Impaired inhibitory control when processing real but not cartoon emotional faces in autistic children: Evidence from an event-related potential study.

Impaired socioemotional functioning characterizes autistic children, but does weak inhibition control underlie their socioemotional difficulty? This study addressed this question by examining whether and, if so, how inhibition control is affected by face realism and emotional valence in school-age autistic and neurotypical children. Fifty-two autistic and 52 age-matched neurotypical controls aged 10-12 years completed real and cartoon emotional face Go/Nogo tasks while event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded. The analyses of inhibition-emotion components (i.e., N2, P3, and LPP) and a face-specific N170 revealed that autistic children elicited greater N2 while inhibiting Nogo trials and greater P3/LPP and late LPP for real but not cartoon emotional faces. Moreover, autistic children exhibited a reduced N170 to real face emotions only. Furthermore, correlation results showed that better behavioral inhibition and emotion recognition in autistic children were associated with a reduced N170. These findings suggest that neural mechanisms of inhibitory control in autistic children are less efficient and more disrupted during real face processing, which may affect their age-appropriate socio-emotional development.

DysDiTect: Dyslexia Identification Using CNN-Positional-LSTM-Attention Modeling with Chinese Dictation Task.

Handwriting difficulty is a defining feature of Chinese developmental dyslexia (DD) due to the complex structure and dense information contained within compound characters. Despite previous attempts to use deep neural network models to extract handwriting features, the temporal property of writing characters in sequential order during dictation tasks has been neglected. By combining transfer learning of convolutional neural network (CNN) and positional encoding with the temporal-sequential encoding of long short-term memory (LSTM) and attention mechanism, we trained and tested the model with handwriting images of 100,000 Chinese characters from 1064 children in Grades 2-6 (DD = 483; Typically Developing [TD] = 581). Using handwriting features only, the best model reached 83.2% accuracy, 79.2% sensitivity, 86.4% specificity, and 91.2% AUC. With grade information, the best model achieved 85.0% classification accuracy, 83.3% sensitivity, 86.4% specificity, and 89.7% AUC. These findings suggest the potential of utilizing machine learning technology to identify children at risk for dyslexia at an early age.

Temporal dynamics and neural variabilities underlying the interplay between emotion and inhibition in Chinese autistic children.

This study investigated the neural dynamics underlying the interplay between emotion and inhibition in Chinese autistic children. Electroencephalography (EEG) signals were recorded from 50 autistic and 46 non-autistic children during an emotional Go/Nogo task. Based on single-trial ERP analyses, autistic children, compared to their non-autistic peers, showed a larger Nogo-N170 for angry faces and an increased Nogo-N170 amplitude variation for happy faces during early visual perception. They also displayed a smaller N200 for all faces and a diminished Nogo-N200 amplitude variation for happy and neutral faces during inhibition monitoring and preparation. During the late stage, autistic children showed a larger posterior-Go-P300 for angry faces and an augmented posterior-Nogo-P300 for happy and neutral faces. These findings clarify the differences in neural processing of emotional stimuli and inhibition between Chinese autistic and non-autistic children, highlighting the importance of considering these dynamics when designing intervention to improve emotion regulation in autistic children.

Unraveling the complex interplay between statistical learning and working memory in Chinese children with and without dyslexia across different ages.

The relation between statistical learning and working memory in children with developmental dyslexia (DD) remains unclear. This study employed a distributional and a conditional statistical learning experiment and a working memory task to examine this relation in 651 Chinese 6- to 12-year-olds with and without DD (NDD = 199, 101 females; NwoDD = 452, 227 females; participated 2014-2019). Results showed working memory positively associated with recognizing high-predictable and familiar items in both groups, but negatively associated with recognizing unfamiliar items in the DD group only. These findings uncovered the complex interplay between statistical learning and working memory, demonstrating how different working memory abilities in children with and without DD relate to various statistical learning mechanisms at the item level.

Unraveling Temporal Dynamics of Multidimensional Statistical Learning in Implicit and Explicit Systems: An X-Way Hypothesis.

