Background/purpose: Awareness of the mathematical skills and knowledge children possess in their early years is widely accepted. This includes various common positive aspects, not only for educators but also for researchers and policymakers. This study presents a systematic review conducted to meticulously identify empirical studies published in…

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…

Preschool children's narrative skills have a positive impact on their future school literacy, their inferential and representational skills, as well as their linguistic and socio-cognitive skills. Therefore, this study examined the impact of an intervention program on preschool-aged children's understanding of the structure of the stories so that…

Vocal imitation in English-speaking autistic individuals has been shown to be atypical. Speaking a tone language such as Mandarin facilitates vocal imitation skills among non-autistic individuals, yet no studies have examined whether this effect holds for autistic individuals. To address this question, we compared vocal imitation of speech and…

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.…

The development of Theory of Mind (ToM) is associated with variables such as language, working memory, and nonverbal cognitive competence. Children on the autism spectrum tend to have difficulties in ToM development, language and communication skills, and working memory. This study investigates relationships between language, working memory, and…

Prospective memory (PM) refers to the ability to remember and complete planned tasks in the future, which relies on working memory (WM) for encoding and maintaining the intention. Implementation intention is a useful strategy for improving PM function in adults. Yet the effect of implementation intentions in children, and whether factors such as…

The purpose of the present study was to evaluate the psychometric properties of Raven's colored progressive matrices by estimating the presence of pseudo-guessing and pseudo-carelessness. Participants were 1127 children from ages 5 to 11. Guessing and carelessness were assessed using the lower and upper asymptotes of the 3PL and 4PL item response…

Grade repetition is an issue with important educational implications. This study analyzes the effect of cognitive variables, socio-economic status, as well as the interaction of socioeconomic status with ethnic origin, on the probability of not repeating. Data were collected to calculate socioeconomic status using the Hollingshead Socioeconomic…

Purpose: This study examined the language and nonverbal inhibitory control skills of Italian monolingual and bilingual typically developing (TD) preschoolers with Italian as their second language and of age-matched monolingual and bilingual peers with developmental language disorder (DLD). Method: Four groups of preschoolers were enrolled: 30 TD…

Children's early literacy skills (ELS) are closely related to literacy learning and reading comprehension performance. Children who cannot acquire early literacy skills face significant difficulties in doing so in the following years. Although it is widely known that children who are deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) perform less well in early…

Early research that relied on standardized assessments of intelligence reported negative effects of bilingualism for children, but a study by Peal and Lambert (1962) reported better performance by bilingual than monolingual children on verbal and nonverbal intelligence tests. This outcome led to the view that bilingualism was a positive…

The current diagnostic criteria for the autism spectrum disorder (ASD) include the possibility to specify concomitant language difficulties. Purpose: Our main aim was to explore whether children with ASD-Level 1 (ASD-L1) present difficulties in the acquisition of structural language, as little work has been done in this regard so far. As a…

Objective: This study investigated the role of cognitive flexibility and temperament as predictors of academic performance, in children in care and children from a community sample, longitudinally. Also, it examined the mediating role of child's temperament in the relationship between cognitive flexibility and academic performance, as well as…

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…