The current prospective cohort study investigated whether early perceptual abilities, measured at preschool age, could predict later intellectual abilities at school age in a group of 41 autistic (9 girls, 32 boys) and 57 neurotypical children (29 girls, 28 boys). More than 80% of the autistic children were considered minimally verbal.…

Background/Objective: Researchers have traditionally reported that individuals with Down syndrome possess a strength in their social development, yet the opposite occurs with Asperger's syndrome. Based on this premise, we sought to assess effectiveness of the social skills training program. Method: Thirty adolescents aged 11 to 14 years with Down…

Social mastery motivation and parental response are important correlates of children's vocabulary and self-regulation skills, but little research has examined their relationships collectively. This study investigated the direct relationships among social mastery motivation (active interaction and positive affect frequencies), parental response,…

The current study examines the relationship between bilingual children's dual language experience (i.e. language input, language output and vocabulary proficiency), and their social-emotional and behavioral skills. Data were analysed from 805 Singaporean bilingual preschoolers (ages 4; 1-5; 8 years), who are learning English and either Mandarin (n…

Students' understanding of the meaning of the equal sign develops slowly over the primary grades. In addition to updating their representations of equations to recognize that the equal sign represents an equivalence relation rather than signaling an operation, students need to move beyond full computation to efficiently solve equivalence problems.…

The study aimed to assess the effectiveness of a comprehensive intervention program (including PA and RAN interventions) on improving early literacy skills in preschoolers from low socioeconomic backgrounds while exploring participant perspectives. The experimental group showed significant improvements in PA, RAN-object, and RAN-color performance…

Conceptual knowledge goal (CKG) is a typical component of outcome-based learning. However, the contribution of CKG to poor readers' reading comprehension development remains unclear. Following the suggestion of the Simple View of Reading theory for the poor reader category, the current study recruited 90 poor decoders (PD), 76 poor comprehenders…

The present study investigated gender differences in social mastery motivation, vocabulary knowledge, behavioral self-regulation, and socioemotional skills and examined the relationships among this knowledge and these skills by gender. Participants were 134 Chinese children (68 boys, M age = 3.80; 66 girls, M age = 3.89) and their parents…

This study investigated the executive functions (EF) of preschool children and their associations with emotional, linguistic, and cognitive skills, using parent and teacher reports. A total of 130 children aged 34 to 71 months participated. The preschool version of the Behavior Rating Inventory of Executive Function (BRIEF-P) was completed by both…

The study's goals were: (a) to examine the influence of postsecondary education (PSE) in the form of academic enrichment courses on the cognitive performance of adults with intellectual disability (ID); (b) to examine their attitudes toward the program. The sample included adults who participate in PSE (N = 21; CA = 26-59) and a control group of…

Background: Current UK measures of early spoken language comprehension require manipulation of toys and/or verbal responses and are not accessible to children with severe motor impairments. The Computer-Based Instrument for Low motor Language Testing (C-BiLLT) (originally validated in Dutch) is a computerized test of spoken language comprehension…

Goals: This study examined: (a) crystallized/fluid intelligence trajectories of adolescents and adults with Down syndrome; and (b) the contribution of endogenous (health, activities of daily living--ADL) and exogenous (cognitively stimulating leisure activities) factors on adults' intelligence with age. Method: Four cohorts (N = 80) with Down…

Previous research showed that in primary school, children's intelligence develops continually, but creativity develops more irregularly. In this study, the development of intelligence, measured traditionally, i.e., operating within well-defined problem spaces (Standard Progressive Matrices) was compared with the development of intelligence…

We assessed a range of theoretically critical predictors (numerosity discrimination, number knowledge, counting, language, executive function and finger gnosis) of early arithmetic development in a large unselected sample of 569 children at school entry. Assessments were repeated 12 months later. Although all predictors (except finger gnosis) were…

Listening comprehension involves the ability to understand and extract meaning from spoken sentences, stories, and instruction. This skill is vital for young children and has long-term effects on school achievement, employability, income, and participation in society. There is a lack of measures of young children's listening comprehension skills.…