Statistical learning enables humans to involuntarily process and utilize different kinds of patterns from the environment. However, the cognitive mechanisms underlying the simultaneous acquisition of multiple regularities from different perceptual modalities remain unclear. A novel multidimensional serial reaction time task was developed to test 40 participants' ability to learn simple first-order and complex second-order relations between uni-modal visual and cross-modal audio-visual stimuli. Using the difference in reaction times between sequenced and random stimuli as the index of domain-general statistical learning, a significant difference and dissociation of learning occurred between the initial and final learning phases. Furthermore, we used a negative and positive occurrence-frequency-and-reaction-time correlation to indicate implicit and explicit learning, respectively, and found that learning simple uni-modal patterns involved an implicit-to-explicit segue, while acquiring complex cross-modal patterns required an explicit-to-implicit segue, resulting in a X-shape crossing of regularity learning. Thus, we propose an X-way hypothesis to elucidate the dynamic interplay between the implicit and explicit systems at two distinct stages when acquiring various regularities in a multidimensional probability space.

Cue predictiveness and uncertainty determine cue representation during visual statistical learning.

This study investigated how humans process probabilistic-associated information when encountering varying levels of uncertainty during implicit visual statistical learning. A novel probabilistic cueing validation paradigm was developed to probe the representation of cues with high (75% probability), medium (50%), low (25%), or zero levels of predictiveness in response to preceding targets that appeared with high (75%), medium (50%), or low (25%) transitional probabilities (TPs). Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrated a significant negative association between cue probe identification accuracy and cue predictiveness when these cues appeared after high-TP but not medium-TP or low-TP targets, establishing exploration-like cue processing triggered by lower-uncertainty rather than high-uncertainty inputs. Experiment 3 ruled out the confounding factor of probe repetition and extended this finding by demonstrating (1) enhanced representation of low-predictive and zero-predictive but not high-predictive cues across blocks after high-TP targets and (2) enhanced representation of high-predictive but not low-predictive and zero-predictive cues across blocks after low-TP targets for learners who exhibited above-chance awareness of cue-target transition. These results suggest that during implicit statistical learning, input characteristics alter cue-processing mechanisms, such that exploration-like and exploitation-like mechanisms are triggered by lower-uncertainty and higher-uncertainty cue-target sequences, respectively.

Speech Prosody and Reading Comprehension in Chinese-English Bilingual Children: The Mediating Role of Syntactic Awareness.

PURPOSE: Although children's prosodic sensitivity links with their reading comprehension, the factors affecting this link remain unclear. By simultaneously measuring first language (L1) Chinese and second language (L2) English prosodic sensitivity and reading comprehension, this study examined the mediating role of syntactic awareness on prosody-reading comprehension among Hong Kong Chinese-English bilingual children. METHOD: A group of 227 Hong Kong Chinese-English bilingual fourth graders completed L1 and L2 prosodic sensitivity (Cantonese lexical tone awareness and English prosodic sensitivity), syntactic awareness, and reading comprehension and control measures of cognitive (nonverbal IQ, short-term memory, and working memory), metalinguistic (phonological awareness and morphological awareness), linguistic (vocabulary knowledge), and word reading skills. RESULTS: The within-language analyses showed a partial mediation effect of Chinese syntactic awareness on the relation between Cantonese lexical tone awareness and Chinese reading comprehension, but a full mediation effect of English syntactic awareness on the relation between English prosodic sensitivity and English reading comprehension. The cross-language analyses revealed a significant direct effect of Cantonese lexical tone awareness on English reading comprehension and a significant indirect effect of English prosodic sensitivity on Chinese reading comprehension via Chinese syntactic awareness. CONCLUSION: These findings suggest that, despite the language-independent mediating role of syntactic awareness in bridging prosody and reading comprehension, the degree of this mediation is shaped by language-specific prosody and its relations with other linguistic structures, including semantics.

Development and validation of the online learning process questionnaire (OLPQ) at home for primary-school children and their caregivers.

Despite the increasing use of virtual modalities in schools since the COVID-19 pandemic, no systematic tools exist to evaluate the process of online learning. We developed and validated an Online Learning Process Questionnaire (OLPQ) for assessing online at-home learning among 219 Hong Kong primary-school students and 474 caregivers. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses of caregivers' data classified the 58-item OLPQ into 11 subscales: (1) learning aims, (2) environmental structuring, (3) learning environment, (4) time management, (5) engagement in learning activities, (6) persistence, (7) interaction between teachers and students, (8) interaction among students, (9) feedback from the interface, (10) application of learning, and (11) meaning of learning under three learning phases. Confirmatory factor analysis of students' data further categorized the 11-subscale framework into three learning phases: preparatory, performance, and transfer. The OLPQ demonstrated excellent reliability and discriminant validity across caregiver (Cronbach's alpha = 0.98) and student samples (alpha = 0.98). These findings indicate that the OLPQ is a valid and reliable instrument for assessing the online at-home learning process among both students and their caregivers.

