home bilingualism was positively associated with performance on attentionally demanding conditions of the n-back and global-local tasks, the two nonverbal tasks, whereas school bilingualism was positively associated with performance on English verbal fluency, the linguistic task. In both cases, results were modulated by the degree of bilingual experience. These results underline the importance of specifying the type and degree of bilingual experience and the details of the outcome tasks to understand the impact of bilingualism on children's development.

The present study investigates the effects of assertiveness training programs through folk dances on high school students' assertiveness levels. Pre-test post-test with control group design has been used to examine. Furthermore, a questionnaire including one open-ended question asked students to learn their opinion on training and its effects on themselves. Experiment and control group participants were administered the Rathus Assertiveness Inventory, and experiment group participants received a two-hour assertiveness training program through folk dances per week over eight weeks. The study sample included 203 students who were in first grade in the same school. Results revealed that students in the experiment group had significantly higher assertiveness levels than those in the control group (P<0.05), and experiment group students defined that this assertiveness training program positively affected them and increased their awareness about themselves.

Elementary music educators use a variety of strategies in classroom instruction. The purpose of this case study was to explore student perceptions of Curwen hand signs, a common instructional strategy in elementary music classrooms. Second- and third-grade students reported various challenges, benefits, and influential factors surrounding hand sign use. Results indicated that students enjoyed movement activities and benefited from visual and physical reminders of singing tasks during instruction. They described several challenges, including multitasking, required background knowledge, and distraction. Influential factors included a learning curve, accuracy, placement, pattern length and complexity, and enjoyment. The results of this study suggest that hand signs should be considered one instructional strategy in a toolbox of multiple approaches.

Autistic people often experience difficulties navigating face-to-face social interactions. Historically, the empirical literature has characterised these difficulties as cognitive 'deficits' in social information processing. However, the empirical basis for such claims is lacking, with most studies failing to capture the complexity of social interactions, often distilling them into singular communicative modalities (e.g. gaze-based communication) that are rarely used in isolation in daily interactions. The current study examined how gaze was used in concert with communicative hand gestures during joint attention interactions. We employed an immersive virtual reality paradigm, where autistic (n = 22) and non-autistic (n = 22) young people completed a collaborative task with a non-autistic confederate. Integrated eye-, head- and hand-motion-tracking enabled dyads to communicate naturally with each other while offering objective measures of attention and behaviour. Autistic people in our sample were similarly, if not more, effective in responding to hand-cued joint attention bids compared with non-autistic people. Moreover, both autistic and non-autistic people demonstrated an ability to adaptively use gaze information to aid coordination. Our findings suggest that the intersecting fields of autism and social neuroscience research may have overstated the role of eye gaze during coordinated social interactions.

Best practice for the assessment of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) symptom severity relies on clinician ratings of the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule, 2nd Edition (ADOS-2), but the association of these ratings with objective measures of children's social gaze and smiling is unknown. Sixty-six preschool-age children (49 boys, M = 39.97 months, SD = 10.58) with suspected ASD (61 confirmed ASD) were administered the ADOS-2 and provided social affect calibrated severity scores (SA CSS). Children's social gaze and smiling during the ADOS-2, captured with a camera contained in eyeglasses worn by the examiner and parent, were obtained via a computer vision processing pipeline. Children who gazed more at their parents (p = 0.04) and whose gaze at their parents involved more smiling (p = 0.02) received lower social affect severity scores, indicating fewer social affect symptoms, adjusted R[superscript 2] = 0.15, p = 0.003.

Using eye-tracking, we studied allocation of attention to faces where the emotional expression and eye-gaze dynamically changed in an ecologically-valid manner. We tested typically-developed (TD) adults low or high in autistic-like traits (Experiment 1), and adults with high-functioning autism (HFA; Experiment 2). All groups fixated more on the eyes than on any of the other facial area, regardless of emotion and gaze direction, though the HFA group fixated less on the eyes and more on the nose than TD controls. The sequence of dynamic facial changes affected the groups similarly, with reduced attention to the eyes and increased attention to the mouth. The results suggest that dynamic emotional face scanning patterns are stereotypical and differ only modestly between TD and HFA adults.

Gestures are one of the ways in which mathematical cognition is embodied and have been elevated as a potentially important semiotic device in the teaching of mathematics. As such, a better understanding of gestures used during mathematics instruction (including frequency of use, types of gestures, how they are used, and the possible relationship between gestures and student performance) would inform mathematics education. We aim to understand teachers' gestures in the context of early algebra, particularly in the teaching of the equal sign. Our findings suggest that the equal sign is a relatively rich environment for gestures, which are used in a variety of ways. Participating teachers used gestures frequently to support their teaching about the equal sign. Furthermore, the use of gestures varied depending on the particular conception of the equal sign the instruction aimed to promote. Finally, teacher gesture use in this context is correlated with students' high performance on an early algebra assessment.

