Joanne Arciuli

Flinders University

Across spoken languages, there are some words whose acoustic features resemble the meanings of their referents by evoking perceptual imagery, i.e., they are iconic (e.g., in English, “splash” imitates the sound of an object hitting water). While these sound symbolic form-meaning relationships are well-studied, relatively little work has explored wh...

Background Atypical patterns of social engagement and joint attention behaviors are diagnostic criteria for people with autism spectrum disorder. Experimental tasks using eye‐tracking methodologies have, however, shown inconsistent results. The development of tasks with greater ecological validity and relevance for developmentally appropriate socia...

Background: Self-harm is a critical public health issue for adolescents/young adults. Aims: To estimate the prevalence of self-harm among adolescents with/without disabilities in the United Kingdom. Method: Secondary analysis of data collected at age 17 in the UK’s Millennium Cohort Study. Results: Prevalence of self-harm was significantly greater...

Background Digital literacy instruction is increasingly common in contemporary practices and can accommodate learners with a range of needs. This systematic review explores the use and effects of technology during reading comprehension instruction involving school‐aged children learning English as an additional language (EAL). Our aim was to provid...

The Bear in a Window project captures Australian children’s experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic. We focused on children’s experiences of lockdown, or extended periods of home confinement, ranging from one to 100 days at a time between 2020 and 2021. Using the online experimental platform, Gorilla, we invited children aged 3–12 to record themselves...

Background: Some research shows a link between sleep behaviours and school achievement in English-speaking children and adolescents. Aims: The current study aimed to examine the relationship between children's sleep behaviours and aspects of their school achievement in Mandarin-speaking children who are living in Taiwan. Sample: The present study...

Plain English summary Involving people and groups with lived experience in research is important to ensure that research is useful and makes real changes in peoples’ lives. Codesign centres on researching with people rather than about people. For true engagement and codesign to occur, university based researchers need to understand why codesign is...

Purpose: Speed and accuracy of lexical access change with healthy ageing and neurodegeneration. While a word's immediate phonological neighbourhood density (i.e. words differing by a single phoneme) influences access, connectivity to all words in the phonological network (i.e. closeness centrality) may influence processing. This study aimed to inve...

Italian vowels have a shorter duration before a geminate than before a singleton consonant, but a longer duration in syllables carrying stress. We asked whether children can produce the differentiation in vowel duration in singleton/geminate contexts reported for adults and whether their production changes depending on position of primary stress. I...

Italian vowels have a shorter duration before a geminate than before a singleton consonant, but a longer duration in syllables carrying stress. We asked whether children can produce the differentiation in vowel duration in singleton/geminate contexts reported for adults and whether their production changes depending on position of primary stress. I...

Background: COVID-19 has resulted in some educators and allied health practitioners transitioning to online delivery of literacy instruction. As far as we are aware, no studies have investigated online delivery of comprehensive literacy instruction for children with Down syndrome. Aims: In this pilot study, we explore the efficacy of online deli...

Purpose: Some children with cerebral palsy (CP) have difficulty acquiring conventional reading and writing skills. This systematic review explores the different types of literacy instruction and their effects on the reading and writing skills of children with CP. Method: Relevant studies published between 2000 and 2020 were identified using elec...

Background/aims The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the need for accessible support for children with developmental disabilities. This study explored online literacy instruction with supplementary parent-led shared book reading (SBR) for children with autism. Methods Twenty-one children with autism (5–12 years) completed a battery of assessments...

Past research has established clear educational inequities between young people with disabilities and their peers. In part, some of these inequities may be attributed to expectations. In this study, we examined whether parental expectations were related to school functioning at high school, with school functioning broadly defined as ease and freque...

Childhood apraxia of speech (CAS) commonly affects the production of lexical stress contrast in polysyllabic words. Automated classification tools have the potential to increase reliability and efficiency in measuring lexical stress. Here, factors affecting the accuracy of a custom-built deep neural network (DNN)-based classification tool are evalu...

Lay abstract: Many autistic children across the globe speak languages other than English. However, much of the research about teaching children with autism to read and write is derived from studies including people who speak English and no other languages. Here, we review the research on teaching children with autism to read and write in languages...

Background Little is known about the exposure of youth with disability to cyber victimisation. Objective /Hypothesis: To estimate the prevalence of peer cyber and non-cyber victimisation in a nationally representative sample of 14-year-old adolescents with and without disability and to determine whether gender moderates the relationship between di...

Spelling analyses can be used to investigate sources of linguistic knowledge underlying children’s literacy development and may be useful in predicting later achievement. This study explored the utility of six analysis metrics in predicting the spelling achievement of school-aged children with literacy learning difficulties via post-hoc analyses of...