Multiple mechanisms regulate statistical learning of orthographic regularities in school-age children: Neurophysiological evidence.

Using event-related potentials (ERPs), this study investigated how the brains of Chinese children of different ages extract and encode relational patterns contained in orthographic input. Ninety-nine Chinese children in Grades 1-3 performed an artificial orthography statistical learning task that comprised logographic components embedded in characters with high (100%), moderate (80%), and low (60%) positional consistency. The behavioral results indicated that across grades, participants more accurately recognized characters with high rather than low consistency. The neurophysiological results revealed that in each grade, the amplitude of some ERP components differed, with a larger P1 effect in the high consistency condition and a larger N170 and left-lateralized P300 effect in the low consistency condition. A smaller N170 effect occurred in Grade 3 than in Grade 1, and a larger P300 effect occurred in Grade 1 than in either Grade 2 or 3. These findings suggest the dynamic nature of statistical learning by showing that neural adaptation associated with N170, and attention and working memory related to P1 and P300, regulate different types of structural input, and that children's abilities to prioritize these mechanisms vary with context and age.

Psychosocial factors, but not professional practice skills, linked to self-perceived effectiveness of telepractice in school-based speech and language therapists during COVID-19 pandemic.

BACKGROUND: Face-to-face class suspensions during the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic in 2019 increased telepractice in speech and language therapy. However, little is known about speech and language therapists' (SLTs) perceived effectiveness of telepractice and its antecedents. AIMS: To examine the use of telepractice and the factors affecting its perceived effectiveness in Hong Kong mainstream schools during COVID-19. METHODS & PROCEDURES: Seventy-two school-based Hong Kong SLTs completed a 110-item online survey with six structural components: (1) concerns, (2) adoption, (3) student selection criteria, (4) perceived effectiveness, (5) continuous professional development and (6) attitudes/beliefs. OUTCOMES & RESULTS: Over 90% of respondents adopted telepractice during the pandemic. Confirmatory factor analysis identified reliable constructs from their component measures. These participants reported great telepractice difficulties (especially in therapy preparation and managing students' attention and/or communication). Mixed-response analysis revealed that psychosocial factors (i.e., students' engagement and SLTs' attitudes towards telepractice) but not professional practice skill factors (i.e., student client selection criteria and SLTs' years of experience in school settings) contributed to SLTs' self-perceived effectiveness of telepractice. CONCLUSIONS & IMPLICATIONS: Our findings suggest that psychosocial factors play a more important role than professional practice skill factors in the self-perceived effectiveness of telepractice. WHAT THIS PAPER ADDS: What is already known on the subject Previous surveys reported that although SLTs were interested in using telepractice before the COVID-19 pandemic, they showed concern about its effectiveness, resulting in a low adoption rate. One critical question naturally arises: What factors may affect the perceived effectiveness of telepractice by SLTs? What this paper adds to existing knowledge This study demonstrates for the first time that despite the high adoption rate of telepractice during the COVID-19 pandemic, school-based SLTs exhibited great difficulties, and the SLTs' self-perceived effectiveness of telepractice was related to psychosocial factors instead of professional practice skill factors. What are the potential or actual clinical implications of this work Professional support is needed to alter the attitudes of SLTs towards telepractice for enhancing their self-perceived effectiveness and positive clinical practice experience.

Syntactic awareness matters: uncovering reading comprehension difficulties in Hong Kong Chinese-English bilingual children.

This study examined whether syntactic awareness was related to reading comprehension difficulties in either first language (L1) Chinese or second language (L2) English, or both, among Hong Kong Chinese-English bilingual children. Parallel L1 and L2 metalinguistic and reading measures, including syntactic word-order, morphological awareness, phonological awareness, vocabulary, word reading, reading comprehension, and cognitive measures of nonverbal intelligence and working memory, were administered to 224 fourth-graders. Five groups of comprehenders were identified using a regression approach: (1) 12 poor in Chinese-only (PC), (2) 18 poor in English-only (PE), (3) six poor in both Chinese and English (PB), (4) 14 average in both Chinese and English (AB), and (5) seven good in both (GB). The results of multivariate analyses of covariance showed that (1) the PB group performed worse than the AB and GB groups in both L1 Chinese and L2 English syntactic awareness; (2) the PC and PE groups performed worse than the AB and GB groups in Chinese syntactic awareness; (3) the PE group had lower performance than the PC, AB, and GB groups in English syntactic awareness; and (4) no significant group difference was found in L2 morphological awareness or vocabulary across both languages. By suggesting that weakness in syntactic awareness can serve as a universal indicator for identifying poor comprehenders in either or both L1 Chinese and L2 English among Hong Kong Chinese-English bilingual children, these findings demonstrate the fundamental role of syntactic awareness in bilingual reading comprehension.

