Parental language input is a key predictor of child language achievement. Parentese is a widely used style of child-directed speech (CDS) distinguished by a higher pitch and larger pitch range. A recent parent coaching randomized control trial (Parentese-RCT) demonstrated that English-speaking US parents who were coached to use parentese with…

Accumulating evidence suggests that there is a spontaneous preference for numerical, compared to non-numerical (e.g., cumulative surface area), information. However, given a paucity of research on the perception of non-numerical magnitudes, it is unclear whether this preference reflects a specific bias towards number, or a general bias towards the…

Children achieve better long-term language outcomes than adults. However, it remains unclear whether children actually learn language "more quickly" than adults during real-time exposure to input--indicative of true superior language learning abilities--or whether this advantage stems from other factors. To examine this issue, we…

From early in development, race biases how children think about gender--often in a manner that treats Black women as less typical and representative of "women in general" than White or Asian women. The present study (N = 89, ages 7-11; predominately Hispanic, White, and multi-racial children) examined the generalizability of this…

The ability to shield against distraction while focusing on a task requires the operation of executive functions and is essential for successful learning. We investigated the short-term dynamics of distraction control in a data set of 269 children aged 4-10 years and 51 adults pooled from three studies using multilevel models. Participants…