Aim To present the first iteration of the caring life‐course theory. Background Despite requiring care from birth to death, a person's universal or fundamental care needs and the subsequent care provision, either by self or others, has yet to be presented within a life‐course perspective. Accurately describing the care people require across their...

Objective/Background The aim of this study was to examine the relationship between overnight consolidation of implicit statistical learning with spindle frequency EEG activity and slow frequency delta power during non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep in obstructive sleep apnea (OSA). Patients/Methods Forty-seven OSA participants completed the exper...

Purpose Children with autism have an increased likelihood of reading difficulties. The reasons for this are numerous and varied, but many children with autism can learn to read when they are provided with evidence-based early reading instruction. Method Here, we provide an overview of some of the factors that impact early reading development for c...

Statistical learning (SL) has been a prominent focus of research in developmental and adult populations, guided by the assumption that it is a fundamental component of learning underlying higher-order cognition. In developmental populations, however, there have been recent concerns regarding the degree to which many current tasks reliably measure S...

This study reviews the literature on reading instruction consistent with the recommendations of the National Reading Panel (NRP; National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, 2000) for children with autism spectrum disorder, using the Evaluative Method for Determining Evidence-Based Practices in Autism to assess research quality (Reicho...

Background: Self-reported school satisfaction is an important indicator of child and adolescent well-being. Few studies have examined how disability, gender, and age affect school satisfaction. Aim: We sought to determine whether the interaction between disability and gender with regard to self-reported school satisfaction might be specific to p...

Lay abstract: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people with developmental disabilities such as autism are among the most marginalised people in Australian society. We reviewed research involving Indigenous Australians with autism based on a search of the peer-reviewed and grey literature. Our search identified 1457 potentially relevant publica...

We investigated production of lexical stress in children with and without autism spectrum disorders (ASD), all monolingual Italian speakers. The mean age of the 16 autistic children was 5.73 years and the mean age of the 16 typically developing children was 4.65 years. Picture-naming targets were five trisyllabic words that began with a weak-strong...

We evaluated the MULTILIT—“Making Up Lost Time in Literacy”—instruction program for individuals with Down syndrome. The 12-week program was administered on a 1:1 basis to participants who were assessed at three timepoints: Baseline, pre-instruction, and post-instruction. Participants were allocated non-randomly to two groups that had comparable abi...

This study examined the relation between Theory of Mind (ToM) and reading comprehension in 42 7- to 9-year-old Hong Kong Chinese children with autism and 55 typically developing peers (TD) who were comparable in age, nonverbal intelligence, and working memory. Relative to their TD peers, children with autism exhibited difficulties with reading comp...

Statistical Learning (SL) is typically considered to be a domain-general mechanism by which cognitive systems discover the underlying statistical regularities in the input. Recent findings, however, show clear differences in processing regularities across modalities and stimuli as well as low correlations between performance on visual and auditory...

Background: Little is known about the prevalence of emotional difficulties and self-harm among adolescents with a disability. Objective: Our aims were: (1) to estimate the prevalence of emotional difficulties and self-harm among British adolescents with and without disability; (2) to determine whether prevalence varies by gender, severity of dis...

In a recent paper (“The procedural learning deficit hypothesis of language learning disorders: We see some problems”, Developmental Science, 2018), West, Vadillo, Shanks, and Hulme (2018) aimed to test the procedural deficit hypothesis (PDH) of specific language impairment (SLI) and dyslexia. This hypothesis proposes that abnormalities of brain str...

Background There is evidence indicating that instruction using ABRACADABRA (ABRA) – a free web application designed to promote literacy development – may benefit children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) when administered on an individualized basis in children’s homes. Aims Here, we investigated the efficacy of ABRA instruction administered in...

Learning to read is a milestone in a child's life, and reading ability is a strong predictor of academic outcomes. Some studies have revealed that individual differences in the capacity for implicit statistical learning are linked with children's reading skills in English, which has a deep orthography, but we do not know whether the same relation i...

Statistical learning plays an important role in the acquisition of spoken and written language. It has been proposed that impaired or atypical statistical learning may be linked with language difficulties in developmental disabilities. However, research on statistical learning in individuals with developmental disabilities such as autism spectrum d...

School satisfaction is a critical aspect of well-being for every child and adolescent. Yet studies have rarely investigated whether school satisfaction varies depending upon participant characteristics and school-related social factors. Here we investigated whether disability and gender moderate adolescents’ self-report of school satisfaction. We a...

Background and aims Effective literacy instruction demands a clear understanding of the subskills that underpin children’s reading and writing abilities. Some previous research on reading has questioned whether the same subskills support literacy acquisition for typically developing children and children with autism spectrum disorders. This study e...

In this exploratory study, we examined stress contrastivity within real word productions elicited via picture naming in 20 children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and 20 typical peers group-wise matched on age and vocabulary. Targets had a dominant pattern of lexical stress beginning with a strong–weak pattern (SW: ‘caterpillar’, ‘butterfly’)...