A majority of children's language learning experiences occur in inclusive early child care and education settings. Few evidence-based professional development (PD) programs exist to empower early childhood education providers to use language instruction practices with children in inclusive classrooms. There is little research on providers' implementation of naturalistic developmental behavioral intervention (NDBI) strategies to improve children's language outcomes in whole-group inclusive instruction. We conducted a pilot cluster randomized controlled trial to test the hypothesis that providers in the Early Achievements for Child Care Providers (EA-CP) PD program would show greater gains in NDBI implementation fidelity during shared book reading relative to business-as-usual (BAU) providers. This hypothesis was confirmed. Compared to BAU providers, EA-CP providers exhibited significantly greater fidelity gains from pre-training to mid-training, post-training, and 12-week maintenance assessments. A secondary hypothesis was that toddlers with and without developmental delays in the EA-CP condition would exhibit greater vocabulary and communication gains than toddlers in the BAU condition. Analyses of children with and without delays showed significantly greater expressive vocabulary and story-related engagement and communication in the EA-CP group. For children with delays, positive effects favoring the EA-CP group but not statistically significant were found. Implications for research, practice, and policy are discussed.

Background: Research into enhancing the effectiveness of information delivery in asynchronous video lectures remains sparse. This study analyzes the nonverbal teaching behaviours in asynchronous online videos, drawing comparisons between pre-service and in-service teachers (ITs). Objectives: This research primarily aims to juxtapose the nonverbal teaching behaviours, such as arm extensions and body orientation, utilized by pre-service teachers (PTs) and ITs within asynchronous online videos. Methods: Asynchronous video lectures from four pre-service and four ITs across four diverse subject topics were scrutinized. Leveraging deep learning technology, teachers' poses during their instruction towards a video camera were quantified, with a particular focus on arm stretch range and body orientation in relation to the subject being taught. Results: The findings revealed that PTs were deficient in effectively employing pointing gestures. Their arm stretches and body orientation towards the board were not differentiated across subjects. Conversely, ITs demonstrated subject-specific variations in their arm extension and body orientation, signalling their effective strategies for knowledge dissemination. Conclusions and Discussion: This study emphasizes the importance of assessing nonverbal teaching behaviours in the development of effective instructional training. It accentuates the need for nonverbal communication and subject-specific teaching strategy training in PTs. Future investigations could broaden their scope to include larger sample sizes and expanded subject areas to discern more comprehensive trends in nonverbal teaching behaviours.

Teaching an infant manual signs is beneficial as it promotes early communication, improves socialization, and can functionally replace behaviors such as crying and whining. Improving early communication also may reduce the probability of an infant engaging in dangerous behavior, like unsafe climbing. The purpose of this study was to extend Thompson et al. (Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis 40:15-23, 2007) by teaching an 8-month-old infant, who was noted to display developmental delays, to sign for "help" when preferred items were inaccessible. Similar to Thompson et al., delayed prompting and differential reinforcement was efficacious in teaching the infant to sign for "help," and the skill generalized to situations that were previously associated with unsafe climbing. However, undesirable generalization of signs for "help" when the infant could independently access the items was observed. Additional teaching was necessary to ensure signing for "help" occurred under appropriate antecedent control.

Successful computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) relies on collaborative group engagement, a complex construct characterized by multifaceted, dynamic, socio-emotional, and socio-cognitive processes. This paper provides a detailed analysis of collaborative group engagement, with a particular focus on nonverbal behaviors as indicators of high versus low group engagement. Using video observations and a multi-method approach, we examine in detail the relationships between different dimensions of group engagement (i.e., behavioral, social, cognitive, and conceptual-to-consequential engagement) and nonverbal behaviors. Using qualitative case analysis, we also provide a rich examination of selected cases to identify the role that nonverbal behaviors play in high-engagement sequences compared with low-engagement sequences. Our findings shed light on specific nonverbal behaviors, including nodding, laughing, and eye contact, as significant indicators of high versus low collaborative group engagement. Notably, more of these nonverbal behaviors are evident in high-engagement sequences, suggesting mutual reinforcement on each dimension of engagement--with the exception of behavioral engagement, where increased laughing or smiling is evident in low-engagement sequences, but still serves a productive group process. The paper concludes with a discussion and implications of the findings. By demonstrating the role of nonverbal behaviors as important indicators, this work contributes to the understanding of the complex, dynamic, and contextualized nature of collaborative group engagement in CSCL settings.

