There is evidence that abnormal cerebral development during childhood is a risk factor for various cognitive and psychiatric disorders. There is not, however, sufficient normative data available on large samples of typically developing children, especially within the narrow preadolescent age range. We analyzed high resolution MRI images from 126 normally developing children between ages 6 and 1...

The first phase of major neuronal rearrangements in the brain takes place during the prenatal period. While the brain continues maturation throughout childhood, a critical second phase of synaptic overproduction and elimination takes place during the preadolescent period. Despite the importance of this developmental phase, few studies have evaluated neural changes taking place during this perio...

Although stereotypy is one of the key diagnostic features of autism, few studies have compared stereotypic behavior in children with autism and typically developing children. The present study employed direct observational measurement methods to assess levels of stereotypic behavior in 2-, 3- and 4-year-old children with autism or pervasive developmental disorder - not otherwise specified (PDD-...

The goal of this study was to investigate whether a brief cognitive training intervention results in a specific performance increase in the trained task, and whether there are transfer effects to other nontrained measures. A computerized, adaptive working memory intervention was conducted with 9- to 11-year-old typically developing children. The children considerably improved their performance ...

The aim of the present study is to investigate the development of visuospatial attention in typically developing children and to propose reference values for children for the following six visuospatial attention tests: star cancellation, Ogden figure, reading test, line bisection, proprioceptive pointing and visuo-proprioceptive pointing. Data of 159 children attending primary or secondary scho...

There has been substantial progress in understanding the production of individual speech sounds. Much less is known about prosodic aspects of speech production. Lexical stress is the prosodic contrast between strong and weak syllables within single words (compare ‘INcense’ with ‘inCENSE’ in English). The ability to achieve stress contrastivity during speech production shows a protracted develop...