Interested in Participating?

We are continually running studies examining children's cognitive, social and/or communicative development. Interested parents can contact us (by phone or email) to have their children added to our database. When studies are being conducted for a particular age group we will contact all the parents of children that age from our database. We encourage you to view our flyer for more information. To give you an idea of the current studies we are running, a few are listed here:

• The purpose of this research is to look at the communication skills in children with and without ADHD. Past research has shown that children with ADHD have difficulties in language and social interaction. This study is designed to look at behavioural and communicative characteristics of children with and without ADHD when interpreting statements from another person. Children with a diagnosis of ADHD, as well as typically developing children, are welcome to participate in this study.

  Click here to view the flyer.

• This study is designed to examine children’s sensitivity to information that is both shared and not shared by someone they are speaking with.  In particular, we want to examine whether providing feedback on the communication task facilitates children’s performance on this task.

  Click here to view the flyer.

• Effective social interactions between two people involve paying attention to a lot of different and complex information, including an interaction partner’s verbal and nonverbal behaviour, as well as deciding how to respond to an interaction partner. Past research has shown that children with ADHD tend to have more difficulties in social interaction than their peers. This study has been designed to explore the social interaction behaviours exhibited by children between the ages of 8 to 12, with and without ADHD, while interacting with their mother.

• In this study, the CDL researchers are investigating communication difficulties in adolescents with and without ADHD. This study investigates how communication is related to working memory (a “mental workbench” which lets us hold information in our heads for a few seconds during problem solving) and inhibition (which is our mind’s way of putting on the breaks and preventing us from saying or doing something we should not). To examine how working memory and inhibition relate to ADHD, adolescents between the ages of 14 and 17 who participate in this study will work on a number of different communication tasks, as well as some working memory and inhibition games. This will allow us to look at whether working memory and inhibition contribute to the communication skills of adolescents who have ADHD.

  Please note that participants for this study are selected from a nearby centre. At the moment, we are not recruiting participants from the community for this study.

Past Research Studies:

AGES 4-5 years-old:

Factors Affecting Children's Communication Ability

• This study examines how certain factors affect children's performance on a communication task. In particular, we explore whether the type of feedback we give children during an easy communication task affects their performance when the communication task gets harder. These results might help us understand how to facilitate children's language development.

AGES 3-4 years-old:

Children’s Attributions of Knowledge Following Ambiguous Messages

• This study explores young children’s ability to differentiate between clear and unclear communication. Specifically, we are investigating whether children understand that ambiguous (i.e., unclear) messages do not provide enough information for a listener to gain knowledge. The results of this study will give insight into how children understand different types of communication and how they judge the knowledge of another person.

University of Waterloo
200 University Avenue West
Waterloo, Ontario, Canada N2L 3G1
519 888 4567

http://www.uwaterloo.ca