Purpose: The purpose of this tutorial is to explain how learning to read can be thought of as learning statistical regularities and to demonstrate why this is relevant for theory, modeling, and practice. This tutorial also shows how triangulation of methods and cross-linguistic research can be used to gain insight. Method: The impossibility of c...

There is growing interest in the link between implicit statistical learning (SL) and reading ability. Although learning to read involves both auditory and visual modalities, it is not known whether reading skills might be more strongly associated with auditory SL or visual SL. Here we assessed SL across both modalities in 36 typically developing ch...

Statistical Learning (SL) is typically considered to be a domain-general mechanism by which cognitive systems discover the underlying statistical regularities in the input. Recent findings, however, show clear differences in processing regularities across modalities and stimuli as well as low correlations between performance on visual and auditory...

To understand the interaction between sensory experiences and cognition, it is critical to investigate the possibility that deprivation in one sensory modality might affect cognition in other modalities. Here we are concerned with the hypothesis that early experience with sound is vital to the development of domain-general sequential processing ski...

This exploratory study compares the shared book reading behaviours of five school aged children with DS (aged 11 years 6 months to 15 years 6 months) before and after participation in an intervention which included selected components of the MultiLit Reading Tutor Program. The program was delivered 1:1 to participants each week over a 12 week perio...

Objectives: Objective: Statistical learning (SL) is an implicit ability to extract statistical cues from continuous stream of stimuli. This study compared behavioural and online (electrophysiological) measures of SL in children with and without musical training. Material and methods: SL of regularities embedded in auditory and visual stimuli was me...

Objective The question whether musical training is associated with enhanced auditory and cognitive abilities in children is of considerable interest. In the present study, we compared children with music training versus those without music training across a range of auditory and cognitive measures, including the ability to detect implicitly statist...

Musicians’ brains are considered to be a functional model of neuroplasticity due to the structural and functional changes associated with long-term musical training. In this study, we examined implicit extraction of statistical regularities from a continuous stream of stimuli—statistical learning (SL). We investigated whether long-term musical trai...

This study explored the effects of an evidence-based literacy program, ABRACADABRA, on the spelling abilities of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Twenty children with ASD aged 5–11 years were assigned to matched instruction and waitlist control groups. Children in the instruction group received 26 hrs of individualized, home-based inst...

Purpose: Verbal fluency tests are often used as part of an assessment battery to investigate children's lexical knowledge as well as executive function skills. To date, however, issues surrounding consistency of measurement cloud comparisons across studies, with the developmental performance of Australian-English speaking children also currently l...

The central argument presented in this paper is that statistical learning (SL) is an ability comprised of multiple components that operate largely implicitly. Components relating to the stimulus encoding, retention and abstraction required for SL may include, but are not limited to, certain types of attention, processing speed and memory. It is lik...

To understand the interaction between sensory experiences and cognition, it is critical to investigate the possibility that deprivation in one sensory modality might affect cognition in other modalities. Here we are concerned with the hypothesis that early experience with sound is vital to the development of domain-general sequential processing ski...

Lexical stress is the contrast between strong and weak syllables within words. Ballard et al. (2012) examined the amount of stress contrastivity across adjacent syllables in word productions of typically developing three- to seven-year-olds and adults. Here, eight- to eleven-year-olds are compared with the adults from Ballard et al. using acoustic...

It has been hypothesized that musical expertise is associated with enhanced auditory processing and cognitive abilities. Recent research has examined the relationship between musicians’ advantage and implicit statistical learning skills. In the present study, we assessed a variety of auditory processing skills, cognitive processing skills, and stat...

This study explored the effects of ABRACADABRA, a free computer-assisted literacy program, on the reading accuracy and comprehension skills of children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). ABRACADABRA is a balanced literacy instruction program, targeting both code and meaning-based reading abilities. Twenty children with ASD, aged 5–11 ye...

Background & Aim: Statistical learning (SL) is a domain-general learning mechanism that is utilised by humans and primates to assess large amounts of sensory information, and extract important cues, across multiple modalities. Statistical learning has been speculated to assist with speech perception in noise. While there is evidence concerning stat...

Purpose: Despite the importance of Speech-Language Pathologists (SLPs) collaborating with parents in the treatment of children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), few studies have examined the nature of this working relationship and how best to facilitate collaboration. To explore what SLPs think parents of children with ASD expect of them when i...

We examined whether typically developing Italian children exhibit adult-like stress contrastivity for word productions elicited via a picture naming task (n = 25 children aged 3–5 years and 27 adults). Stimuli were 10 trisyllabic Italian words; half, began with a weak–strong (WS) pattern of lexical stress across the initial 2 syllables, as in patat...