Drawing a New Picture: Children with Developmental Dyslexia Exhibit Superior Nonverbal Creativity.

BACKGROUND: Creativity and literacy are essential skills that today's children are expected to develop. However, the question of whether children with developmental dyslexia, a severe difficulty in reading and writing, exhibit any intact creativity strengths remains controversial. This study examined creativity strengths across verbal, figural, and nonverbal modalities, and the relations among creativity, nonverbal intelligence, and literacy skills, in younger and older Chinese children with and without developmental dyslexia. METHODS: Two age groups of Chinese children with developmental dyslexia (Grade 2: N = 62; Grades 4-5: N = 62) and their age matched controls (Grade 2: N = 61; Grades 4-5: N = 61) were assessed on fluency and originality of verbal, figural, and nonverbal creativity, as well as on nonverbal intelligence, vocabulary, working memory, Chinese word reading accuracy and fluency, and word dictation. RESULTS: Multifactorial analysis of variance demonstrated that regardless of grade level, children with developmental dyslexia exhibited higher nonverbal creativity than, and comparable figural creativity to, their typically developing peers. Moreover, the partial correlation analysis revealed creativity was not significantly correlated with nonverbal intelligence and literacy skills. CONCLUSIONS: These findings suggest that children with dyslexia possess strengths and even advantages in nonverbal creativity and that the relationship between intelligence and/or literacy and creativity is negligible.

Linguistic but Not Cognitive Weaknesses in Deaf or Hard-of-Hearing Poor Comprehenders.

This study examined the reading comprehension profiles, and the related linguistic and cognitive skills, of 146 Chinese students in Grades 3-9 who are deaf or hard of hearing (d/Dhh). Employing a rigorous regression approach, the current study identified 19 unexpected poor comprehenders, 24 expected average comprehenders, and 16 unexpected good comprehenders. Compared to the expected average and unexpected good comprehenders, the unexpected poor comprehenders performed worse in broad linguistic skills (i.e., Chinese sign language comprehension, vocabulary, and segmental and suprasegmental phonological awareness), but their weaknesses in cognitive skills (i.e., working memory and executive function) were less severe. These findings suggest that weak linguistic skills are possible indicators of reading comprehension difficulties for students who are d/Dhh.

Suprasegmental but not segmental phonological awareness matters in understanding bilingual reading comprehension difficulties in Chinese and English: a 3-year longitudinal study.

This study examined whether, and if so how, L1 and L2 segmental and suprasegmental phonological awareness is longitudinally related to L1 and L2 reading comprehension difficulties among Hong Kong Chinese-English bilingual children. Using a regression approach, we identified five types of comprehenders, i.e., 11 poor-Chinese/average-English comprehenders, 19 poor-English/average-Chinese comprehenders, six poor-Chinese/poor-English comprehenders, 12 average-Chinese/average-English comprehenders, and seven good-Chinese/good-English comprehenders among 223 Grade 4 Chinese-English bilingual children who were comparable in age, nonverbal IQ, and word reading, but differed in reading comprehension. These children were compared retrospectively on segmental and suprasegmental phonological awareness in both Chinese and English for three consecutive years from Grade 2 to Grade 4. The results revealed that only Cantonese lexical tone awareness distinguished poor comprehenders from typically developing comprehenders. Specifically, the poor-English/average-Chinese comprehenders performed worse than the average-Chinese/average-English and good-Chinese/good-English comprehenders in Grades 4 and 3, but not in Grade 2; and the poor-Chinese/average-English comprehenders performed worse than the good-Chinese/good-English comprehenders in Grades 4 and 3, but not in Grade 2. These findings suggest that suprasegmental phonological awareness, especially Cantonese lexical tone awareness, is critical for both Chinese and English reading comprehension development among Hong Kong bilingual children.

Understanding Text Reading Comprehension of Chinese Students Who Are d/Deaf and Hard of Hearing: The Roles of Segmental Phonological Awareness and Suprasegmental Lexical Tone Awareness.