Learning engagement is an essential indication to define students' learning pacification in the class, and its automated identification technique is the foundation for exploring how to effectively explain the motive of learning impact modifications and making intelligent teaching choices. Current research have demonstrated that there is a direct link between learning engagement and emotional investment and behavioural investment, and it is appropriate and required to apply artificial intelligence to perform autonomous assessment. Unfortunately, the number of relevant research is limited, and the features of learning engagement in certain contexts have not been thoroughly examined. In this research, we highlight the features of a particular application scenario of learning engagement: the application scenario of learning engagement has to incorporate both the coarse-grained information of human body position and the fine-grained information of facial expressions. On the basis of this analysis, a fine-grained learning participation recognition model that suppresses background clutter information is presented. This model can effectively extract coarse and fine-grained information to improve the recognition of learning participation in real-world teaching situations. Particularly, the CNN-Transformer model suggested in this study employs CNN to extract fine-grained information of facial expressions and Transformer to recover coarse-grained information of human body position. Simultaneously, we gathered and categorised real teaching data based on the features of learning engagement situations and enhanced the data quality via crowdsourcing and expert verification. The experimental findings indicate that the CNN-Transformer model can accurately predict the learning engagement of unknown participants with a 92.9% rate of accuracy. Comparative trials reveal that the model's recognition impact is much greater than that of other sophisticated deep learning approaches. Our research offers a framework for future work on deep learning approaches in learning engagement settings.

Negation is usually considered as a linguistic operator reversing the truth value of a proposition. However, there are various ways to express negation in a multimodal manner. It still remains an unresolved issue whether nonverbal expressions of negation can influence linguistic negation comprehension. Based on extensive evidence demonstrating that language comprehenders are able to instantly integrate extralinguistic information such as a speaker's identity, we expected that nonverbal cues of negation and affirmation might similarly affect sentence comprehension. In three preregistered experiments, we examined how far nonverbal markers of negation and affirmation--specifically, the so-called "not face" (see Benitez-Quiroz et al., 2016) and red or green color (see Dudschig et al., 2023)--interact with comprehending negation and affirmation at the sentential level. Participants were presented with photos ("not face" vs. positive control; Experiments 1 and 2) or color patches (red vs. green; Experiment 3). They then read negated and affirmative sentences in a self-paced manner or judged the sensibility of negated and affirmative sentences (e.g., "No, I do not want to sing" vs. "Yes, I would like to buy a sofa"). Both frequentist statistics and Bayes factors resulting from linear mixed-effects analyses showed that processing times for negated and affirmative sentences were not significantly modulated by the nonverbal features under investigation. This indicates that their influence might not extend to sentential negation or affirmation comprehension.

Causal reasoning is important to children's cognition and academic development. However, there have been few empirical studies on the impact of visual cues and non-verbal scaffolding on children's reasoning in continuous causal processes. Hence, the present study aims to explore how causal reasoning in continuous processes is facilitated by visual mind maps and multiple-choice questions through science experiments. By randomly selecting 136 children aged 9-13, the following results were obtained: Children provided with a mind map containing visual causal cues performed significantly better than the non-cue group on explanation tasks regardless of age differences, and children assessed using non-verbal multiple-choice questions scored significantly higher in explaining causal relationships than those using only verbal reports. This suggests that identification and explanation need to be differentiated for a more accurate evaluation of causal reasoning ability. These results have valuable implications for science curriculum and pedagogy at primary schools.

As an important resource in online learning, video lectures have attracted considerable research attention in the impact of teachers' nonverbal guidance behaviors on learning. However, few studies have focused on secondary education, and it remains unclear whether the interaction between different guidance frequencies and types leads to variations in the effectiveness of guidance. This study tested the mutual effects of instructor's guidance frequency and type on secondary school students' learning performance (retention scores, transfer scores) and affective experiences (cognitive load, learning experience, learning satisfaction). A total of 202 secondary school students were randomly assigned to watch one of the four video lectures, using a 2 (guidance frequency: low-frequency guidance, high-frequency guidance) × 2 (guidance type: gesture guidance, gesture + gaze guidance) between-groups design. The study was conducted in a multimedia classroom setting. The results showed that low-frequency guidance by instructors contributed to improved learning performance. Specifically, under low-frequency guidance conditions, gesture guidance was more effective in enhancing retention, while gesture + gaze guidance facilitated learners' transfer. Moreover, low-frequency gesture + gaze guidance by teachers resulted in better affective experiences for students, as evident in cognitive load, learning experience, and learning satisfaction. Therefore, it is recommended that instructors lecturing for secondary students adopt appropriate types of low-frequency guidance according to the level of learning difficulty to improve teaching effectiveness.