The intersection of sound processing, speech production, and literacy is a promising and growing area of study. This volume showcases recent empirical research exploring the association between linguistic rhythm and reading. Linguistic rhythm does not easily assume a single definition, which is part of the motivation for this volume, and subsumes c...

Variability in children's language acquisition is likely due to a number of cognitive and social variables. The current study investigated whether individual differences in statistical learning (SL), which has been implicated in language acquisition, independently predicted 6-to 8-year-old's comprehension of syntax. Sixty-eight (N = 68) English-spe...

This study investigated the relationship between both receptive and expressive prosody and each of three reading outcomes: accuracy of reading aloud words, accuracy of reading aloud nonwords, and comprehension. Participants were 63 children aged 7 to 12 years. To assess prosody, we used the Profiling Elements of Prosody in Speech Communication (PEP...

This study examined the effect of a prior bout of exercise on implicit cognition. Specifically, we examined whether a prior bout of moderate intensity exercise affected performance on a statistical learning task in healthy adults. A total of 42 participants were allocated to one of three conditions-a control group, a group that exercised for 15 min...

This study is about the role of elicited verbal imitation in toddler word learning. Forty-eight toddlers were taught eight nonwords linked to referents. During training, they were asked to imitate the nonwords. Naming of the referents was tested at three intervals (one minute later [uncued], five minutes, and 1-7 days later [cued]) and recognition...

Objectives: Musicians’ brains are considered as a functional model of neuroplasticity due to the structural and functional changes associated with long term musical training. Statistical learning is an implicit ability to extract distributional cues from continuous stream of stimuli. This study investigated if long term musical training is associat...

The effect of concurrent movement on incidental versus intentional statistical learning was examined in two experiments. In Experiment 1, participants learned the statistical regularities embedded within familiarization stimuli implicitly, whereas in Experiment 2 they were made aware of the embedded regularities and were instructed explicitly to le...

Prosodic awareness has been linked with reading accuracy in typically developing children. Although children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) often have difficulty processing prosody and often have trouble learning to read, no previous study has looked at the link between explicit prosodic awareness and reading in ASD. In the current study, 29...

Statistical learning (SL) studies have shown that participants are able to extract regularities in input they are exposed to without any instruction to do so. This and other findings, such as the fact that participants are often unable to verbalize their acquired knowledge, suggest that SL can occur implicitly or incidentally. Interestingly, severa...

The Lombard effect describes the phenomenon of individuals increasing their vocal intensity when speaking in the presence of background noise. Here, we conducted an investigation of the production of lexical stress during Lombard speech. Participants (N = 27) produced the same sentences in three conditions: one quiet condition and two noise conditi...

Aims Present study Aims to investigate the contribution of auditory processing abilities and statistical learning abilities towards speech perception in noise in musicians. Methodology We propose to evaluate auditory and visual statistical learning in 10 musicians and non-musicians using a behavioural and electrophysiological approach. We have modi...

This study examined whether there are processing differences between children with Down syndrome (DS; n = 22; 7 years 8 months to 13 years 10 months) and typically developing children (TD; n = 22; 6 years 6 months to 10 years 10 months), matched for receptive vocabulary. The TD children performed better on tests of nonverbal intelligence (matrices)...

Objective: Impaired prosody is a core diagnostic feature of Childhood Apraxia of Speech (CAS) but there is limited evidence of effective prosodic intervention. This study reports the efficacy of the ReST intervention used in conjunction with bisyllabic pseudo word stimuli containing orthographic cues that are strongly associated with either strong...

This study was designed to shed light on the profile of reading ability in children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). A key aim was to examine the relationship between parent report of adaptive behavior and direct assessment of reading ability in these children. We investigated children's reading ability, using the Wide Ranging Achievement Test...

Language processing is an example of implicit learning of multiple statistical cues that provide probabilistic information regarding word structure and use. Much of the current debate about language embodiment is devoted to how action words are represented in the brain, with motor cortex activity evoked by these words assumed to selectively reflect...

Previous research has examined home-based reading practices in families with typically developing children, however, little is known about these activities in families with children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). This study describes the naturalistic interactions of 11 mothers and their children (7.4–12.9 years of age) during home-based read...

Purpose. The search for objective markers of a true versus false confession is an important but under-researched area. In the first study of its kind, we examined the utility of expressions of remorse as a marker of a true compared with a false oral versus written confession. Methods. We elicited both written and oral false confessional statements...

Most psychological experimentation takes place in laboratories aiming to maximize experimental control; however, this creates artificial environments that are not representative of real-life situations. Since cognitive processes usually take place in noisy environments, they should also be tested in these contexts. The recent advent of smartphone t...

Lying is a universal activity and the detection of lying a universal concern. Presently, there is great interest in determining objective measures of deception. The examination of speech, in particular, holds promise in this regard; yet, most of what we know about the relationship between speech and lying is based on the assessment of English speak...