Purpose: Stuttering is associated with clinically significant social anxiety, which emerges during early childhood for some, but not all, children who begin to stutter. The purpose of this review article is to develop a model of social anxiety development during early childhood stuttering and to present an empirical method by which it can be…

Learning takes time: Performance usually starts poorly and improves with practice. Do children intuit this basic phenomenon of skill learning? In preregistered Experiment 1 (n = 125; 54% female; 48% White; collected 2022-2023), US 7- to 8-year-old children predicted improved performance, 5- to 6-year-old children predicted flat performance, and…

Identifying infants at elevated likelihood for autism and other developmental differences in the first year of life remains a significant challenge. This study explored associations between behavioral differences in infancy and developmental outcomes in toddlerhood. We conducted a secondary data analysis of 256 infants with an older autistic…

Executive control (EC) emerges in the first year of life, with the ability to inhibit prepotent responses (inhibitory control [IC]) and to flexibly readapt (cognitive flexibility [CF]) steadily improving. Simultaneously, electrophysiological brain activity undergoes profound reconfiguration, which has been linked to individual variability in EC.…

Caregivers play an outsized role in shaping early life experiences and development, but we often lack mechanistic insight into "how" exactly caregiver behavior scaffolds the neurodevelopment of specific learning processes. Here, we capitalized on the fact that caregivers differ in how predictable their behavior is to ask if infants'…

The standard view on Theory of Mind (ToM) is that the mastery of the false belief (FB) task around age 4 marks the ontogenetic emergence of full-fledged meta-representational ToM. Recently, a puzzling finding has emerged: Once children master the FB task, they begin to fail true belief (TB) control tasks. This finding threatens the validity of FB…

Research Findings: The present study investigated the potential mediating role of maternal parenting in the intergenerational effects of maternal childhood traumatic experiences (CTEs) on prosocial behaviors of their offspring and examined whether the offspring's sensory processing sensitivity (SPS) moderates this association using a 1-year…

A recent study suggests that parent report on the Social Symptom and Prosocial scales of the Childhood Joint Attention Rating Scale provides useful information about differences in the social development of school-aged autistic children. The current study provides additional psychometric data on the Childhood Joint Attention Rating Scale regarding…

The emergence of prosocial tendencies in early childhood is still not well understood and not commonly tested with direct measures. This study investigated predictors of prosocial behavior (i.e., prosocial decision-making and prosocial creativity) in 3-to-5-year-old children and explored the role of demographic factors on empathy and moral…

Although more is known about how general parenting practices predict social-emotional strengths in children, less research has looked at parent involvement in education and children's social-emotional strengths. This study examined the extent to which parent involvement, specifically home-based involvement, parent-teacher trust, and home-school…