The authors investigated the roles of Chinese segmental (i.e., onset and rime) and suprasegmental (i.e., lexical tone) phonological awareness in Chinese text reading comprehension among 146 Chinese students in grades 3-9 who were d/Deaf and hard of hearing. All participants completed tasks involving onset and rime detection, lexical tone identification, sight word reading, text reading comprehension, nonverbal intelligence, and working memory. Path analyses showed that after controlling for age, grade, nonverbal intelligence, and working memory, segmental phonological awareness contributed both directly and indirectly (via sight word reading) to text reading comprehension, whereas suprasegmental lexical tone awareness only exerted only an indirect effect on text reading comprehension via sight word reading. These findings underscore the importance of phonological awareness in text reading comprehension for Chinese students who are d/Dhh.

Lexical processing in sign language: A visual mismatch negativity study.

Event-related potential studies of spoken and written language show the automatic access of auditory and visual words, as indexed by mismatch negativity (MMN) or visual MMN (vMMN). The present study examined whether the same automatic lexical processing occurs in a visual-gestural language, i.e., Hong Kong Sign Language (HKSL). Using a classic visual oddball paradigm, deaf signers and hearing non-signers were presented with a sequence of static images representing HKSL lexical signs and non-signs. When compared with hearing non-signers, deaf signers exhibited an enhanced vMMN elicited by the lexical signs at around 230 ms, and a larger P1-N170 complex evoked by both lexical sign and non-sign standards at the parieto-occipital area in the early time window between 65 ms and 170 ms. These findings indicate that deaf signers implicitly process the lexical sign and that neural response differences between deaf signers and hearing non-signers occur at the early stage of sign processing.

Statistical Learning of Orthographic Regularities in Chinese Children With and Without Dyslexia.

This study examined distributional statistical learning of positional, phonetic, and semantic regularities of an artificial orthography in Chinese children aged 8-10 years: 29 with dyslexia, 29 age-matched controls, and 30 reading-level matched controls. Despite having positional regularity learning performance comparable to the controls, the children with dyslexia were poorer at learning left-right structured characters than top-bottom structured characters in high- and low-consistency conditions. Moreover, they showed difficulties in mapping a given sound or meaning to a specific character compared with the typically developing controls. These findings suggest that children with dyslexia have deficits in some, though not all, aspects of statistical learning of character orthography, which may reflect their difficulties in coping with distractors and inconsistency of orthographic input.

Neurocognitive Correlates of Statistical Learning of Orthographic-Semantic Connections in Chinese Adult Learners.

We examined the neural correlates of the statistical learning of orthographic-semantic connections in Chinese adult learners. Visual event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded while participants were exposed to a sequence of artificial logographic characters containing semantic radicals carrying low, moderate, or high levels of semantic consistency. The behavioral results showed that the mean accuracy of participants' recognition of previously exposed characters was 63.1% that was significantly above chance level (50%), indicating the statistical learning of the regularities of semantic radicals. The ERP data revealed a temporal sequence of the neural process of statistical learning of orthographic-semantic connections, and different brain indexes were found to be associated with this processing, i.e., a clear N170-P200-N400 pattern. For N170, the larger negative amplitudes were evoked by the high and moderate consistency than the low consistency. For P200, the mean amplitudes elicited by the moderate and low consistency were larger than the high consistency. In contrast, a larger N400 amplitude was observed in the low than moderate and high consistency; and more negative amplitude was elicited by the moderate than high consistency. We propose that the initial potential shifts (N170 and P200) may reflect orthographic or graphic form identification, while the later component (N400) may be associated with semantic information analysis.

The Neural Signature of Statistical Learning of Orthography.

While an increasing number of behavioral studies suggest the importance of statistical learning in acquiring orthographic regularity across writing systems, no direct neural evidence supports this claim. The present study used event-related potentials (ERPs) to investigate the time course and the neural correlate of statistical learning of positional consistency in Chinese orthography. Visual ERPs were recorded, while Chinese adults performed an orthographic statistical learning task involving artificial characters varying in high, moderate, and low levels of positional consistency. The negative ERP deflection at the N1 time window, typically linked with orthographic regularity processing, was found in orthographic statistical learning with the low and moderate consistencies eliciting larger neural responses than the high consistency in the time window of 150-210 ms over occipital-temporal brain areas. These results suggest that orthographic statistical learning begins within the first 210 ms and that the N1 might be its neural indicator.