This study examined how maternal cognitive mind-mindedness, maternal time, and their interactions predict inhibitory control in Chinese children. Participants were 88 toddlers (59% girls) and their mothers from Beijing, China. Maternal cognitive mind-mindedness was coded in mother-child interactions and mothers reported weekly interaction duration…

Purpose: Children who are deaf or hard of hearing (D/HH) are at increased risk for neurocognitive delays, which can have cascading effects on development. Associations between neurocognition and the content of parental language--specifically the use of mental state vocabulary--have been observed in typically hearing (TH) children. This study…

This study explored the role of growth in the executive components of working memory (WM) on second language (L2) mathematical problem-solving in elementary school children who are emerging bilinguals whose first language (L1) is Spanish. To this end, children (N = 429) in Grades 1, 2, and 3 at Wave 1 were administered a battery of math, reading,…

To date, cross-cultural studies on Theory of Mind (ToM) have predominantly focused on preschoolers. This study focuses on middle childhood, comparing two samples of mainland Chinese (n = 126) and Australian (n = 83) children aged between 5.5 and 12 years. Strange Stories, the most commonly used measure of ToM, was employed. The study aimed to…

Wolf and Bowers (1999) described a model in which phonological awareness (PA) and naming speed (NS) make independent contributions to reading ability. We tested this model in a sample of 201 Grade 3 Arabic-speaking children in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Measures of general cognitive ability, vocabulary, PA, NS, word reading, and reading…

Learning the names of geometric shapes is at the intersection of early spatial, mathematical, and language skills, all important for school-readiness and predictors of later abilities in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). We investigated whether socioeconomic status (SES) influenced children's processing of shape names and…

Many recent studies have aimed to demonstrate that specific types of reading comprehension depend on different underlying cognitive abilities. In these studies, it is often implicitly assumed that reading comprehension is a multidimensional construct. The general aim of this study was to examine the dimensionality of a large pool of reading…

This exploratory study identified underlying skill and ability differences among subgroups of adolescent and young adult struggling readers (N = 290) overall and in relation to a fluency-based instructional grouping method. We used principal axis factoring of participants' scores on 18 measures of reading-related skills and abilities identified in…

The mental lexicon plays a central role in reading comprehension (Perfetti & Stafura, 2014). It encompasses the number of lexical entries in spoken and written language (vocabulary breadth), the semantic quality of these entries (vocabulary depth), and the connection strength between lexical representations (semantic relatedness); as such, it…

The purpose of the present study was to reveal the developmental pathway from third grade cognitive competencies to sixth grade conceptual and procedural fraction knowledge through the intervening whole numerical skills at fifth grade. The study used empirical data that come from 536 students in nine schools across two Delaware public school…

This study evaluated the effects of Adapted Reciprocal Teaching (ART) on the receptive and expressive flight-word vocabulary of 1st-grade students. During ART, classroom interactions produced narrative contexts within which students assumed responsibility for applying new flight words in personally meaningful ways. Students in the control group…

This study investigated the prevalence and stability of latent classes at risk for reading disabilities (RD) in elementary-aged children whose first language is Spanish. To this end, children (N = 489) in Grades 1, 2, and 3 at Wave 1 were administered a battery of reading, vocabulary, and cognitive measures (short-term memory [STM], working memory…

Using a sample of 263 mother-child dyads, we examined the extent to which maternal emotional and cognitive support during a joint problem-solving task when children were 3-years-old predicted children's academic skills 1 year later independent of each other, the quality of the home learning environment, and maternal emotional responsiveness. When…