Purpose: The aim of this research note is to introduce a new appraisal form, the Classroom Communication and Collaboration (C3) Appraisal, designed to evaluate communication and collaboration within classroom settings. Method: A comprehensive synthesis of the key skills from a broad range of publications on successful communication and collaboration in the classroom was conducted. The resulting appraisal comprises 39 items across six scales: crafting clear messages, appropriateness of communication exchange, active listening, pragmatics and discourse, communication breakdown, and collaboration. To demonstrate its application, an exemplar usage of the C3 Appraisal involving a hearing child and a child with hearing loss engaged in a collaborative learning task is presented. Results: The C3 Appraisal allowed for the quality and successfulness of the collaborative learning task between the two children to be assessed and quantified across the six scales. Conclusions: These findings highlight the utility of the C3 Appraisal as a valuable tool for evaluating communication and collaboration in classroom environments. Next steps are to test the reliability and validity of the C3 Appraisal on a large data set.

Purpose: Thirty percent of children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) do not develop spoken language. To provide a means of communication for this subset of the population, augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) systems are often utilized. Low-tech options have traditionally been delivered through the in-person modality. However, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, changes to service delivery models have been required. This randomized controlled trial was conducted in order to assess the efficacy of low-tech AAC delivered face-to-face versus remotely on communication outcomes in nonspeaking children with ASD. Conclusions: Both participant groups demonstrated similar gains in AAC proficiency, number and type of nonspeaking acts, and number of spoken communication acts. Remote delivery of low-tech AAC treatment is a viable alternative to face-to-face instruction.

Acquisition of visual attention-following skills, notably gaze- and point-following, contributes to infants' ability to share attention with caregivers, which in turn contributes to social learning and communication. However, the development of gaze- and point-following in the first 18 months remains controversial, in part because of different testing protocols and standards. To address this, we longitudinally tested N = 43 low-risk, North American middle-class infants' tendency to follow gaze direction, pointing gestures, and gaze-and-point combinations. Infants were tested monthly from 4 to 12 months of age. To control motivational differences, infants were taught to expect contingent reward videos in the target locations. No-cue trials were included to estimate spontaneous target fixation rates. A comparison sample (N = 23) was tested at 9 and 12 months to estimate practice effects. Results showed gradual increases in both gaze- and point-following starting around 7 months, and modest month-to-month individual stability from 8 to 12 months. However, attention-following did not exceed chance levels until after 6 months. Infants rarely followed cues to locations behind them, even at 12 months. Infants followed combined gaze-and-point cues more than gaze alone, and followed points at intermediate levels (not reliably different from the other cues). The comparison group's results showed that practice effects did not explain the age-related increase in attention-following. The results corroborate and extend previous findings that North American middle-class infants' attention-following in controlled laboratory settings increases slowly and incrementally between 6 and 12 months of age.

We evaluate the impact of gestures during the teaching of vocabulary in a foreign language (FL). Spanish speakers learned words in a FL in four gesture conditions according to the relationship between the meaning of the words and the gestures (congruent gestures, incongruent gestures, gestures without meaning, and no gestures). The participants learned the words by performing gestures ('do' teaching group) or by observing the gestures performed by others ('see' teaching group). Compared to the meaningless gesture condition, the processing of congruent gestures facilitated the recall of second language (L2) words in the 'see' and 'do' teaching groups. However, the interference effect associated with the processing of incongruent gestures was greater in the 'see' teaching group than in the 'do' teaching group. Thus, the performance of gestures seems to mitigate the negative impact that the use of gestures may have on the teaching of vocabulary in a foreign language.

Research has demonstrated that deaf children of deaf signing parents (DOD) are afforded developmental advantages. This can be misconstrued as indicating that no DOD children exhibit early language delays (ELDs) because of their early access to a visual language. Little research has studied this presumption. In this study, we examine 174 ratings of DOD 3- to 5-year-old children, for whom signing in the home was indicated, using archival data from the online database of the Visual Communication and Sign Language Checklist. Our goals were to (1) examine the incidence of ELDs in a cohort of DOD children; (2) compare alternative scaling strategies for identifying ELD children; (3) explore patterns among behavioral ratings with a view toward developing a greater understanding of the types of language behaviors that may lie at the root of language delays; and (4) suggest recommendations for parents and professionals working with language-delayed DOD children. The results indicated that a significant number of ratings suggested ELDs, with a subset significantly delayed. These children likely require further evaluation. Among the less delayed group, ASL skills, rather than communication or cognition, were seen as the major concern, suggesting that even DOD children may require support developing linguistically accurate ASL. Overall, these findings support the need for early and ongoing evaluation of visual language skills in young DOD children.